Daredevil Villains #69: The Cossack
DAREDEVIL #217 (April 1985)
“The Sight Stealer”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Artist: David Mazzuchelli
Colourist: George Roussos
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio
We’ve jumped forward a year since the last entry, so let’s get up to speed.
Issues #206 and #210-214 are the remainder of the Micah Synn storyline. Issue #207 is HYDRA. Issues #208-209 are a fill-in story by guest writers Harlan Ellison and Arthur Byron Cover, and they involve robot assassins sent by the Death-Stalker’s mother. I’m not giving her an entry, because she’s barely in the story. Issue #215 sees Daredevil team up (kind of) with the Two-Gun Kid, Marvel’s western hero who was also a lawyer; Two-Gun’s segments are told in flashback, with Daredevil tying up the loose ends in the present day. The villains are just your standard issue corrupt businessmen, though. And issue #216 was the second Gael story.
William Johnson left as penciller after issue #207. His replacement is David Mazzuchelli, who’ll be with us through to issue #233. This is Mazzuchelli’s first major assignment for Marvel after a few fill-ins, and it’s the only lengthy run he’ll do on a superhero title in his career. Oh, and the book has changed editors once again: as of issue #212, it falls under Ralph Macchio’s office.
In the previous issue, Daredevil learned that Glorianna O’Breen was working with the IRA. As this story begins, Glorianna is still making speeches about how the IRA are really great guys, and Daredevil is mainly preoccupied with catching the Gael, who is still on the loose. All this has at least a foot in the camp of realism.
But, with the Gael arc still continuing in the background, the story takes a bizarre left turn back into the Silver Age. People across Manhattan are struck blind, including the Black Widow. The man responsible is the Cossack, a mad scientist type in a white jacket with an odd-looking contraption on his head. (It turns out to be a device to shield him from his own weapon.) The Cossack tries to kill the Black Widow by chucking her through the window of her apartment – Denny O’Neil did like a good defenestration – but naturally Daredevil swings by to rescue her.
The Widow explains that the Cossack is another former Russian intelligence agent, who betrayed the Kremlin and “turned freelance”. He’s managed to get his hands on a weapon that makes everyone in the area blind. This weapon, we’re told, was created by the famous East German defector Dr Hermann Schreck, but that doesn’t matter at all. It’s just the story’s way of telling us not to worry about where the blindness ray came from. For some reason, the Cossack was trying to enlist the Black Widow as an ally, so presumably the idea is that after he belatedly figured out that she was a hero now, he wanted to kill her to cover his tracks.
Much of the issue focusses on the Widow struggling to adjust to blindness. She asks Daredevil if he can teach her how to fight without her sight, but he isn’t sure; Stick isn’t around any more, and Daredevil isn’t confident that he can pass on what he learned.
Back at the notional A-plot, the Cossack threatens to blind even more people unless New York City gives him fifteen million dollars worth of gems. If they refuse, he says, then “death will rain down on foolish New York tonight”. The Widow is confident that he’ll deliver on the threat – in another tell-don’t-show sequence, she explains that while the Cossack is basically rational, he’s likely to take offence if his demands are rebuffed.
Curiously, none of this motivates Daredevil to do anything about the Cossack – instead, he decides that the police will probably sort it all out, and tries to get back to the Glorianna O’Breen storyline. But nothing turns on this, because as it happens, both Glorianna and the Cossack are heading to the airport. And so is the Gael, because he’s tailing Glorianna.
Daredevil shows up at the airport just as the Cossack strikes everyone blind, including Glorianna and the Gael. You know the drill from here: Daredevil is blind already, so he’s completely unaffected and has no difficulty in taking out both the Cossack and the Gael. Everyone is cured. And the story ends with the Black Widow’s sight returning, and her offering a testimonial that Glorianna is really great.
This is hardly the first time we’ve seen a Daredevil villain whose main weapon is completely ineffective against a blind person. The Masked Marauder had the same issue. From one angle, it’s an odd choice, since it neuters the villain from the outset. I think it’s an attempt to apply to Daredevil the old concept of a character whose disability turns out to be, situationally, an advantage after all. But the trope doesn’t really work for Daredevil, because his powers already cancel out his blindness for most purposes. There are still meaningful limits, and they do come up from time to time – he can’t see colour, he can’t read from a distance or see what’s on a TV screen, his radar can’t look through glass – but they aren’t enough to support this kind of story.
It’s an odd issue. The Gael story feels like it wants to be a two-parter, and it kind of is, but its second issue gets shouldered into B-plot status by the Cossack. The new villain’s story has nothing whatsoever to do with the Gael, and clashes badly with him in terms of tone. The Gael is a more or less realistic villain, starting with a “ripped from the headlines” IRA link (an awkward fit with the Marvel Universe at the best of times), and developing into a more general serial killer. The Cossack says things like “Test is success! Machine works! Now we attach to big transmitter and make many crashes.”
Beyond the accent, he’s barely a character; he’s simply a delivery vehicle for the blindness ray. He’s not a comedic figure, exactly; he’s certainly presented as a threat to New York. But he’s certainly painted in very broad strokes. This doesn’t play to David Mazzuchelli’s strengths, and his character design is all a bit understated; the guy looks more like a scientist villain than a spy, even though he didn’t design the machine, which makes me wonder whether there were crossed wires here.
Perhaps there were plans to do more with the Cossack, having established him as a rival from the Black Widow’s world. If so, they come to nothing, as he never appears again. It’s hardly surprising, as he’s entirely out of place in mid-80s Daredevil. Some version of this character might have worked in the San Francisco era, when the Widow was a full-fledged co-star. By 1985, he’s an incongruous throwback.
I think that Death-Stalker’s mother should count as a villain. Yes, she’s a posthumous character and she only appears in a recording on two pages but she drives the plot.
The Death-Stalker story, by the way, features ANOTHER of the boys who used to bully Matt.
The Cossack’s dialogue makes me think of the KGBeast. He was introduced by Jim Starlin while Denny O’Neil was editing Batman. In his original appearances by Starlin he spoke English well. But in his later appearances, written by Chuck Dixon but still while Denny O’Neil was editor, he would say things like “To be stopping autobus, “To be burning Gotham” and “All of Gotham is being dead”. As a result, the KGBeast turned into a joke. I always thought it was Dixon’s writing but now I’m wondering if Denny had a bigger influence on how the KGBeast was written after Starlin left.
I’d still very strongly suspect it was Dixon’s writing. It’s not as if O’Neil is the lone perpetrator of this offence in comic books. I wouldn’t give much credit to Dixon. It’s definitely something that I’d associate with his style of writing.
I agree that the Harlan Ellison issue should be covered, but just because it’s Ellison. It was a better story than what we’ve seen from O’Neil so far on DD, although I’d argue that O’Neil’s run would soon top the Ellison story.
It’s a shame that the majority of the best issues from this period of DD’s publication are going to be skipped due to featuring repeat villains (will the Vulture issue even be included, since he’s a Spider-Man foe?). I’d rank the next issue, with the humanization of the Jester, as O’Neil’s best work on the title, but the Mazzuchelli art really seems to have motivated O’Neil, as his writing starts to reach towards the level of his Batman or Question runs after this story.
So not only does he strike people blind, he blinds another hero for Daredevil to babysit, just like the Masked Marauder story from PP:TSSM 25-28. How many times does this happen? 🙂
That cover is fire. If I wasn’t five years old at the time I would have snatched this issue up just for that.
That’s a Barry Windsor-Smith cover, isn’t it? I can tell from the beautiful line work and the skeletal faces.
Nice cover overall, even if DD’s left hand looks like it is missing a couple of fingers.
Denny’s xenophobia tour continues,
I had to look up who created the KGBeast (stalin and aparo) and NVKDemon (Marv and Aparo).
he he…you said Stalin created the KGBeast. We are protecting kayfabe, but who was Aparo in the USSR…? That name doesn’t sound Slavic. heh
I forgot that Wolfman created the NKVDemon. I was thinking that Wolfman wrote the KGBeast at some point.
Yes, definitely a BWS cover. He colored it, too, if I’m not mistaken. I’m such a sucker for this period of his work, mainly from his special Uncanny issues with Claremont. I can also recommend Conan Saga from around this time. So pretty.
I’m sure someone somewhere has already made this joke, but with the existence of KGBeast, I wish we had gotten CIAntagonist and FBInvader.
Barry Windsor Smith’s artwork is undeniably gorgeous, though admittedly, I’ve never been too keen on the way he draws faces. They look somewhat plastic and lifeless to me. This cover, for example. Absolutely beautiful, but it looks as though Daredevil is diving down to catch a Black Widow mannequin that just fell out of a window.
Also, this is my least favorite Daredevil logo. They dropped it and went back to the classic logo when Miller came back for Born Again, I think.
It’s not that I think it’s an ugly logo. It just doesn’t seem to suit the character for some reason. Hard to put my finger on it. I look at it and it looks to me like it should be the logo for an Old West series like Rawhide Kid or something.
It’s a very 80s logo. Looks like something you’d see on a show like The Equalizer around that time.
So, out of curiosity, I checked online to see how long this logo lasted. It made its first appearance on the cover of Daredevil 215 and lasted through until issue 226. Just a year, then.
Funnily enough, the story in issue 215 (the logo’s first appearance) featured the Two-Gun Kid. I guess that could be why I associate the logo with the Old West.
Daredevil is a very dynamic character, but this logo has no sense of motion. It looks like a pile of bricks.
Rightfully esteemed though he may be, I’ve always found Denny O’Neil a very uneven writer in terms of quality on an issue-by-issue basis.
He has a tendency to inject camp at rather odd times, as in this issue.
@Oldie – Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. The classic logo looks like it’s going somewhere. This logo doesn’t want to budge. It looks a bit like a theater marquee sign, actually.
The logo looks kind of like it’s the word “Daredevil” and a yellow bar with “The Man Without Fear” were a on cardboard cutout that you have to fold to stand up. The viewer can somehow see the front and the bottom at the same time. It doesn’t make sense visually.
That BWS cover is gorgeous. Denny O’Neil has never been a consistent writer, but he did better with street-level characters. Some of his best work was when he had Batman get involved in international capers, maybe he thought he could do the same thing with DD? Or the reverse (bringing international criminals to New York)? Unfortunately, it wasn’t the ‘70s anymore and he didn’t have Neal Adams as a collaborator.
I remember reading in a much more recent (21st c.) issue a story in which a laughing villain reveals that he has the amazing power to strike people blind. I think he’s facing Spider-Man and DD; Spider-Man, aware of the situation, quips something to the effect that this isn’t the bad guy’s day. DD then settles the villain’s hash off-panel.
As a short piece (it’s all foggy but the whole episode might taken up a page), I thought it was funny. I’m surprised to learn writers have tried to do more with it.
But I think I’ll look up this DD/Two Gun Kid story. That sounds rather fun.
The Widow explains that the Cossack is another former Russian intelligence agent, who betrayed the Kremlin and “turned freelance”.
Does she also explain that this renegade status is why he’s a villain, while active Russian intelligence agents are a bunch of great guys really?
At this point in 1985, are the Soviet Super Soldiers babyfaces, heels or tweezers? I presume the latter of the three.
Glori doesn’t know that DD and Matt are the same person at this point in the continuity
In this issue, Daredevil (in costume) mentions that he is acquainted with a fellow named “Stick.”
In issue 211, Matt Murdock (out of costume) told Glori that he once had a mentor/teacher named “Stick.”
Conclusion: When it comes to keeping his identity secret, Matt Murdock gives zero f*cks.