DAREDEVIL #203 (February 1984)
“Trumps!”
Writer: Steven Grant
Penciler: Geof Isherwood
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Letterer: Jim Noavk
Colourist: George Roussos
Editor: Dennis O’Neil

Daredevil went into 1984 with regular penciller William Johnson struggling to keep up a monthly schedule. Having started his run on issue #197, he managed to do six consecutive issues. But this is where we hit our first fill-in, evidently commissioned back when Denny O’Neil was still the editor. Johnson only manages two further issues – #205 and #207 – before leaving the book.

Steven Grant had been writing for Marvel on and off since 1979, but hadn’t yet had a regular run on a series, unless you count seven issues of Marvel Team-Up. We’re still a couple of years away from him writing the first Punisher miniseries. Penciller Geof Isherwood was relatively new to Marvel: prior to this, he’d done an anthology story for Bizarre Adventures #33, and a fill-in issue of Power Man & Iron Fist (also written by Grant). In the same month as this, another Grant/Isherwood fill-in story appeared in G.I. Joe. You get the idea.

Their contribution to Daredevil is about what you’d expect given their position on the pecking order. It looks fine, it has a few good set pieces and there’s a reasonably solid story hook.

Matt Murdock finds himself defending Stymie Schmidt, one of the neighbourhood kids who bullied him as a teenager. Stymie is blatantly guilty, but Matt mounts the sort of aggressive defence that’ll just land him with an increased sentence when he’s inevitably convicted. Foggy realises that Matt is sabotaging Stymie, and persuades him to pass the case to someone more neutral. That’s basically the story. It’s left ambiguous whether Matt is consciously sabotaging Stymie or whether he’s convinced himself that he’s doing the right thing, but either way it doesn’t reflect brilliantly on Matt.

Still, as a fill-in there’s nothing wrong with this idea. There’s an interesting theme, the art is decently polished, and the emotional angle is sold quite effectively.

The problem comes when Grant tries to shoehorn a villain into the story. That’s the Trump, and ostensibly he’s this issue’s villain. He’s even a proper supervillain with costume and mask, something that we’ve been drifting away from for a while in favour of organised criminals, ninjas, masterminds and assorted weirdos. Daredevil hadn’t debuted an old-style costumed supervillain since the 1970s.

But the story is about Matt and Stymie, so the Trump has the disadvantage of being the B-plot in his own debut. The link between the two plot threads is that Stymie was working for the Trump, and so the Trump wants to kill him to stop him talking. But that’s just plot mechanics. The heart of the story is Matt’s conflicted feelings about his childhood tormentor, and the Trump has nothing to do with that at all.

The Trump’s gimmick is that he’s a stage magician, who uses his sleight of hand and illusion techniques to keep opponents off balance. That might be a viable idea, but you never get the sense that Grant or Isherwood believe in it. His costume is completely generic, and entirely fails to tie in to the gimmick. He’s not using illusion to fake superpowers as some sort of misdirection, he’s just a stage magician in a costume. Grant finds a couple of reasonable ways to use the gimmick – producing a handgun out of nowhere by sleight of hand, or scattering playing cards as a distraction – but it really is just gimmickry, with no real connection to the wider story.

Besides, if that’s the Trump’s gimmick, then you might expect him to be a trickster villain. And that sort of character needs to be a lot more imaginative. Aside from silencing Stymie, the Trump’s main goal in this story is to steal some guns. Apparently they’re hard to come by in New York. Who knew? The guns are just a macguffin, of course, but they contribute to making the Trump feel terribly mundane. He needs to be pulling off elaborate and creative heists . Instead, he’s loading some guns into the back of a truck, and telling us that “These little babies will revolutionise crime.” How? They’re just ordinary guns! And besides, the Trump is stealing them from the mob. So even if you were somehow willing to buy that they’re really special guns, they’re already in criminal hands. All the Trump is doing is moving the guns from one criminal to another.

Another problem is that it’s been less than a year since issue #193, another fill-in which also features a villain with a stage magic gimmick. And that issue is a lot better. Willow isn’t shoehorned into being a conventional supervillain but simply has a criminal scheme worked around her stage act. Her magic is pitched at a slightly exaggerated level that works for the Marvel Universe. And she has a convoluted, inventive plan to outwit everyone. The Trump is just a heist guy who knows some prestidigitation.

And what does “the Trump” have to do with this gimmick, anyway? We’re told that it was his nickname as the two-time prison bridge champion, but that seems like a hangover from a different concept – some sort of card shark character. And… bridge? I’ll grant you it’s more cerebral than poker, but it doesn’t score well on the intimidation factor. Perhaps he’d have been more at home in Murder, She Wrote.

Understandably, the Trump never appeared in Daredevil again. He did appear in some other comics, where he’s basically used as a bozo. He has a handful of cameos in early 90s Captain America as a Z-list joke villain, and made one further appearance in 2009’s Iron Man & The Armor Wars #1, where he gets thrashed by Iron Man in the first three pages. Some of these stories lean into the goofiness of the stage magic angle rather more effectively than this story does, presenting him as more of a show-off and inveterate performer. But essentially he’s only been brought back as a mockable failed character.

Frankly, even this scattering of appearances is more than he deserved. The underlying concept of a villain using stage magic isn’t awful; you can make him a subtler Mysterio. But the execution is bland and half-formed, the costume is just misconceived, and anyone wanting to do the idea properly would have been well advised just to start again from scratch.