Daredevil Villains #53: Eric Slaughter
DAREDEVIL #159 and #161 (July & November 1979)
“Marked for Murder!” / “To Dare the Devil”
Writer: Roger McKenzie
Penciller: Frank Miller
Inker: Klaus Janson
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Letterer: Jim Novak (#159) and Diana Albers (#161)
Editors: Mary Jo Duffy & Al Milgrom
As I explained last time, Roger McKenzie’s run largely rested on existing villains. There are only two candidates for inclusion in this feature, and even they both debut playing second fiddle to more established bad guys. The new Ani-Men were henchmen of Death-Stalker, and Eric Slaughter is hired by Bullseye.
But their stories are also the earliest issues to be drawn by Frank Miller. And Slaughter has a better claim to inclusion than the Ani-Men, since he makes several repeat appearances over the next few years. Most notably, he’s the villain in issue #168, the debut of Elektra. He’s not exactly the focal point of that story either, mind you, but he does enough to justify us looking at him.
Slaughter’s debut story is simple. Bullseye hires him to kill Daredevil. The story is rather vague about Slaughter’s actual role in the underworld. He’s an elderly man who has a gang of thugs working for him, and who it seems are expected to do the actual killing. Daredevil has heard of Slaughter, but “thought he’d retired years ago”. Still, there’s no suggestion here that Slaughter has to round up some men in order to take on this contract. So apparently he’s some sort of gang leader who’s managed to avoid Matt’s notice. Frank Miller isn’t much clearer on this point, to be honest. Issue #181 describes Slaughter as running a “freelance assassination operation”, but in issue #168 he’s providing bodyguards. Either way, the operation can’t be particularly elite, because Turk holds down a job there, and he’s a comic relief moron.
Slaughter duly sets about fulfilling Bullseye’s contract. His approach isn’t hugely inventive. Matt and Foggy are known to be in contact with Daredevil, so Slaughter sends a couple of heavies round to threaten them, and to demand that Daredevil show up at Pier 42 at midnight. According to the script, Slaughter “couldn’t have chosen a lonelier or more foreboding locale” than Pier 42. From the look of the art, it seems to be on a main road. Daredevil duly shows up and decides to scout the location before charging in, which gives Frank Miller the chance to draw a montage of Daredevil picking up on tiny details among the waiting gunmen. At this point, Miller’s art still has one foot firmly in the Marvel house style of the period, maybe a little heavier on the atmospherics, but more inventive storytelling is starting to creep in.
While Daredevil is doing this, he reflects on Slaughter’s motives for going after him. It’s briefly presented as some sort of mystery, but Daredevil quickly comes to the unremarkable conclusion that gun-for-hire Eric Slaughter has been hired by someone. After that, we get six pages of Daredevil beating up Slaughter’s goons, in a sequence where the plot might well have read “They fight”. Fortunately, Frank Miller is drawing the fight, and so it’s good action with a particularly striking underwater sequence. Daredevil wins, but just as one of the henchmen is about to reveal who hired them, Bullseye kills the guy from the shadows. And that’s basically it. The idea is that Bullseye never expected Slaughter’s men to actually win, but just wanted a chance to watch Daredevil in action.
Slaughter himself barely appears in issue #159, and he isn’t in issue #160 at all. That issue involves Bullseye taking the Black Widow hostage in order to lure Daredevil into a fight. But in issue #161, Bullseye is working with Slaughter and his crew again. Since the rescue has to be visually exciting, the final showdown with Bullseye takes place at Coney Island, and Miller gives us an elaborate double page spread of fighting on the Coney Island Cyclone. Slaughter stays on the margins of this issue too, but he’s played a little differently. In issue #159, he was effectively a dupe. But in issue #161, Bullseye comes up with an elaborate Silver Age scheme involving roller coasters and the like, only to have a crisis of confidence and suffer a mental breakdown when he’s defeated. (Once Miller took over as writer, he retconned this breakdown into an early symptom of a brain tumour.)
This all means that in issue #161, Slaughter’s role is different. This time, he’s the calm professional taking Bullseye’s money while rolling his eyes at the absurdity of it all. In the event, Slaughter turns on Bullseye and refuses to kill Daredevil, supposedly because “Daredevil has earned my respect” – is this a common get-out clause for hitmen? But also, and more plausibly, Slaughter has realised that Bullseye is a complete lunatic and doesn’t trust him to pay. Daredevil carts Bullseye off to the cops, and Slaughter lets him go.
So the story leaves Slaughter positioned as a competent gangland figure of some sort, which is basically how Miller will play him going forward. The angle of him coming out of retirement, which seemed at first to be his hook, is quietly dropped. He’s simply another mob boss, though a particularly unflappable one. But there are a couple of reasons why he keeps coming back after this point. One is simply that he’s a recognisable gangland figure and the book could use one of them for plot purposes. Another is that his gang includes Turk – since Turk is going to stick around as a running joke, his boss has to play a role too.
By issue #168, this has become Slaughter’s established role. That issue is built around the debut of Elektra, and about a third of its page count is devoted to her origin flashback. The story sees petty thief Alarich Wallenquist hire Slaughter to protect him from Elektra. Slaughter comes across as calmly professional, and retains his trait of seeming wryly amused by the antics of more flamboyant characters. His goons are there to be beaten up by Daredevil and Elektra, but Slaughter himself is allowed to see through some of Elektra’s trickery. He emerges from that story with his dignity intact.
Ultimately, though, Slaughter is just a generic mob boss. Daredevil needs one of those, but once Miller takes over as writer, he’ll bring in the Kingpin. Once the Kingpin is established in that role, there’s less need for Slaughter. He makes some scattered further appearances an underboss trying to navigate life under the Kingpin, but ultimately the Kingpin proved to be the more compelling version.
Turk isn’t as much a comic relief goon in issues 159-161 as he becomes when Miller writes him. Under Miller, he becomes more stupid and more arrogant. Many saw Miller’s writing of Turk as racist, and Turk as something out of a minstrel show. It’s hard to think of Miller writing black male characters well. Keep in mind that around the same time Miller was writing Turk, other black male characters at Marvel included Robbie Robertson, James Rhodes and Luke Cage, so Miller’s writing was the exception.
I’m not sure…those are two important supporting characters and a superhero, rather than villains. While I agree that it is difficult to find a well-written Black male character by Miller, I think it’s easy to read Miller’s later politics into every bit of his work. The only reason I argue against that overt interpretation of Turk is that Miller would go on to create the strong character of Martha Washington after his time at Marvel. I rarely hear of people being outright racist against Black men but having respect for Black women.
As Miller’s politics changed, he even turned Martha Washington into Ayn Rand (not literally) which must show the level of sympathy Miller had for that character in the early-1990s.
Early Frank Miller writing was not above putting established characters in ridicule, often to contrast and emphasize his protagonists.
Turk is an example, but the best example in his first Daredevil run (and the second as well) is probably Foggy.
On hindsight, his absurd politic stances _do_ come across fairly early on – particularly on TDKR – but I don’t think he is as much a racist as he is a vigilantist.
There was still criticism of Reagan and the Cold War in DKR, but yeah, he has had a strong Constitutionalist/pro-guns/vigilantism streak almost from the beginning, it just wasn’t far Right, as it became after the first Martha Washington mini-series.
Not only is Miller’s Turk an overtly-racist depiction of a Black character, Miller wrote Luke Cage as a belligerent moron in a guest appearance. I bought a handful of Miller DD back issues around 1995. Even 18 years-old no-nothing me was surprised by how Turk and Cage were depicted.
The problem with Turk is more the absence of other black characters – there are plenty of bit part white characters who are presented as Turk’s peers and seem to be at least as useless as him. But the fact that the only recurring black character serves the role of getting punched in the face for comic relief is an issue.
In terms of the Luke Cage issue, I’m not familiar enough with how he was generally being written around that time to know where Miller’s depiction sits, though both he and Iron Fist are treated as well meaning nuisances in that issue.
This is the Mary Jo Duffy period of “Power Man/Iron Fist”.
During this time their book was not above a bit of silliness (Danny pretending to be a toreador during a fight in #74-75, a vampire mounting on Luke’s back and finding out that his fangs can’t penetrate Luke’s skin in #76, a silly Doctor Who parody in #79, a fangirl deciding that Luke’s favorite food must be Coke and Pizza in #80 without bothering to ask him), although it was mostly situation comedy.
@Paul: agreed that the lack of other Black characters in Miller’s DD makes Turk look worse. I remember the last issue of Miller’s DD also had Black characters- a traumatized little boy and his father, who DD beat up to stop him from taking the law into his own hands. Not great, even if not as bad as Turk.
The Black father in DD .1 #191 turns out to be guilty of embezzlement, and tries to shoot his blackmailer. He’s also portrayed as emotionally abusive to his son, fueling the son’s retreat into fantasies of violence.
The son in that story is treated sympathetically, and Miller’s run does have ADA Maxine Lavender, who is portrayed as generally competent.
But Black men tend to be written quite stereotypically overall.
“ I’m not familiar enough with how he was generally being written around that time to know where Miller’s depiction sits, though both he and Iron Fist are treated as well meaning nuisances in that issue.”
If only you knew someone who has read many (all) issues of PM/IF. 🙂
And of course, Eric Slaughter has no relation to:
– Vic Slaughter, the crook Michael Morbius turned into a fellow pseudo-vampire in 1993
or..
– Constantine Francis Slaughter IV, a mutant hunter from 1999’s Generation X #49.
Apparently in the Marvel Universe, “Slaughter” is a common surname, like “Marko” (Cain Marko, Flint Marko, Man Mountain Marko, etc.).
A lot of Marvel Universe writers were big fans of the band Slaughter, which (improbably enough for an ‘80s heavy metal band) was named after the lead singer’s, Mark Slaughter*, surname.
*Also no relation to Eric Slaughter.
“To Dare the Devil” as the title of a Daredevil story feels like an “Alright, five minutes to deadline, what we have missed” decision.
I’m surprised they don’t use that titling convention more often:
“To Doctor the Strange!”
“To Power the Man!”
“To Iron the Man!”
“To Iron the Fist!”
“To X the Men!”
“Too Fantastic, the Four!”
“To Hell, the Cat!”
Or maybe they do, and I just don’t know about it.
@AMRG:
Yeah, there are Slaughters everywhere in the Marvel Universe, and some of them are very out there indeed.
There is a Man-Thing Villain nicknamed “Professor Slaughter”.
There is even a previos Eric Slaughter, codenamed “War Yore”, who was a recurrent Shang-Chi villain back in 1977 and therefore predates the Daredevil villain. He was a brutal assassin who alternated between guises of historical figures and had identity issues.
Hawkeye once fought a “Slaughter-Man”.
One wonders if the word has some other meaning in the Marvel Universe.
Slaughter is a normal enough surname in the real world. Obviously not common, but well within the boundaries of plausible names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughter_(surname)
I forgot about Enos Slaughter, the man whose “mad dash” scored the winning run in game 7 of the 1946 World Series and robbed Ted Williams of his only opportunity to win it all. He was an unreconstructed racist, deliberately harassing and injuring Jackie Robinson only after his efforts to get his Cardinals team to boycott games against Robinson’s Dodgers.
Yes, there’s overlap between baseball nerds and comic book geeks. Me.
My understanding is that it is related to the once-common practice of creating surnames based on the family profession, with Slaughter being another variation of another Anglo surname Butcher.
“Professor Slaughter”, from Gerber’s Man-Thing, was given that name as a mocking nickname by students at the university. His real name was Hargood Wickham. He created the “Slaughter Room”, leading to the nickname.
@Oldie: Some of us are still upset about Enos Slaughter’s mad dash.
Let’s not forget Sgt Slaughter or the 1970s Jim Brown blaxploitation franchise Slaughter, whose Issac Hayes theme was used by QT in Inglorious Basterds.
A quick internet search tells me that he was never given a canon civilian identity, but I hope that the New Defenders character Manslaughter is actually Manuel Slaughter. Also with no relation to any of the previously mentioned Slaughters.
Manslaughter was also perhaps a mutant, so we could have seen him on Krakoa (and then get thrown in the Pit).
Miller has always been a big Eisner fan, maybe his Turk was inspired by Ebony White? We like to think that progress in representation is an upward curve over time, but Ted Danson did blackface in public in the early 90’s and Whoopi Goldberg has said she thought it was funny and not inappropriate, so what do I know