Daredevil Villains #46: Copperhead
DAREDEVIL #124-125 (August & September 1975)
“In the Coils of the Copperhead” / “Vengeance is the Copperhead”
Writers: Len Wein (#124 part 1) & Marv Wolfman (#124 part 2 & #125)
Pencillers: Gene Colan (#124) and Bob Brown (#125)
Inker: Klaus Janson
Colourists: Michelle Wolfman (#124) and Klaus Janson (#125)
Letterers: Joe Rosen (#124) and John Costanza (#125)
Editor: Len Wein
Tony Isabella lasted only five issues on Daredevil before editor Len Wein removed him from the series. The next issue, issue #124, opens with the Black Widow departing – again, but this time it will finally stick. The narrator certainly seems to be taking the opportunity to put the boot in. “Good-bye”, he declares. “There is no sadder, more bittersweet word in all the languages of man… Good-bye: The word is truly tragic when those who say it really don’t want to say it at all.”
Issue #124 has a truly odd writing credit – instead of the usual plotter/scripter distinction, it credits editor Len Wein with writing the first half of the issue himself, with the rest being credited to Marv Wolfman. It all looks a bit shambolic and last minute. Nonetheless, this is the start of Marv Wolfman’s run, which will see us through to issue #143 before he leaves in mid-storyline.
Some parallels could be drawn with Steve Gerber’s run. They’re both big name writers, but their Daredevil runs aren’t in the top tier of their work, nor are they regarded as top tier Daredevil. But both of them leave the book in a better place than they found it. For Wolfman, this will mean getting Foggy out of the DA’s office and putting him back with Matt – this time as crusading lawyers for the underclass, even if they’ve descended as an act of charity in order to do it. Wolfman won’t get quite to the point of tying the book to Hell’s Kitchen, but he does move the series decisively in that direction.
If the credits on issue #124 are to be taken literally, though, Wolfman starts off his run by picking up a Len Wein story in progress.
The Copperhead is an urban vigilante who shows up in New York alleys in a suit, trenchcoat and fedora, wearing a golden mask with a blank expression. He hisses all his S’s and goes around summarily executing petty criminals by shooting them with darts tipped with snake venom: “Any crime against the people isss a capital offenssse!” He also has a non-lethal dart gun for use in dealing with inconvenient policemen. His trade mark is to leave two copperhead pennies on the eyes of his victims.
So far, so generic. But in fact, that’s the point: the Copperhead is a 1930s pulp character. No doubt one reason for doing this story was that Marvel happened to be relaunching their Doc Savage series that very same month, and he was an authentic pulp character. The Copperhead is not authentic – he’s invented from whole cloth in this issue. But he’s explicitly an intruder from the pre-superhero pulp genre.
In the Marvel Universe, the Copperhead was the star of a monthly 30s pulp series about millionaire playboy Richard Crandell, who was disfigured in an acid attack, and became a masked vigilante in a suit of copper armour. But the fictional Copperhead didn’t go in for shooting purse snatchers, so the new, “real” Copperhead is apparently some sort of lunatic cosplayer.
The story then takes a turn which is a little surprising for Marvel in 1975. With no other leads, Daredevil tracks down Walter Kranz, the original author of the Copperhead stories. To Daredevil’s surprise, despite the enduring popularity of his work-for-hire character, Kranz lives in crushing poverty in a crumbling tenement. Or at least, he did, until his murder the previous week.
Eventually Daredevil stumbles upon the Copperhead by blind luck, and has to stop him from killing some muggers. Daredevil is a bit of an idiot in this fight, acting surprised when he punches a metal mask and it hurts his hand. But the Copperhead takes very badly to someone fighting back against him. He decides that Daredevil is clearly in league with villains, and also qualifies for summary execution. A contrived cliffhanger involves the Copperhead punching Daredevil out, then shooting him at point blank range and leaving him for dead. But wait, Daredevil has managed to block the darts with his billy club without Copperhead noticing! The art tries its utmost to make this stunt work, but can’t pull it off.
Meanwhile, the Copperhead murders publisher Milton Wexler, who made his fortune from the original Copperhead stories. Then, he shows up at the door of publisher Martin Foster, who has brought the stories back into print. It turns out that the Copperhead has been demanding money from all these people for getting rich off “his” identity.
The Copperhead turns out to be Lawrence Chesney, whose father was the artist’s model for the covers of the Copperhead pulps. Mr Chesney Sr was also mad, or so we’re offhandedly told – he believed that he was the Copperhead, and somehow convinced his son too. Lawrence is trying to avenge what he regards as the exploitation of his father’s name. With the mystery resolved, the Copperhead then obligingly dies by getting struck by lightning – because going out in a storm while wearing a suit of copper armour is not a very smart thing to do.
And that’s pretty much it for the Copperhead. A second Copperhead showed up in Human Fly in 1978, and once again got himself killed thanks to his own armour – he fell into a river and drowned because copper isn’t just a lightning rod, it’s also heavy. More bizarrely, the original Copperhead returned from the dead in the 2000 miniseries Daredevil/Spider-Man by Paul Jenkins and Phil Winslade, as an undead wraith trying to claim Spider-Man’s soul. It’s a baffling use of the character, which has seemingly nothing to do with the original concept, whether visually, conceptually or in terms of personality. But he’s still alive at the end of that story, so he’s out there somewhere.
His debut is a strange story. Even though it stresses that the Copperhead’s creator died in work-for-hire ruin, it feels more like a parody of creator rights disputes than a shot across anyone’s bow. But killing him off at the end of the story seems like a waste. There’s a vague hint of Rorschach about this guy, even if it’s mostly visual. The design works, at least until he takes the trenchcoat off for the final fight, at which point he’s a budget Iron Man.
Yes, he’s a limited character when he’s killing any minor criminal that he comes across. But if you made him a bit more long-term in his thinking, the core idea of a lunatic vigilante who thinks he’s a pulp hero might have worked.
Copperhead really suffers for the mid-story swerve from “lunatic street vigilante” to “vengeful lunatic killing businesspeople for a delusion.” I wonder if that was always Len Wein’s intended twist, or if it was something Wolfman added when he picked up the story.
But either way, it does seem like a waste. Copperhead-as-vigilante has a rather good design and a memorable set of gimmicks.
And there are also a lot of clever nods to various old pulp characters: the fictional-in-universe origin with the acid-scarred face resembles the Black Bat, the copper outfit plays on Doc Savage’s nickname as “the Man of Bronze,” the metallic body resembles the steel-like physique of the Avenger, the trenchcoat and two-guns bit plays as a reference to the Shadow, and the venomous animal theming suggests the Shadow ripoff the Spider.
So it feels like a fair number of ideas and design work went into the original concept, only for the character to be summarily killed off.
I always thought it odd that Mark Gruenwald co-created an entirely dissimilar Copperhead for the Serpent Society rather than reviving some version of this one, resulting in a character who’s even more of a nonentity than the Daredevil-related versions.
As to that Paul Jenkins/Phil Winslade miniseries…it’s always struck me as a vehicle for Phil Winslade’s redesigns of old villains. It’s not a particularly interesting, consequential, or especially coherent plot. And aside from using the late-1990s “will the Owl reform?” idea, there’s not much happening in it. It also finishes with a rather arbitrary bit of “magic can do anything.”
There’s a reason pretty much all of it — including the Owl’s redemptive sacrifice at the end — has been roundly ignored by other creators.
The visuals and the pulp theme are interesting… but conceptually, this strikes me as a slightly goofier Punisher.
Re: The Narration’s comments about the word “good-bye”.
It sure sounds like Len Wein is tired of the indefinition about Black Widow’s role in Matt’s life.
@Omar: The name Crandall also suggests the Shadow’s fake secret identity of millionaire Lamont Cranston, while the Spider and the Avenger were both named Richard.
@Luis: The Punisher is kind of a slightly less goofy version of gun-toting pulp characters. Give him a fedora and have him leave a calling card with a skull on it on the bodies, and you’d be there.
As Omar alludes to, the ending of Daredevil/ Spider-Man was later ignored. At the end, the Copperhead and the Owl are dragged off to Hell. But the Owl later inexplicably shows up alive two years later in a Kevin Smith story Who knows if the Copperhead is alive or dead?
The reason why Black Widow is written out is so she can appear in Champions.
@Omar- Several of the Serpent Society members had the same name as previous villains, and except for Bushmaster, they had nothing to do with them. The Asp had nothing to do with the thief. Cottonmouth had nothing to do with Luke Cage’s foe.
But yes, the second batch of Serpent Society villains Gruenwald created- the ones that worked for the Viper originally- were all nonentities. The worst had to be Boomslang- did Gruenwald really think that the Marvel Universe needed TWO Australian villains who used boomerangs?
@Luis, Daibhid C- the Punisher is based on Mack Nolan, who debuted in 1969, long after the pulp era had ended.
Ah, mid-‘70s Wolfman. The man whose mission statement at the back of Nova #1 is almost literally, “At a time when other writers are doing interesting, innovative things with superheroes, I wanted to do something boring and conservative.”
It occurs to me that Marv Wolfman liked the “unhinged, undiscriminating vigilante” archetype back in the day. He’d also co-created the Hangman over in Werewolf by Night, a psychopath who killed criminals because he could tell old John Wayne movies from reality. Then, at DC, he introduced the original Electrocutioner in some of his Batman stories as another crazed killer vigilante, who naturally wound up as the archenemy of Wolfman’s own take on the Punisher…the Vigilante.
@Luis Dantas: I suppose the distinction is that Copperhead is never played as some sort of gritty antihero, as the Punisher was even in his first appearance. Rather, he’s treated as an outright maniac right from the start,
And unlike the Punisher, who from the beginning was shown to research his targets, he doesn’t seem to care who he kills as long as he thinks they’re “criminals.”
None of this means that anyone has to like the Punisher, but Copperhead is, as Paul notes, more of a bizarre anachronism who’s meant to feel utterly out of place, where the Punisher than a reflection of extreme backlash to fears about urban decay.
@Michael: I can understand Gruenwald ignoring the Asp, since he was a noncostumed thief. But however dated he seemed in those pre-Netflix days, Cornell Cottonmouth was much better overall than Gruenwald’s “guy who bites stuff.”
Bushmaster, the guy with a giant snake tail, also never worked very well as a concept, even after he got a belated origin tying him to the old Iron Fist and Power Man villain. The visual is just too clunky.
The second-generation Serpents really did stretch the snake theme quite a bit, and few had anything to distinguish them. Coachwhip briefly developed a personality and a role as the Cobra’s moll, but just as Boomslang is Dollar Store Boomerang, she’s always seemed like Temu Constrictor.
But, then, there were plenty of nobodies in the Serpent Society right from the beginning, many of whom started and stayed as crowd-fillers like the aforementioned Cottonmouth II.
Right from the start, the Rattler was the Shocker plus the Scorpion minus a personality. The second-gen Serpent Fer-De-Lance is like the least interesting things about Spider-Man’s villain the Tarantula and Gruenwald’s own Bushmaster put together with a terrible color scheme.
Rock Python might have been interesting if an actual story had ever done anything with his intended backstory about coming from one of Marvel’s many ersatz South Africas or Rhodesias. And then there’re folks like Puff Adder and Black Racer, each of whom is little more than some random powers stuffed into a very late 80s costume.
Ah, but Bushmaster would go on to disguise himself as Golobulus, part of a CIA psy-op to mess with Cobra Commander’s head and convince him that the COBRA organization dates back to some sort of antediluvian Robert E. Howard rip-off civilization.
Yes, the difference between Copperhead and the Punisher (as others have pointed out) is that Copperhead is based on pre-superhero pulp motifs, while the Punisher is based on an attempt to revive pulp traditions in the wake of the Vietnam War and fears about increasing urban crime at home.
Marv Wolfman’s run is the strongest work on DD, setting the stage for the character to finally become the iteration that people associate with the character from the Frank Miller days. Not everything Wolfman brings to the character congeals, but it certainly feels like the prototype for the Frank Miller version.
This may not be the very top tier of Wolfman’s output, it’s no Tomb of Dracula or New Teen Titans, but unlike the flawed Gerber run, I’d still rank this as relatively high in Wolfman’s writing career. That’s also due to the fact that after a genius series like ToD, a classic run on TT, and some of his work on Batman, I’m not really a fan of most of Wolfman’s comic work. Unlike the case of Steve Gerber who rarely turned in subpar stories.
This reminds me of the Gray Ghost episode of BTAS in a way.
Marv Wolfman can be difficult to predict. He has some very good and innovative, daring stories. But he can also crash and burn his own storylines in rather disappointing ways. Happened at least twice in the Titans.
He is also fond of a certain trigger-happy stereotype, of which I guess Copperhead is an early prototype.
So this isn’t the Copperhead that was a grizzled veteran who used his military training to turn his family’s moonshining business into a drug cartel?
This guy looks interesting. I really am surprised that, dead or not, he was allowed to fall into utter obscurity. I’d forgotten about that miniseries, and obviously for good reason.
I love the Serpent Society and the thought of there just being that many random snake-themed supervillains out there willing to join a snake-themed criminal union -and- there were still a bunch more willing and able to infiltrate it on Viper’s behalf -and- then most of them just stayed together afterwards.
Sure, most of them are basically just crowd-fillers with interesting visuals and no personalities. Sure, some of them are so confused they don’t even have consistent designs (Is Puff Adder Black or white? Only his momma knows for sure…) Sure, they seem to come and go at random. Sure, their motivations range from crime to assassination to um… Mephisto worship (why?????) Sure, half of them apparently have recycled/stolen names. Sure, Copperhead looks like a palate-swapped Cobra…
But dangit, in the overall world of themed supervillain groups, the Serpent Society are right up there with Death-Throws and Wrecking Crew for useful yet weird opponents to throw at your hero. And I won’t have anyone slandering them. 🙂
It’s groups like the Serpent Society that reinforce the truth that while snakes are cool and/or scary, most species have pretty dumb names. Copperhead is good, but Puff Adder? Coachwhip?
See also spiders.
Then, there is the Taipan. That’s an impressive name.
The Krait is another good choice.
While the “mamba” is kind of a goofy name…“grass cutter”, really…no one is ever going to be laughing at a black mamba. Some snakes just dare to say their name is dumb.
I wouldn’t laugh at a puff adder either.
If no one else saw this over on Mark Evanier’s site, Tony Isabella is now Jenny Blake.
https://www.newsfromme.com/2025/02/09/tony-jenny/
Good for her. It just goes to show, it’s never to late to be the real you.
I agree.
It is still surprising that such significant news comes so soon after we mentioned her discussed here for a few weeks. Her former name does not come here too often.
Th Marvel Database over at Fandom has already done a pretty good job of updating credits for indexed stories to read “Jenny Blake Isabella (credited under a different name).”
I’m assuming this is a back-end solution that automatically changes the displayed name, but it’s still heartwarming to see it happen so quickly.
As to the way Blake doesn’t come up here very often, she only wrote for X-characters in her brief run on The Champions v.1 (including the excellent storyline introducing minor villain Rampage/Stuart Clarke, which as a delightfully cynical ending) or in her scripting job on Incredible Hulk v.1 #1, one of the “Cancellation Era’s” X-Men cameo appearances (and, more notably, the first Hulk-Juggernaut throwdown).
She also used the Living Pharaoh in a Living Mummy story over in Supernatural Chillers, but no X-Men showed up there. The Pharaoh didn’t even manage to become the Monolith before he was defeated, which is, I think, the only time someone used the character after his Arnold Drake appearances without having him transform.
“Th Marvel Database over at Fandom has already done a pretty good job of updating credits for indexed stories to read “Jenny Blake Isabella (credited under a different name).” ”
I think it’s worth pointing out here that Isabella has said on Facebook that she intends to continue using “Tony Isabella” as a pen name and to appear under that name at conventions, so this is a case where outright deletion of the former name appears to go beyond the expressed wishes.
@Paul: That’s good to know!
Seems to be a case where the widespread concern about “deadnaming” has led to an oversight-cum-overcorrection.
I was surprised to see horror fiction author Bill Martin using the name Poppy Z. Brite when he came out of retirement recently to publish a new short story. There’s market value in using an established name by pop culture figures, I suppose. Everyone knows of “Poppy Z. Brite”, while not many are familiar with the name Bill Martin. Authors use pennames all the time (as Jenny Blake makes the point), so there’s no reason to think of “Poppy Z. Brite” or “Tony Isabella” in any other way.
I wonder if the writer’s living situation in this story was inspired by Bill Finger living in poverty. Finger died in 1974, so it would make sense that Wein & Wolfman would reference him here.
@Dave White, @Paul: thanks for the update regarding Jenny Blake, I didn’t know about it.