Daredevil Villains #51: Smasher
DAREDEVIL #149 (November 1977)
“Catspaw!”
Writer: Jim Shooter
Penciller: Carmine Infantino
Inker, colourist: Klaus Janson
Letterer: Denise Wohl
Editor: Archie Goodwin
Marv Wolfman is gone, and next up is Jim Shooter, whose short run lasts from issues #144 to #151. Even some of those are co-written: the first two are co-credited to Gerry Conway, while the last sees him hand over to incoming writer Roger McKenzie. By this point, Daredevil is floundering. With issue #147, the book is relegated to a bimonthly schedule, and it’s going to stay there until the 1980s.
This is the only Shooter issue that we’ll be covering, since the rest of his run relies on existing villains: the Man-Bull (#144), the Owl (#145), Bullseye (#146), Death-Stalker (#148) and the Purple Man (everything else).
There were reasons for this. For one thing, on Shooter’s own account, he was generally averse to creating new characters on Marvel’s 1970s work-for-hire terms – although he did introduce Paladin as a supporting character in issue #150. But in any event, Shooter’s top priority was to tie up some storylines that had been left unresolved by Marv Wolfman.
A plot about shady dealings within Glenn Industries, the company run by Heather Glenn’s father, had started all the way back in issue #131 and still hadn’t really gone anywhere. More remarkably, Foggy’s fiancée Debbie Harris had been kidnapped in issue #132 and she was still missing. Matt had done basically nothing to find or rescue her, unless you count him pausing every so often to observe that the whole situation made Foggy very sad, which was a terrible shame. By the time Shooter took over, this subplot had been running for over a year, and it was preposterously overdue for resolution.
Shooter reveals that the Purple Man is behind all of this. He’s exploiting Glenn Industries’ resources by using Heather’s father as his mind-controlled pawn. Debbie’s father is also high up in the company, and for some reason the Purple Man is using her as a hostage. But having set up an actual villain that Daredevil can fight, Shooster still doesn’t get around to resolving the storylines. He leaves that to his successor Roger McKenzie, who drags it out still further. The Purple Man is finally defeated in issue #154 – which, thanks to the bimonthly schedule, is two and a half years after the story began.
But amongst all this, Jim Shooter gives us a single story focussed on a new villain… well, kind of. After bringing back Death-Stalker in issue #148, Shooter devotes issue #149 to Death-Stalker’s henchman, the Smasher.
This one is actually the second Smasher. The original appeared in issue #138, a crossover with Ghost Rider #20, where he was also a henchman of Death-Stalker. I didn’t give that Smasher an entry, because Death-Stalker was the main villain of the issue and the Smasher was just a super-strong henchthug to round out the plot. But this time round, Death-Stalker is absent and the Smasher is the focal point. And, well, if we don’t do this issue, we’re skipping Shooter entirely.
Besides, it’s not without its charms as a story. It’s got guest art by Carmine Infantino, inked by Klaus Janson in a rather effective combination. There are unusually pleasing storm effects on the first few pages, admittedly somewhat spoiled by the weather suddenly clearing up on page 6. Heather Glenn, who has a bit of a doormat up to this point, finally gets a scene taking Matt to task for his complete lack of support while her father is in trouble – a bit of melodrama that gives Infantino something to get his teeth into.
After that, it’s time for the Smasher. This big thug has been given super strength by the Death-Stalker, and sent out to kill Daredevil. But while the Death-Stalker has equipped his agent with physical power, he doesn’t seem to have briefed the poor guy with any sort of plan, or tracking device, or, well, anything. Instead, the Smasher’s plan is to wear a big coat over his costume and wander around areas of New York where Daredevil has been sighted, hoping to bump into him.
Fortunately for the Smasher, this technique actually works, because there wouldn’t be a plot otherwise. Once he spots Daredevil on a rooftop, the Smasher races merrily to the top of the building by punching hand holds in the wall, and the fight is on. We establish that the Smasher thinks he was a “nobody” until Death-Stalker transformed him, and that he’s delighted by the opportunity to repay the favour. The big lug isn’t especially skilful, but he’s fast and strong, and punching him does no good at all, so he’s a perfectly serviceable brick wall villain. But his signature character trait is a puppy-like devotion to the Death-Stalker.
Daredevil slips away to advance the Purple Man subplot, and we regroup for a second round at the end of the issue. Daredevil tries to persuade the Smasher that the Death-Stalker will betray him and kill him, but the loyal Smasher isn’t having it. So Daredevil shrugs his shoulders and knocks the guy out with a couple of nerve strikes. The poor Smasher seems genuinely bemused to discover that he wasn’t invincible after all.
An odd little coda sees Daredevil tell the police not to bother arresting the Smasher, since if he’s actually imprisoned anywhere, the Death-Stalker will easily find him and kill him – he can teleport into prisons, after all. The Smasher never appears again, so either Death-Stalker kills him off panel as Daredevil expected, or he’s still out there somewhere. Death-Stalker dies in issue #158, so the Smasher wouldn’t have had to go on the run for too long.
Realistically, of course, the reason why the Smasher never returns is that he’s a generic thug who exists to provide a couple of fight scenes to fill an issue while the Purple Man storyline is advanced in the subplots. He’s such an all-purpose Silver Age brawler that he’s even wearing green. It’s a more enjoyable issue than you’d expect given that remit – it’s efficiently done, and the Smasher’s trusting naivety, which isn’t laid on too thick, has a certain charm. It’s decent filler, then, but still filler.
The Disruptor, from Amazing Spider-Man, also created a super-strong henchman named “the Smasher”.
Unless I’m mistaken, this will be the final new villain for DD until after Miller joins the book on art, working with McKenzie.
The villain in issue 74 is also called the Smasher. So that’s three villains called Smasher that Matt fought in 76 issues.
And a member of the Imperial Guard is also called Smasher.
@Chris V- that depends on whether or not you want to count the second Ani-Men, who are introduced the issue before Miller joins the book, as “new” villains.
There are a few DD foes that never actually appeared in DD’s own book. DD does not have quite the knack for borrowing foes from other heroes that Spider-Man has, but he may have more than, say, the Fantastic Four.
There are also the original Zodiac Gang; Spymaster and the Espionage Elite; even Mr. Kline is about as much an Iron Man villain as a Daredevil one.
Most notably for this time period, Roger Slifer adds the Mad Thinker to the list of Daredevil enemies in Marvel Two-in-One #38-39, and Roger McKenzie writes both Daredevil and Captain America for a certain period of time. Not too long after Frank Miller starts drawing DD, McKenzie has DD guest star in Cap’s book. 1979’s “Captain America #234” was published between DD #158 and #159 and is a DD feature in all but name, and adds the Grand Director (formerly the Captain America of the 1950s) to the list. Pretty much at the same time David Micheline writes Daredevil into the Avengers confrontation with Grey Gargoyle (Avengers #190-191).
There are also a couple of esoterica from his Defenders days. The Sons of the Serpent, Grandmaster, Prime Mover, even Korvac. And Magneto from his Avengers appearance in the early 1970s. And the Blood Brothers and the Controler from Iron Man #89. A few years ahead, Psycho-Man and his Hate-Monger during Secret Wars II in Fantastic Four.
Considering how much he struggled and for how long, he sure got around.
One wonders if any of these Smashers ever met their opposite, the Passer.
It is wild how many villains named Smasher are in Daredevil. Or how many Marvel titles were bi-monthly in the 1970s. By this stage, X-Men had been relaunched and shifted back to monthly, while DD was slipping into that format.
With hindsight, one of the three Smashers, or maybe all of them, could have had some life as reoccurring minions. In the 80s, Bullet became a reoccurring brick, and Gladiator often served that role overall, but variety is key. Besides, DD is also a title where the Ox commuted from ASM twice for more or less that purpose. The Smasher with the Committee maybe had more legs, since that could have been a reoccurring oddball street gang (like the Purple Dragons in TMNT, who in modern incarnations have often been led by another brick character, Hun). But there’s nothing that stopped this one from popping up more, too. He’s a blank slate, could have had some life as a guy eager to please or serve any mastermind willing to employ him, or offer a rematch with DD.
But, I guess it was better to rely on Gladiator and the other five or six villains a lot. Even in modern times, DD’s most persistent enemy is sanity (or commitment).
The funny thing is, Smasher isn’t a very good name. It has too many soft consonants to resonate. You can imagine it in a Sean Connery voice.
I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2077 lately, which is very dark, often extremely emotionally wrenching. But its backstory was based on old tabletop roleplaying game adventures, so they’re stuck with the ultimate threat, the terrifying cyborg nemisis, named Adam Smasher.
Like a throwaway pun out of Bob’s Burgers or something.
I feel like this overarching Glenn Industries story is the first one that really finds a lot of drama in the conflicting agendas of DD vs. Matt Murdock: i.e., vigilante justice vs. courtroom justice. Shooter spins a lot of melodrama out of this conflict, and it’s quite satisfying.
It’s also somewhat bemusing to observe that Shooter is very much hewing to his own somewhat notorious creed, that the best (only?) conflict for a fictional character is “I can’t! Yet I must!” We see that playing out in the Heather Glenn material. He CAN’T win Heather back unless he tells her the whole story, including that he’s Daredevil. But … he MUST keep that identity secret! I gotta admit, it works.
Re: the Smasher specifically …
I think the fact that he’s just a generic strong guy suits this issue perfectly. In Daredevil’s mind, the Smasher is barely even a person; he’s just a punching bag, a convenient physical representation of Matt’s internal angst. You can’t hit angst after all, so the Smasher makes a perfect cathartic substitute; something he can just hit and hit and hit until it falls down.
It’s a nice distillation of one of the key Daredevil motifs: Matt Murdock is a very intelligent and analytical person who believes in the law. But when there are problems his mind can’t solve, he gets very angry, very fast, and he needs to go out and hit people.
Ann Nocenti will explore this element at some length in her run, really making a lot of how pathological and insidious this character trait is, in many respects.
It’s not quite as psychologically heavy as presented in this issue with the Smasher, but there’s a hint of it.
(Oh, and speaking of hints, the previous issue, #148, has Daredevil think to himself at one point, “Next stop — HELL’S KITCHEN!” And this is, in fact, the first explicit mention of Hell’s Kitchen in a Daredevil comic, ever! Well played, Shooter.)
@Jason: Your analysis really opens up this issue a lot more for me. It’s one of the bleaker endings possible for a seemingly goofy slugfest-of-the-month storylines, with the villain’s triviality as a key thematic and plot point, underlining the degree to which Daredevil/Matt Murdock fails as both an investigator and a moral person.
After all, the resolution is that Daredevil beats the Smasher up, but suggests letting him go since the death-Stalker doesn’t see the Smasher as a person either. But instead of coming across as mercy, it comes across as an echo of the same kind of dehumanizing apathy about another life. When Matt’s anger takes over, so does his narcissism.
And that’s kind of the Maxwell Glenn arc as a whole: if Daredevil were paying a bit more attention to Heather’s protestations, if he weren’t focusing more on the things he can’t figure out or solve, then perhaps Maxwell Glenn wouldn’t have ended up a disgraced suicide. But it’s just not important enough to Matt, not enough to look beyond his angry judgment, until it’s too late.
This trait — and Matt’s failure in the Killgrave plotline — plays out more broadly later on, as the corruption Killgrave introduces or amplifies at Glenn Industries will continue to haunt the McKenzie/Miller and plain old Miller runs, much as Matt’s malign neglect and patronizing attitude towards Heather Glenn will worsen throughout Miller’s run until its tragic results in the O’Neill era.
I don’t see most of this as something Shooter was doing on his own, but rather as something that starts to get highlighted as early as the Wolfman run, in stories like the one with Matt and the Torpedo trashing some family’s home in the course of their fight. But it’s not clear at all that Wolfman had the Killgrave plot in mind; he may well have been going for Glenn as actually corrupt, or as the victim of his seeming henchman Stone.
It really seems to be a case of four consecutive writers — Wolfman, Shooter, McKenzie, and Miller — each taking the book in a progressively darker direction by reevaluating the ongoing plot and character development.
Wolfman, for all the Silver Age gimmickry still hanging on during his run, starts to emphasize the social decay idea and uses more casually murderous villains. Shooter plays up the idea that Matt Murdock can’t always achieve justice, that sometimes good people are destroyed by bad ones, and that Matt’s frustrations can take him to dark places. McKenzie introduces the noirish, hardboiled reporter Ben Urich and later leans in to Miller’s art style by bringing in grittier street-level criminals like the next (I think) new villain we’ll see, Eric Slaughter. And it’s McKenzie who co-developed the story that first brings DD into conflict with the Punisher, which makes the book’s “justice vs. law vs. vengeance” conflicts into the primary theme.
Miller is still the writer/artist who brings this slow, somewhat accidental development to full fruition by bringing in the graphical style, additional themes, and villains who best express it all. That’s the point at which all of this becomes the book’s identity.
I certainly can’t quite see McKenzie, Shooter, or Wolfman writing the Kingpin the way Miller did (as is best evidenced by the Kingpin’s last pre-DD appearance in Wolfman’s Amazing Spider-Man) or playing up Matt’s Catholic faith, the kind of thing Shooter in particular would likely keep far afield of. But Miller’s triumph is still the last big jump forward in the title’s rocky evolution from the mid-1970s on.
@Jason: I agree, the actual Glenn Industries storyline is perfectly solid. It just lasts too long, particularly given the kidnapping angle.
@Omar: I think the move towards Matt as morally/emotionally dysfunctional starts with Roy Thomas, whose first move is to resolve the romantic triangle, put Matt and Karen together, and then have it be an absolute disaster because Matt isn’t prepared to accommodate her in the slightest.
@Paul: That’s a good point regarding Thomas. I’ve tended to read his stories as an effort to make Karen seem unsympathetic, since she wants Matt to quit superheroing. That runs counter to the presumed appeal of the book, it would make it easier to write her out.
But on rereading the Thomas stories and looking back at your Brother Brimstone entry and others in this series, “Karen the wet blanket, fighting the book’s premise” is a reductive take. It reads much more as Matt being all take and no give. He won’t even let Karen just move off to California and get on with her life!
As with Hank Pym’s bizarre marriage to the Wasp in Thomas’s Avengers, it’s definitely something that later writers picked up on. Matt’s treatment of Heather Glenn is eventually called out by other characters as his steamrolling her and her feelings, treating her as little more than an extension of himself.
As I’ve said before, I wanted to do a podcast episode about the Hank/Jan marriage issues when the last movie came out, but it’s so “not 2025” with all the poor behavior and mental health issues going on.
@Omar, Mark- There was evidence of Hank’s mental problems before the wedding though. in his first appearance Hank was supposed to be a mad scientist who learned his lesson but his first appearance was so popular Hank became a recurring feature. And his actions after his first wife’s death are meant to be unstable- he thinks he can find his wife’s killers by attacking random Hungiarian policemen.
The Hank/ Jan wedding issue is one of those stories that never made any sense. Wouldn’t T’Challa’s senses have told him Yellowjacket was Hank? Can’t the police in the Marvel Universe arrest someone if they admit to murder in front of multiple witnesses?
I guess the opposite of Thomas’s Karen-Matt issues, where the woman came off as MORE unsympathetic than intended , would be Len Wein’s Green Lantern run. Len wanted to temporarily replace Hal with John Stewart. So he created a scenario where Ferris Aircraft is attacked, Hal has to go stop a planet from exploding, and Carol Ferris’s employee and friend is crippled. Carol slaps Hal and demands he quit being Green Lantern. So Hal quits and Stewart becomes Green Lantern. Wein probably intended Carol to be traumatized by her friend being crippled while Hal was off protecting other people. But since Hal was making a good faith effort to handle two emergencies at once and was rewarded by his girlfriend slapping him and threatening to break up with him, many readers weren’t very sympathetic to Carol. This, plus Len forgetting that Carol and John had met before, led Steven Englehart to turn Carol into a villain when he took over the series shortly after. It was an out-of-left field revelation that made no sense- the Predator was a portion of Carol’s subconscious with a memory-erasing organ and Carol’s ultimatum was part of her Star Sapphire identity’s plan to defeat Hal- but Carol stayed a villain for several years.
@Omar: That all sounds about right. It’s an interesting evolution, over the course of those baton-tosses from one writer to the next.
Another element that fascinates me about the protracted “Glenn Industries” arc is the way Deb is handled. After her rescue, she goes into isolation — breaking off her engagement to Foggy — seemingly needing time by herself to process her trauma. But Matt ends up kind of browbeating her into getting back together with Foggy.
My first experience with Foggy and Deb was reading the Micah Synn saga, wherein Deb gets a truly misogynistic personality-overhaul from Denny O’Neil. That was always the Deb I knew, and I was surprised to go back and read this story about her.
When you put it all together, you see a woman who was held hostage for a very, very long time — enough so that there was a hint of Stockholm syndrome going on. (As I recall, she briefly demonstrates some empathy and concern for her kidnapper when DD finally beats him up and rescues her.)
Instead of being given time to heal, she then was psychologically pressured into resuming her relationship with Foggy, something she explicitly did not want to do.
Then in the Micah Synn saga — which I know is still to come in this blog series, so I’m maybe getting too far ahead — we seem to see a woman who is bitter and resentful at being trapped in her marriage to Foggy. Enough so that she becomes attracted to Micah, a dangerous savage who seems perfectly capable of duplicating her earlier trauma by kidnapping and brutalizing her (which indeed is what he’ll end up doing).
It’s a really strange and dark journey that Deb takes over the course of Daredevil, before she’s written out just a few issues after the Micah saga ends.
I have been fantasizing for a while about writing a Daredevil story that would bring back both Deb and Micah, in order to explore some of the tragic implications of this aspect of the O’Neil run.
Anyway … again, getting ahead of things a little bit, but it is true that Deb’s unfortunate downward spiral seems to begin with her kidnapping here, during the long Glenn/Kilgrave storyline.
Jason:
FYI, “Stockholm Syndrome” was invented at the behest of police. See, the “victims” observed that the police were incompetent and didn’t care about the hostages’ safety, causing the hostages to negotiate with the kidnappers *themselves*, and found said kidnappers far more reasonable than the police.
The fact that you bring up the term in connection with a woman who was violently “rescued” by a man, who then proceded to pressure her to act against her own better judgment… actually seems oddly appropriate.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think most Bronze Age comic book writers were very good at writing women.
@Jason- O’Neil rationalized Harris’s behavior by pointing out that she was working for the Organization in her first appearance. The problem is she hadn’t acted like that in a long time.
@Jason- she does express sympathy for her captor but the situation was unusual. Her captor was under the control of the Purple Man. Shooter’s interpretation of the Purple Man’s power was that his victims have to obey his commands but they otherwise retain their normal personalities. So instead of threatening to kill or rape her like a typical henchman might, he’s talking to her about his wife and son and trying to cheer her up. Debbie didn’t know he was under the control of the Purple Man but his behavior was weird enough for her to suspect something was going on- remember, this is the Marvel Universe.
He’s such an all-purpose Silver Age brawler that he’s even wearing green.
Say what?
Oldie: Traditionally, comic book heroes wore primary colors: red, yellow and blue.
The villains wore the secondary colors: orange, green, and purple.
The Hulk and, to an extent, Batman and Robin were the big exceptions, but otherwise the pattern holds up pretty well
@Taibak- Green Lantern was also a big exception.
Oldie –
In Silver Age comics heroes usually wear primary colors and villains usually wear secondary colors.
Spider-Man is red and blue.
Electro and Mysterio wear green.
Green Goblin and Mysterio wear green and purple.
Doc Ock wore Green.
The Hulk was not a Super-Hero so he could wear purple on his green skin.
These are more traditions than rules.
Also,
Supes (red blue) v Luthor (purple, green). Joker also purple and green,
FF (blue’) v Doom (green)
Loki wore green and yellow.
How is Batman an exception?
Chris: Because arguably Batman’s main color is grey.
Michael: I completely forgot about the Green Lanterns. To be fair though, Alan Scott wore as much red and yellow as he did green, so he’s really in the same boat as Robin.
And thank you for not mentioning me forgetting Green Arrow. 🙂
@Alexx: I looked this up to read more about it. Fascinating stuff. The more you know!
@Michael: I didn’t realize O’Neil ever tried to defend his characterization of Deb. Do you happen to know, was that in an interview, or an intro to a TPB collection, or …?
Thanks for the info about Deb’s captor. I either forgot or failed to twig that she was concerned about him because he was an innocent thrall.
All of that acknowledged, I still find Deb to be a tragic character — or a character with a very tragic arc (which I suppose is the same thing). I’d love to see her get rehabilitated, and have a relatively happy ending to her story. Not many female DD characters really get such a thing …
Out of curiosity, who was Marvel’s first superhero to wear a costume heavy on secondary colors?
You could make a case for the Hulk or Namor, but they weren’t really heroes. Plus, Namor didn’t wear all that much.
You could make a case for the Thing since he’s orange, but his costume was blue.
When they joined the Avengers, Quicksilver wore green and Hawkeye wore purple, but they started out as villains. They just never bothered to change their costumes.
After that… I think it’s actually Jean Grey when she started wearing the green miniskirt. I think that was a few months before the Wasp wore green for the first time.
Huh. Never noticed that before.