DAREDEVIL #131-132 (March & April 1976)
“Watch Out for Bullseye, He Never Misses!” / “Bullseye Rules Supreme”
Writer, editor: Marv Wolfman
Penciller: Bob Brown
Inker: Klaus Janson
Colourist: Michele Wolfman
Letterer: Joe Rosen

Well, it took us 48 goes and over a decade of comics, but we’ve finally reached one of the really big names. We’ve had enduring second-tier villains like the Gladiator, the Jester and the Owl. We’ve had some villains who were big deal for a short time, like the Masked Marauder and the Death-Stalker. And we’ve had a whole bunch of one-off villains. But truly A-list villains? There’s the Purple Man, perhaps, but his claim to that status rests largely on stories published long after he stopped appearing in Daredevil.

Bullseye is in a different position. He still appears in Daredevil today. He’ll get his own minis. He’s a recognisable figure around the Marvel Universe. He’ll even make it to the Dark Avengers. But it’ll take him a little time. He made it into the first Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe but didn’t  make the cut for the Deluxe Edition – which means he was ranked below the likes of the Death-Throws, a team of evil jugglers. He didn’t get back in until Update ’89. So why didn’t he click immediately?

In a sense, he did. He immediately enters Daredevil’s rogue’s gallery and starts making repeat appearances. As you surely know, Bullseye’s gimmick is that he has a perfect aim and can turn anything into a deadly weapon. In his first story, Bullseye’s plan is remarkably sensible. Using his skills, he’s going to make a name for himself as an unstoppable murderer, and then extort money from the rich. So in his very first scene, he shows up in the office of wealthy Mr Hunnicutt, and kills him by hurling a fountain pen into his throat. Bullseye follows that by spraypainting a target design over the corpse, along with a message saying “This is an example to all who refuse to pay Bullseye.”

An origin flashback tells us that Bullseye was an unusually bloodthirsty soldier in the Vietnam War. He’d always had a perfect aim. When his gun jammed, he killed an enemy soldier by simply throwing the gun as a spear instead. After the war, he became a mercenary, using his uncanny aim to master throwing weapons. It’s not a million miles from Garth Ennis’s version of the Punisher’s origin: homicidal sociopath finds his niche in wartime. Bullseye claims that he only kills for the intimidation factor and says that he’d rather just be paid. But he certainly seems to be enjoying himself.

As part of his brand-building efforts, Bullseye lures Daredevil into a public fight at a circus. Daredevil holds his own, but Bullseye gets to look impressive, and having made that point, he simply leaves. Then he shows up at the home of another wealthy couple to extort them. When they call the police, he tries to kill them. Fortunately, Daredevil is on hand; unfortunately, the story has run out of space, and ends with Daredevil defeating Bullseye in a rather routine three-page fight.

Still, Bullseye’s core elements are present and correct from the outset. He’s scary because he can kill you with anything. He’s a sadist who enjoys toying with people. That’s Bullseye, isn’t it? That’s the character that became a hit?

But at first, Marv Wolfman won’t quite commit to the purity of the concept. Like Captain America or Hawkeye, Bullseye is notionally not a superhuman. He’s just extremely skilled. This is, of course, absurd. He does things that are completely impossible. But they have to be things that at least feel like they could be done by a suitably talented genius, at least if you don’t think too hard.

So it’s not ideal that the very first thing Bullseye does is to shatter a skyscraper window by throwing a paper plane at it from the other side of the street. That’s the wrong side of the line. It doesn’t matter how good your aim is, you’re not throwing an ordinary paper plane with enough force to go through a pane of glass. At best, it’s a Karnak stunt, not a Bullseye one. It’s the next page that gets Bullseye right, when he kills with a fountain pen.

On top of that, Wolfman gives Bullseye with a sonic gun. This is truly bizarre. The last thing Bullseye needs is a gun. He can already turn anything that he finds lying around into a ranged weapon. That’s his whole gimmick! So if you’re going to give him a weapon, it should be something that he can fall back on in close combat. The dynamic of his fights with Daredevil is that Bullseye has the upper hand at a distance, but Daredevil can win if he manages to get close. So that’s where Bullseye could sensibly have been shored up. But a ray gun? Why?

There’s another issue, which reads even more strangely with hindsight. Despite being a creation of the mid 1970s, early Bullseye has a foot squarely in the Silver Age. Eventually, he’ll work as a smirking killer, much like the Joker. And that element is absolutely present from the outset. But in his first incarnation, Bullseye is also prancing around circuses and doing wacky stunts with paper planes.

The fact that Wolfman sees Bullseye that way becomes even clearer in his second story. In issues #141-142, Bullseye actually defeats Daredevil in combat, and has our hero unconscious. Bullseye doesn’t just kill the helpless hero, or even unmask him, but opts for the classic death trap. Fair enough, that’s the genre convention. But what a death trap. We’re not talking a bomb on a timer here, oh no. Bullseye ties Daredevil to a giant arrow, and then fires it at a cliff using a giant rooftop-mounted crossbow. This isn’t even Silver Age Marvel – it’s Adam West Batman. And here’s Bullseye doing it in 1976, the era of Wolverine and the Punisher.

In his earliest appearances, Bullseye is a genuine hybrid: a gimmicky throwback with a darker 70s edge. As it turns out, Bullseye works better when he’s played straight, or at least deadpan. He’s a killer who gets a kick out of his outrageous defiance of the normal limits of human skill, mocking everyone else who has to play by the normal laws of physics.

The core idea of Bullseye is strong, and he’s a natural opponent for Daredevil as another skill-based fighter. There are endless possibilities for his improvised weapons routine, and everything that makes him work is there to some degree from the outset. It was just mixed up with throwback elements that needed trimming away.