Daredevil Villains #67: Crossbow
DAREDEVIL #204 (March 1984)
“Vengeance of the Victim!”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Penciller: Luke McDonnell
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Colourist: Bob Sharen
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Bob Budiansky
Denny O’Neil doesn’t like the English, part two.
William Johnson was still notionally the regular artist at this point, but by all accounts he struggled badly with deadlines. Issue #203 was an inventory story. This issue returns to the regular storyline, but with a fill-in artist. Luke McDonnell was the regular artist on Iron Man at this point, but over the course of the 1984 cover dates he somehow found time to pencil not only this issue, but also the back-up strip in issue #202 and the whole of Further Adventures of Indiana Jones #20. He did skip one issue of Iron Man, to be fair, but then again he also drew that year’s annual. He was seriously fast.
Daredevil #204 doesn’t even look like a rush job; the opening splash page on the streets of New York is full of properly designed individual bystanders and journalists. Regular inker Danny Bulanadi must have helped, but it’s still remarkable.
This is the second part of the Micah Synn storyline that began in issue #202. Crossbow is a hitman, who’s been hired by Lord Barrington Synn to kill Micah. Barrington is a stereotypical simpering aristocrat, who wants Micah dead “before anyone learns that he and I are of the same ancestry”. Apparently, Micah is a brutal, savage heathen and “a blot on the Synn honour”. Later on, there will be mention of Matt and Foggy pursuing some sort of claim that Micah might have on the Synn estate, but at this point Barrington seems simply to regard Micah as a family embarrassment. Of course, Micah really is awful, but Barrington doesn’t know about any of that. His objection appears to be simply that the man has gone a bit African.
Crossbow himself is an Englishman dressed in Robin Hood gear. In fact, he looks a lot like Green Arrow. Suspiciously like Green Arrow, in fact. As you might expect, he carries a crossbow. He says things like “This scumscullion of a city, it’d throw any laddybuck off his aim” and “Fancy foreign kinda fightin’… not fair to a workin’ man.”
Since he’s a secondary villain designed to keep Daredevil busy while the Micah Synn plotline builds, Crossbow doesn’t really get that much to do in his debut issue. Micah keeps the spotlight. But we do learn that even though Crossbow is being paid £50,000 for this job (about £200,000 in today’s money), he’d do it on principle. Crossbow claims that he doesn’t like the way the world has changed, and “I put meself at hire to anyone who wants to make things proper again”. So the idea is apparently that he’s some sort of working class English reactionary working as a hired gun for the reactionary establishment.
There’s potentially something in that concept, but in practice it has nothing to do with the plot. It’s just a bit of colour to liven up his scenes, while Daredevil and Micah get on with the main story. Crossbow’s function in the plot is to force Daredevil into a position where he has to save Micah, and then to put up a token fight against Daredevil before being defeated. And that’s what he does.
Crossbow shows up twice more in O’Neil’s run, and hasn’t appeared again since. In issue #210, Micah breaks Crossbow out of jail and orders him to kill Daredevil. Crossbow plays along in order to get revenge on Daredevil, but still plans to kill Micah anyway, just on principle. In practice, Daredevil escapes, and Crossbow simply continues as Micah’s henchman. This feels as if it was meant to head somewhere, but it doesn’t. Micah’s story ends in issue #214, without Crossbow being involved.
His third and final appearance is in issue #216, when he shows up in a subplot and has another go at killing Daredevil, with predictable results. This gives Daredevil the opportunity to interrogate Crossbow about how he was planning to get out of the country after killing Micah. That information is important to the main story, because Crossbow responds by telling Daredevil about to “the Old Woman of Beare”, who was apparently supposed to help him leave the country. This is, to put it mildly, extremely confused. Crossbow is an English reactionary; the Old Woman of Beare is working for the IRA. We’ll get to the IRA storyline next time, but the problem here ought to be fairly obvious.
Crossbow is weirdly positioned in O’Neil’s stories. He’s never the focus of anything, and his motivations are frankly bizarre. Much like his employer Barrington Synn, Crossbow is a reflection of O’Neil’s bizarrely simplistic grasp of England far more than he’s an actual functioning character. He’s not explicitly positioned as a comedy character, but he’s never the focus of attention, and his reactionary politics seem to want to turn the clock back to the middle ages, rather than the Victorians. This doesn’t really map on to anything in the real world.
You might expect Crossbow to fit into the well established tradition of archer characters, such as Hawkeye and, well, Green Arrow. O’Neil, of course, had written Green Arrow in the past. To some extent Crossbow is a parody of that character. Normally, archer characters are presented as having a dzzling mastery of a unique weapon. And Crossbow is very good with his weapon – he can break a rope with a single shot fired from a good distance away, and the story is perfectly clear that crossbows are lethal. But we’re also told, very directly, that he’d be an awful lot more dangerous if he’d just use a gun. His choice of weapon is treated as something that hobbles him, akin to the Riddler obsessively leaving clues for Batman.
This leaves Crossbow in a weird position – not quite a credible threat, not quite a comedy character. He doesn’t really say anything worthwile about England, and he doesn’t really say anything worthwhile about Green Arrow either. As a secondary villain designed principally to stop Daredevil from resolving more important plots too quickly, he serves his function well enough. But you can see why nobody, not even his creator, ever felt like building a story around him.
Crowssbow’s real name is Jason Praed, which is apparently a combination of actors Jason Connery and Michael Praed, both of whom played Robin Hood in the 1984 British television series “Robin of Sherwood”.
Hmm. I don’t know how that could be possible, though. That’s what it says on Crossbow’s wiki entry, but this comic came out in ’83. The Robert of Sherwood show didn’t start airing until 1984 and Jason Connery didn’t appear in the series until 1986.
I would bet thw name was a later reveal from the Handbooks approved by editorial in the 2000s.
Yeah, that’s gotta be it.
Anyway, maybe Crossbow could make a comeback as a member of a team of cross-themed villains. So, you’d have Crossbow, Crossbones, Crossfire, and… um.. I can’t think of any others. Might have to invent a couple of more. Perhaps a maniacal embroiderer? Cross-Stitch.
Luke McDonnell would go on to pencil Suicide Squad, and his run introduces William Hell: A reactionary American supervillain who uses a crossbow.
Maybe McDonnell just likes drawing Crossbows?
Re – Moo
I think it’s a good idea… As long as we can get ChrisCross to draw it
@Moo- Yeah, the other reason nobody’s gone back to Crossbow is that Crossbones has already filled the “villain with a crossbow and “Cross” in his name” niche in the Marvel Universe. (It’s a VERY specific niche.)
@Moo – There’s Iron Cross, but he’s got it as the second syllable. Anyway, the story is they all get sent to the Crossroads Dimension, and from there to a universe where everyone has their own genre, but are all linked by these things called Sigils. It’s the Cross-Time Crossroads CrossGen Caper!
Okay, fine. Crossbow is out because of Crossbones but we have Iron Cross now, and a crossover with CrossGen with ChrisCross doing the artwork and maybe a soundtrack for the TV show and/or films with songs performed by Kriss Kross and Christopher Cross.
Crosses on Infinite Earths!
Okay. Time for bed, Moo.
That cover looks like Green Arrow is about to shoot Oliver Queen. Funny.
I’m not sure Green Arrow actually had the cowl added to his costume until Mike Grell retooled him a couple of years later in The Longbow Hunters. I’m no GA expert, though, so I could be wrong.
Finally, I was a huge fan of Luke McDonnell’s work in the ’80s. He would go on to end the original Justice League of America (Detroit version) and revive the Suicide Squad with John Ostrander. His work got more stylized and chunkier over time, which I really liked.
Was he given a real name when he first appeared? Could have happened later.
Maybe Crossbow was a devout follower of JRR Tolkien’s and loved the Lord of the Rings so much that it was the influence on his politics.
It’s remarkable how well the Denny O’Neil run holds up, given the quality of villains in it. Then again, Daredevil comics do tend to be at their best when Matt is the heel of his own story.
Crossbow isn’t even a particularly good shot, I don’t think he lands a single hit in any of his appearances. You’d think someone would have brought him back to be killed by Bullseye at some point.
It’s similar to O’Neil’s run on Iron Man, although I’d say to a lesser degree. Outside of Obadiah Stane, the villains were certainly the least interesting aspect to O’Neil’s Iron Man, yet his Iron Man is arguably the strongest work on the Iron Man comic.
Guess you could always put him with the stable of “throwing” Marvel B and C level villains.
So there’s Crossbones, Crossbow, and Crossfire.
There’s also Cross, a one-shot Moon Knight villain.
Cross-Wordo, a one-shot evil robot from Marvel’s Fun and Games Magazine.
Lucas Cross, vampire.
Elijah Cross, a mutant who died but was presumably resurrected on Krakoa.
Barnabus Cross, sinister shark-studying scientist.
For extra fun, there’s also Crossbow, an alternate future cyborg version of Blade.
And let’s PLEASE forget the CROSSING storyline.
When asked how they stay in such good shape, they answer “CrossFit.”
Ahhh!
Oh, what a terrible dream. I was kidnapped by a crap villain named Crossword who said to me, “You are my seven-letter word for a prisoner. Begins with the letter C. What are you?” and I panicked and said “Hostage?” and he got really mad and exclaimed, “I said begins with the letter C fool!” and then he stabbed me repeatedly with a pencil while I screamed “Captive! Captive!”
@Thom – You’re remembering right. Green Arrow’s cowl debuted in The Longbow Hunters. He was always wearing that silly cap up until then.
Has everyone really forgotten to mention Darren Cross of Cross Technologies (Scott Lang’s arch-nemesis) who has obviously been funding this entire conglomeration of Cross-over villains?
Is this guy an intentional Green Arrow stand in, or just a case where Any time you try to refit Robin Hood into a superhero, they’re pretty much going to look like Green Arrow?
Well, probably intentional because the author is Denny O’Neil who was Green Arrow’s most famous embellisher. Although, as pointed out, Oliver Queen wouldn’t take up this costume until the Longbow Hunters. There are points in the story which point to O’Neil playing with the GA formula: a working class guy who takes the side of the aristocracy as opposed to a wealthy gadabout who learns to take up the cause of the downtrodden…although this guy being British once again raises the question as to intentional inversion of GA versus playing with the Robin Hood formula.
Perhaps it’s obvious, but a reactionary pro-establishment Robin Hood is the obverse of Green Arrow’s anti-establishment revolutionary.