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.