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Jul 21

Daredevil Villains #32: El Condor

Posted on Sunday, July 21, 2024 by Paul in Daredevil

DAREDEVIL #75-76 (April & May 1971)
“Now Rides the Ghost of El Condor!” / “The Deathmarch of El Condor!”
Writer: Gerry Conway
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Syd Shores (#75) and Tom Palmer (#76)
Letterer: Sam Rosen (#75) and Artie Simek (#76)
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee

In certain parts of South America, January 1971 was an exciting time to be a diplomat, particularly if you fancied leaving the house. In Brazil, guerillas  kidnapped four diplomats, and ransomed them to secure the release of 130 prisoners. At around the same time, in Uruguay, the Marxist-Leninist group Tupamaros kidnapped the British ambassador.

What, you might ask, does any of this have to do with Daredevil? And… well, yes, that’s a good question.

What it has to do with Daredevil is this two part story, billed on the cover of issue #75 as “A shocker… ripped from today’s screaming headlines!” Just to prove the point, it includes a Daily Bugle front page story about a kidnapping in Buenos Aires (or a “kidnaping”, as the cover says in three separate places). But this being the Marvel Universe, the story is not set in Argentina. We’re in the previously unheralded nation of Delvadia.

The first thing we’re told about Delvadia is that the national hero is a guy called El Condor. He’s a masked horseman with a trained condor who died heroically in the Delvadian revolution back in the 1930s. The Delvadians love El Condor. There’s an insanely enormous statute of him over the capital city. And yes, it really does seem to be Delvadia’s answer to Rio’s statue of Jesus.

The basic idea is that an impostor El Condor is leveraging the legend for his own ends. This new Condor doesn’t seem like much fun – the guerrillas used to have “singing and drinking in the hours of firelight”, but now they have a grumpy, shouty man who punches his own men in the face when they interrupt his brooding sessions. His small band of revolutionary followers seem to be mostly sincere; one of them says he’s only in it for the money, but he seems to acknowledge that he’s in the minority. The guerillas also seem to be quite gullible, as they’re willing to believe that El Condor has returned from the dead after forty years, even though he hasn’t aged and doesn’t have any supernatural abilities. To be fair, at least one sensible American character also seems to take the possibility seriously, so apparently it’s meant to be semi-plausible.

The story opens with the US consul being kidnapped as he leaves the embassy. And while we may have left the United States, this is still a Gerry Conway story from 1971, so this is how the narrator sets the scene:

“Embassy! A building, a structure like any other – and yet, it represents something far more than a style of architecture. Within its echoing halls and tight, untidy rooms, men and women from the far-off, near legenday land of America work to make that legend real to the people of this tiny South-American nation…”

The first line of dialogue from a Delvadian character is “Ahh, Meester Villiers, you deesappoint us. Such a well-behaved man as yoursealve – it isn’t deegnified to scream!” This is not promising. It’s a relief to turn the page and find an unexpected diversion into the realms of Peter Milligan: The kidnapper’s colleague demands to know what the silly voice is for, and gets told that it’s a satire on American expectations. Conway clearly likes this moment, because he repeats it in full when recapping the plot (at inordinate length) in issue #76 – only to give precisely the same accent to some other locals who aren’t faking it.

Daredevil drives off the kidnappers, and we learn that poor Villiers is standing in for the US ambassador, who was kidnapped a couple of weeks previously. This has not deterred Villiers from strolling out of the embassy on his own with no security. As it turns out, Daredevil’s rescue achieves precisely nothing, because Villiers is taken away in an ambulance, and the crew hand him straight over to the guerillas anyway. Meanwhile, Villiers’ loyal aide Keith Bayard is determined to take matters into his own hands. The story centres around Daredevil trying to rescue the diplomats, while stopping Bayard from starting some sort of diplomatic incident by taking the law into his own hands – which he does, though it has no real impact on the plot.

But what on earth is Daredevil doing here? Ah, well. You see, he and Foggy have come to Delvadia on a “Senate-sponsored fact-finding mission”. Because who better than the New York District Attorney and his assistant to investigate political instability in South America? To be fair, Conway has an upcoming plot about Foggy’s thwarted political ambitions, and so it makes at least some sense for him to sign up for political junkets at this point. And Matt, supposedly, has been brought along for “a simple paid vacation”. Even so, it’s a real stretch to shoehorn either of them into this story.

El Condor’s plan is to use the kidnapped diplomats to lure the government forces into the hills, and then capture the undefended city. At first glance this seems unduly ambitious for a force of 100 men, but wait! It turns out that El Condor also has “helicopters! Thirty of them!” And everyone seems to agree that that’s going to make all the difference.

The helicopters come from the Russians – well, from “powerful foreign friends”, but you get the idea. El Condor’s personal motivations are kept ambiguous for most of the story – is he a Russian plant, a genuine revolutionary who happens to be taking Russian money, or just a cynic who wants to seize power? In the end, he gives us a rant about the peasants are a bunch of superstitious morons and how he plans to claim El Condor’s legacy for himself, so apparently he’s just a cynic. This was probably a mistake. El Condor is a more interesting character when the story lets everyone else project whatever they want onto his legend. That’s what the story is meant to be about, after all.

El Condor’s conquest of the nation does not come to pass, because that giant statue of the original Condor falls on him and crushes him to death. Supposedly it’s dislodged by a lightning strike, which would suggest some seriously questionable engineering decisions when they put it up. But we’re clearly meant to think that the spirit of the original has intervened to put a stop to the abuse of his legacy.

This story is much more simplistic than it would like to think. It has a rather utopian view of American involvement in South America, and never really gets to grips with its theme of the manipulation of legacy. But for all that, it’s actually quite a fun neo-Western romp. And the basic idea is quite solid, even if it was never going to translate into a recurring villain. As usual, Colan pays lip service to supervillain tropes by basically making him El Condor revolutionary with a rudimentary mask. If he looks a bit dated, well, he is supposed to be mimicking a figure from the 30s. In fact, there might have been some more story potential in the original El Condor, the interwar revolutionary.

Still, El Condor isn’t a Daredevil villain. He’s too far removed from the book’s usual setting to use him regularly, and that brings us back to the question of what on earth this story is doing in Daredevil in the first place, when it really has to shoehorn Daredevil into the plot. This is a story about national heroes and the American presence in South America – surely this is a Captain America concept?

Bring on the comments

  1. Mixchael says:

    Conway uses Delvadia again in his stories. It’s best known as the homeland of the Tarantula(s). In later stories Delvadia is more of a substitute for El Salvador, not Argentina. In those stories the government of Delvadia is portrayed as a dictatorship and the rebels as mostly heroic. (The original Tarantula’s backstory was that he was thrown out of the rebels for being too bloodthirsty, then managed to anger the dictatorship by being too bloodthirsty even for them.) American involvement in Delvadia was criitcized, as was the refusal to offer asylum to Delvadians fleeing the country.
    Apparently there was a third El Condor, since when Greunwald had Captain America investigate a villain who was killing South American superhumans, one of his victims was named El Condor.

  2. Omar Karindu says:

    Delvadia was also seen briefly in, of all places, a Man-Thing story by Steve Gerber in Adventures into Fear v.1 #14. It’s briefly mentioned as part of a montage of television coverage of global chaos caused by the mystical upheaval going on in the main plot.

    It wasn’t mentioned again until Conway’s 198-s creation of a successor to his 1970s Spider-Man villain the Tarantula. By retcon, that puts the earlier Tarantula in Delvadia. His country of origin had been unmentioned until then; even the 1980s Marvel Handbooks didn’t specify the country whence came that Tarantula.

    In the Spectacular Spider-Man story using the 1980s Tarantula, Conway also mixes in some Nicaragua stuff when he reuses Delvadia in the 1980s, what with the unsubtle “Mr. South” stuff referencing Oliver North and the Iran-Contra scandal.

    Oh, and the John Walker Captain America does indeed duly show up.

    As I’m sure Paul has remarked in the past, Marvel’s Latin America must be at least as crowded with tiny nations as Marvel’s Europe.

  3. Michael says:

    @Omar- And when readers complained, the letters page claimed that Mr.South was not supposed to be a parody because if it was, Sal Buscema, who was the artist, would have drawn a better likeness. This wasn’t the last time Sal got trashed because of a story the readers didn’t line- after Peter hit MJ, DeFalco and Glenn Herdling claimed that Peter was supposed to be shoving MJ away and Sal drew the scene wrong.

  4. Omar Karindu says:

    @Michael – I mean, they even named him Gullivar South to make sure everyone got that it was Oliver North!

    Sounds like DeFalco and Herdling had been talking to Jim Shooter about that infamous Hank Pym story, which Shooter now blames on Bob Hall’s pencils.

  5. Skippy says:

    Some of DD’s most notable stories are Captain America concepts. “America sucks actually” is a pretty successful mode for him. “America knows best”, not so much.

    My main recollection of this story is the scene in which Matt punches Foggy’s lights out purely to avoid coming up with an excuse to change into Daredevil. What a pal.

    “Kidnaping” seems to have been a spelling in common use right up to the ’90s, fwiw.

  6. Zoomy says:

    Maybe I’m out of touch, but I thought Americans even nowadays still tend to not double the p in “kidnaping” or “kidnaped”. I’ve always thought of it as one of the many transatlantic weirdnesses that nobody understands… 🙂

  7. CalvinPitt says:

    Anecdotal, but I was in school in the ’90s and it was always “kidnapping.” I occasionally screw up and only type one “p”, but it always looks wrong to me.

    The 1930s El Condor makes me think a bit of El Aguila, who I usually associate with Power Man and Iron Fist. His deal seemed to be striking at businessmen responsible for stuff that was within the law, but still evil. I don’t know if that would make him a revolutionary per se, he didn’t seem to be leading a group, just acting alone based on his conscience, but closer than the guy Daredevil fought here.

  8. ASV says:

    Yeah, the single “p” says long vowel every time to me – “caping” vs “capping,” for instance.

  9. Omar Karindu says:

    @CalvinPitt: There’s even a retcon making El Aguila a legacy character. Dan Slott introduced an 19th-century predecessor in a Phantom Rider backup story from an issue of the reprint series Original Ghost Rider.

  10. Joe S. Walker says:

    In one of Richmal Crompton’s William stories (c.1936) William writes a ransom letter and signs it “Kidnaper.” His elder brother Robert reads it thinking it’s a moneylender’s demand for payment* and imagines Mr Kidnaper to be a sinister foreigner.

    *That kind of thing tended to happen in the William stories.

  11. CalvinPitt says:

    @Omar: Huh, I didn’t know that, though I shouldn’t be surprised. Everybody’s part of a heroic lineage these days.

    Only a matter of time before we learn Frank Castle’s great-grandfather ran around the 19th Century West wearing a white skull on his chest (in that case, probably an actual skull rather than a drawing), killing cattle rustlers and horse thieves.

  12. Steven Kaye says:

    Unfortunate choice of names for a Latin American hero, though this happened after the DD story:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor

  13. CalvinPitt says:

    @Omar: Wow. I even thought about ending my comment with “Now I await someone telling me that’s already happened,” and there it is.

  14. Luis Dantas says:

    Only in comics Daredevil would turn up in a South American comic at the same time when Foggy and Matt are there and there would be no apparent suspicions of how that came to happen.

  15. Luis Dantas says:

    I mean, in a South American country.

  16. Si says:

    Oh they all did that, back in the day. I’m sure I can remember Peter Parker and Spider-Man once turning up in Antarctica on the same day, and there were like two other Americans in the whole desolate place: his Spider-Man obsessed boss and his girlfriend. They still didn’t notice that the two were never seen together.

  17. Chris says:

    Marvel Comics almost always defaults to “KIDNAPING” and “KIDNAPED”

    In the real world it is spelled “kidnapped” and “kidnapping”

  18. Michael says:

    More from SDCC:
    Psylocke will be an ongoing.
    Dani will be popping up somewhere in the X-Titles soon.
    We will be seeing more of the New Mutants eventually but some characters will have to wait their turn.
    The Beast situation will be addressed.

  19. Michael says:

    Sorry- meant to post that in the x-axis thread.

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