DAREDEVIL #202 (January 1984)
“Savages”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Penciller: William Johnson
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Colourist: Glynis Wein
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Mike Higgins

We’ve skipped issue #200, which is a Bullseye story, and issue #201, where the villains are one-off ordinary criminals. That brings us to issue #202, which was part of Assistant Editors’ Month – a stunt event where the assistant editors were supposedly running Marvel’s line for a month while all the regular editors were away at a convention. In practice this meant a lot of wacky gimmicks. Daredevil‘s contribution was a comedy back-up strip which doesn’t concern us – its only effect on the main story was to make it a few pages shorter.

Even so, Micah Synn is by far the most bizarre concept that we’re encountered since Steve Gerber’s Black Spectre arc back in the 1970s. He’s a major fixture of Denny O’Neil’s run – he appears nine times between issues #202 and #214 (and most of the issues where he doesn’t appear are fill-ins). And after that storyline, he vanishes entirely. He’s never been seen again.

Micah Synn is the chief of the Kinjorge tribe, “from Mount Suruba in eastern Africa”. Ah, eastern Africa. That really narrows it down. In 1775, a party of British explorers went to Africa hoping to start a trading post, but got stranded there and “reverted to savagery”. They’re the King George Tribe, if you hadn’t figured it out. They’ve been living in isolation ever since, apparently hiding from hostile neighbouring tribesmen, until being “discovered by a party of Belgian geologists” six months ago. The Kinjorge are entirely white, so it would appear that the eighteenth century traders had enough numbers (and enough women) to make a viable breeding population. Seems unlikely, but that’s the story.

Professor Horatio Piper is an anthropologist who’s brought Micah and his two wives to Manhattan, because that’s excellent anthropological practice when you’ve just discovered a hidden tribe. The Kinjorge are a media sensation, and so Piper introduces them to Matt and Foggy, who can represent their legal interests. Piper is black, by the way, which seems unlikely to be a random creative choice.

In his first appearance, Micah cuts a more or less dignified figure, speaking in (understandably) broken English, and politely accepting the lawyers’ help. Meanwhile, his wives hang around in the background mocking the disabled. Later, Micah tries to walk off with some food from a grocery without paying for it, on the grounds that he’s allowed to because he’s bigger than the shopkeeper. When the man takes issue with this reasoning, Micah chucks him through a window and gets himself arrested.

Professor Piper explains that this is merely a matter of cultural relativism. “These people come from a hard, savage land. For centuries, their very survival has depended on a certain ruthlessness… on taking what they need and exploiting the weakness of others. To the chief, what he did was not wrong. On the contrary.” Moments later, one of the wives gets run over by a car, to the apparent indifference (or even amusement) of Micah and his remaining wife.

At the hospital, the cop who arrested Micah offers his condolences, and sensitively acknowledges the challenges of cultural acclimatisation. Micah does not accept the apology, and decides to avenge himself for his arrest by chucking the cop through another window – this time on the tenth floor. Daredevil comes to the rescue, and fights Micah, but only manages to beat him by luring him into electrocuting himself. Micah is duly arrested again, with Daredevil musing that “He may be the most dangerous man I’ve ever met.”

To figure out what the hell O’Neil was trying to do with this bizarre character, we have to look at the rest of the storyline. There are a number of themes going on. For a start, Micah is apparently the descendent of an aristocrat and the potential claimant to a peerage or something. Coming to the story today, a natural first reaction is that the high concept is to add a race swap angle to a dodgy racial stereotype about savage tribesmen. But in fact, the core idea seems to be to satirise Tarzan.

As originally conceived, Tarzan was a British aristocrat whose parents were stranded in West Africa and killed, leaving him to be raised by apes. His creator Edgar Rice Burroughs later wrote that “I was mainly interested in playing with the idea of a contest between heredity and environment”, and that Tarzan was “an infant child of a race strongly marked by hereditary characteristics of the finer and nobler sort”. So Tarzan is a hero because, even without exposure to his parents’ culture, he’s just innately better. Because of his race.

Now, to be fair, this was in 1912, and the original Tarzan stories also have a romantic primitivist streak which suggests that his heroism was fully brought out precisely because he didn’t grow up in English culture. When he has the chance to go back, he refuses. But Tarzan is still a literal noble savage who combines the best of both worlds; he does Africa better than the Africans.

As we’ll see in coming instalments, O’Neil is not a big fan of the English. The basic joke of the Micah Synn arc is that the Americans – and especially the chattering classes like Foggy and his wife – persist in attributing the Kinjorge’s behavour to cultural differences, and in dealing with them as if they were wise, noble savages, when in fact they are unremittingly awful people. Not just Micah, all of them. The entire culture is organised on the principle of being entitled assholes. No matter how often we’re told that it’s a function of their environment, I think the point is meant to be simply that this is just the distilled essence of Englishness. Micah doesn’t march around seizing stuff with a sense of entitlement because he’s a savage. He does it because he’s a colonist.

That seems to be the idea, anyway. I don’t think it quite works. The problem with this reading is that the Kinjorge still come with a lot of off-the-shelf savage tribe tropes that can’t be unique to their culture, since we recognise them from other stories. As such, those tropes do play into the idea that Africans are Just Like That. But, with a degree of charity, I’m willing to accept that this is a muddled execution of what was basically conceived as an inverted Tarzan story.

The sexual politics of the story are much harder to defend. Micah is apparently very sexy, which is fine. But even his first appearance has two random female passers-by exchanging the following dialogue: “I don’t usually go for the brute type… but for him I’d make an exception.” “He can brutalise me any old time he wants.”

A major part of Micah Synn’s storyline involves Foggy’s wife Debbie Nelson trying to get shot of her boring husband and hook up with the sexy chief instead. This ultimately leads to her winding up as a domestic slave in Micah’s service and learning the error of her ways via ritual humiliation.

Denny O’Neil hates Debbie Nelson. I’ve never seen an incoming writer hate a supporting character the way Denny O’Neil hates Debbie Nelson. She wasn’t even being used heavily in the book before his run. He brought her back specifically to wreck her.

I can understand going for the henpecked husband angle with Foggy. At this point he was still regularly serving as comic relief, even if he increasingly got to complain that he was doing all the work to keep the business afloat while Matt kept letting him down. But O’Neil writes Debbie as an intolerable harridan, detested by every other character aside from Foggy himself. I genuinely had to check whether O’Neil was going through a bitter divorce at the time. Apparently not, but there’s real “she’s turned the weans against us” energy in this storyline.

The other strand to Micah Synn’s storyline is his steady adjustment to New York. The basic idea is that he starts off as a character who’s physically imposing and dangerous, but who can still be defeated by taking advantage of his lack of understanding of his new environment. Over the following chapters, he swiftly picks up that understanding, and learns how to manipulate the media, the courts and Matt’s own cultural values, making him increasingly dangerous. But, finding himself in a situation of unprecedented abundance, he also succumbs to temptation and starts to lose his physical edge. Eventually, he gets beaten up by some homeless people while trying to throw his weight around and winds up having to ask Daredevil to save him. And that’s the end of that – we never see him again.

In theory you could do more with Micah. The idea of an outsider who views New York as an outsider and exploits its cultural weak spots with psychopathic ruthlessness is really quite good. You could develop him in that way, and focus on him gaming the system because he sees it differently from everyone else. He might have been better suited as a dark-mirror villain for Ka-Zar.

But it’s understandable that nobody wanted to come back to Micah Synn after O’Neil’s story was finished. Not only does he get unceremoniously defanged in his final appearance, but he’s tied to a very awkward back story that would only get more awkward over time.