Daredevil Villains #71: Sunturion II
DAREDEVIL #224 (November 1985)
“Abe”
Writer: Jim Owsley
Pencillers: Daniel Jurgens & Geoff Isherwood
Inkers: Mel Candido & Bruce Patterson
Letterer: Janice Chiang
Colourist: Ken Feduniewicz
Editor: Ralph Macchio
We’re only two issues away from the end of Denny O’Neil’s run, but there’s still time to squeeze in one more fill-in. It’s a weird story, and not in a good way.
Daredevil is investigating Continental Trucking, a transport firm which is secretly a front for the mob. He fights his way into their warehouse, planning to interrupt a drug deal. But moments before he reaches the real bad guys, someone else gets to them first, incinerates them all, and disappears. Naturally enough, Daredevil turns his attention to this vigilante killer.
The one survivor of the massacre is the building’s janitor, Abe. Abe is an old blind man who has been working at Continental since the days when it was a legitimate business. He was kept on as janitor after he lost his sight, but he doesn’t know anything much about the mob – in fact, he assumes that he was kept around precisely because he wouldn’t be able to identify anyone.
The killer was presumably planning to steal the briefcase of money from the drug deal, but by mistake he’s run off with Abe’s satchel instead. Inside that bag is a locket which is Abe’s last keepsake from his late wife. So of course Daredevil has to get it back for him.
Daredevil follows the trail to Continental’s head office, and confronts the CEO, Richard Knox. Knox explains that the killer is Mike Stone, a former truck driver who was involved in the mob’s drug dealing, but got booted out after he started his own side deals that endangered the whole operation. This is where it gets a bit odd, at least for a Daredevil story. While fishing on the Florida coast, Stone has stumbled upon a yellow and orange costume in the water. When he put it on, it gave him superpowers. Now he can fire energy beams, teleport anywhere in the world, and “tune into any sound frequency on earth”. Stone wants revenge on the mob for expelling him.
Knox’s plan is to get Daredevil to save him from Stone, and then cover the whole thing up by getting his men to gun Daredevil down afterwards. As a plan, this doesn’t make an awful lot of sense – it requires Knox to believe both that Daredevil is so good that he can beat a villain who’s plainly out of his league, and that this is going to be the day when he finally catches a stray bullet from some random henchthugs – but that’s the plan.
Stone duly shows up, and Daredevil does indeed fight him. As you’d expect, it’s a power versus skill fight, with Stone having lots of confidence and a ton of power, but no real idea of how to use it. Daredevil calls him “slow, stupid and amateurish”. Eventually Daredevil realises that the suit has converted Stone into pure energy – “I’m no scientist, but I’d say this suit is some kind of matter transformer” – and opens the visor, which results in Stone dispersing and the suit falling to the ground. So, uh, Daredevil kills the bad guy, to all intents and purposes.
So Daredevil sends Knox to jail – the whole thing about killing Daredevil after he’s won the fight is just forgotten about. And finally, Daredevil takes Abe’s bag back to him, complete with the locket. The ironic twist is that the locket doesn’t actually have a picture of Abe’s wife in it at all, but neither he nor Daredevil knows that.
Hold on, though. When did Daredevil recover the bag? Did Stone bring it with him when he attacked Knox? Well, no, he didn’t. In fact, Daredevil recovers it… uh… um… well, the story doesn’t actually explain how he recovers it. I guess we have to take it that he tracks down Stone’s apartment or something, but it would have been nice if the story had said. Recovering the locket is meant to be the emotional heart of the issue, after all.
Come to think of it, when Daredevil arrives back at the diner to return Abe’s bag, there’s a hole in his costume where the “DD” logo has been torn out. That sure seems like it was scripted to be symbolic, but it simply didn’t happen in the fight with Stone – his costume is intact at the end. And that’s never explained either. There are two different art teams credited for this story, which seems like it might be significant here.
You may have gathered by now that this story is a mess. Here’s how the issue was solicited:
While Dashing Denny O’Neil and Dynamo David Mazzuichelli take a well-earned break, writer Jim Owsley, penciler Dan Jurgens and inker Mel Candido step in to produce “Abe”, a gripping tale of drugs and power. The only man who has seen the dealers destroying the city and can help Daredevil is poor, a janitor – and blind!
So only one of the two art teams is mentioned, and Stone doesn’t come up at all. The solicitation focusses on Abe, the “only man who … can help Daredevil”, who appears in the actual story for four pages and doesn’t really help Daredevil at all. Abe’s story, such as it is, is almost completely detached from Stone’s – if you wanted to force it, you could argue for some sort of parallel between Abe’s dignified acceptance of his position and Stone’s self-destructive railing against it, but that’s a stretch. It feels more like the issue underwent late changes that reduced Abe’s plot to a shadow of whatever had originally been intended.
Equally strange is that Stone is identified on the cover as “Sunturion”, but that name never appears in the story. In fact, neither the story nor the letters page offers any explanation at all for where Stone’s armour came from. As far as this issue is concerned, Stone’s origin story is simply that he yanked a super-powered costume out of the sea while fishing, as if it was an old boot or a discarded shopping trolley.
The original Sunturion was a character from Iron Man #143-144 (1980), by David Michelinie, John Romita Jr and Bob Layton. That version of Sunturion is Arthur Dearborn, a Roxxon scientist who’s created an orbital solar power station in orbit. Dearborn agrees to be turned into an energy being so that he can run the station singlehandedly and make it economically viable. Dearborn’s deal is basically that he’s a good man with a tunnel-vision focus on solving the energy crisis. The station is a tiny bit prone to accidentally killing people, because there wouldn’t be a story if it just worked. But when Roxxon tries to shut the station down and it gets knocked out of orbit, Dearborn seemingly dies a hero, making sure that it lands harmlessly in the sea off the coast of Florida.
So the idea of Daredevil #224 is meant to be that Stone has fished Sunturion’s costume out of the water. A footnote might have helped, considering that Sunturion’s only previous appearance had been in a single two-part story in a different series five years before. Unfortunately, Owsley (or whoever foisted this idea on him) has also missed the point that Dearborn didn’t have a costume – he was an energy being, and his “costume” was just the way he chose to appear. When Michelinie and Layton brought the original Sunturion back in 1987’s Iron Man Annual #9, the suit from this issue was explained away as being something to do with an experiment by Roxxon to try to bring Dearborn back from the dead.
Knowing all this explains where Stone’s costume came from. It doesn’t make the Daredevil story itself any less arbitrary. Nothing here plays off the original Sunturion story in any way. The obvious angle would have been for Dearborn’s core decency to influence the new wearer of the suit and make him a Firestorm type character… but no, that’s not here.
The original Sunturion was conceived as an Iron Man supporting character – a well meaning techno-zealot with a blind spot for the failings of his corporate employers. That’s not a concept particularly at home in Daredevil, nor is it what this story is about. The plot just requires Stone to find a thingie that makes him powerful enough to threaten his former employers. There’s no apparent reason to make it the Sunturion costume, unless someone was particularly keen to renew the trade mark.
Stone’s character is simply a low-rent thug who stumbles upon power that he doesn’t understand and doesn’t know how to use, and who lacks the imagination to find out. Since he’s an energy being, there’s nothing to stop him being brought back, just as Dearborn was. In the context of Daredevil, I suppose he could be a Juggernaut-style character: someone with much more power than everyone else in the book, but none of the wit to use it, persistently outclassed by the physically weaker but much smarter people around him. But even that feels like it would be more at home in Spider-Man. This just isn’t a book where Sunturion, in any interpretation, belongs.
It’s the age-old problem of “Just because you’ve got an entire shared universe to play with, doesn’t mean you have to.” Like when Roy Thomas decided a guy who’d bult a suit of power armor, named himself after the metal it was made from, and sworn revenge on Tony Stark was an X-Men villain.
By and large, it’s fine to pretend that characters like DD and Batman somewhow live in a gritty, low-key powers world most of the time, only dealing with overpowered energy beings when they’ve been dragged into some other hero’s milleu. At the very least, this story should have included DD thinking “This feels like an Iron Man problem, but the number I have for Stark Industries goes straight to the machine.”
The original Sunturion is a minor character with fewer than a dozen appearances. so it’s no surprise that Sunturion II was never brought back.
The entire story is built around the twist ending of the locket which seems almost like a very dark comedy moment. I do enjoy the ending. That plot fits with DD and seems like a story a writer like Owsley feels comfortable telling. There are just a lot of crossed wires getting to that point with lots of moving parts that don’t fit. It would have worked better to have Abe simply get robbed with some random thieves also stealing his locket, and DD does the “good Samaritan” routine of trying to get Abe’s locket back, going through many hurdles in the attempt, only for the twist reveal.
Once again, an Iron Man idea finds its way into DD’s stories.
It happens even more often with Spider-Man concepts, of course. I still find it weird. Maybe the editorial offices were door-to-door?
@Luis- Owsley wrote two Iron Man inventory stories that eventually saw print in Marvel Super-Heroes. Maybe he had an idea for a third one involving Sunturion?
Sunturion appeared in one of the first Marvel books I ever bought (a spidey annual) so for a while 11 year old me thought he was an A list character
I’m wondering if this was a case of an editor requesting that Owsley write a story based on an already completed cover. Maybe Owsley was writing a crime story, the editor wanted Owsley to use a villain, they had already paid for a cover. “I need you to adapt your story so that Sunturion is the villain.” “Sunturion? I don’t even know that character. He was an Iron Man villain with some type of armour, right?” “Something like that. The artist decided to draw Sunturion fighting DD. It’s a rush job, so hurry up.”
They should create a new Sunturion completely unrelated to these two. Make him the avatar of the sun god, Apollo (or make him delusionally believe that he’s the avatar of Apollo). Set him up as a Moon Knight villain.
@Chris V- It is odd. The cover is drawn by Bob Layton. who drew and co-plotted the original Sunturion story. Maybe Layton planned on bringing back the original Sunturion in Daredevil but the plans were aborted? Layton later co-plotted the story that brought back Sunturion in Iron Man.
I don’t see how Layton would have any plans at all for Daredevil given that, AFAIK, he was never a regular contributor to the series. He drew a couple of other covers (issue 202 and a variant Bullseye cover for 169. I’m not sure if there are others).
Maybe that was originally an Iron Man cover that went unused and they had Layton doctor it to replace Iron Man with Daredevil.
Priest was already an editor at Marvel by this point yes? Maybe he had an idea for the character in another book, but those plans fell through and he used him in an inventory story?
@Mark Coale- At this point Priest had only edited the Conan books and the Spider-Man books. Sunturion doesn’t belong in the Conan books. He might belong in the Spider-Man books but even that is a poor fit.
Plus, Priest encouraged David to pursue darker stories on Spectacular and wanted to turn Web into a crime series using Spidey, more stories like this DD plot would have been minus the super-villain, so I doubt he’d have any interest in Sunturion showing up in Spider-Man (Amazing was the traditional Spidey book, but DeFalco seemed to have a solid grasp on the villains he wanted to use), especially since he seems to have had little knowledge of the original Iron Man story.
I would bet cash money that somewhere deep un the Usenet racmu archives or one of the many nuked iterations of Priest’s website there is a wry, entertaining, slightly-embittered thousand word essay about the Byzantine chain of mishaps and mismanagement that led to this final product.
Actually, I don’t want to know. The real story behind the making of this issue likely won’t be as interesting as what we completely make up here.
I heard this was an Iron Man inventory story written by Owsley that was rejected by Jim Shooter because the twist ending featured Tony Stark walking away laughing when he saw the locket contained no picture. Owsley argued, “Tony Stark is a jerk.” Owsley thought the story was too good to go unpublished and had Iron Man redrawn as DD throughout. Shooter agreed to publish the story here since Matt Murdock wouldn’t be able to see the picture was missing from the locket.
I heard that Owsley was a “method writer” at this point in his career. And since he was about to write a Daredevil story, he wrote this one with his eyes closed (to really get the essence of the character).
When Shooter received the script in the mail (after it had accidentally been sent off to DC by mistake because Owsley apparently also mailed it with his eyes closed), it was barely legible and almost past deadline. Shooter had to decipher what he could make of it to the best of his ability, and as quickly as possible. The result is this mess of an issue.
Incidentally, Owsley gave up the whole method writing approach after he wrote a script for The Incredible Hulk which resulted in him destroying his own apartment.
Thank goodness he wasn’t the writer of the FF issue about the kid deciding to emulate the Human Torch during that period. Otherwise, Marvel might have really been forced to replace Johnny with Herbie due to safety concerns.
Wouldn’t Abe have felt with his fingers that there was nothing inside the locket?
Why did I do that? I wrote “accidentally” followed by “by mistake” in the same sentence. Ugh.
I really wish we could edit our own posts (and also any posts we disagree with). I want to press the dislike button to vent my dismay with the lack of an edit feature, but there’s no dislike button for me to press. I’d put a suggestion for the addition of like/dislike buttons as well as an edit feature into a suggestion box, but there’s no suggestion box for me to put it in.
@Joe S. Walker- I think the idea is that Abe’s wife’s picture was in the locket at one point and Abe never opened the locket after his wife’s picture disappeared.
Chris V> I heard this was an Iron Man inventory story written by Owsley that was rejected by Jim Shooter because the twist ending featured Tony Stark walking away laughing when he saw the locket contained no picture. Owsley argued, “Tony Stark is a jerk.” Owsley thought the story was too good to go unpublished and had Iron Man redrawn as DD throughout. Shooter agreed to publish the story here since Matt Murdock wouldn’t be able to see the picture was missing from the locket.
See, the problem with that gag is that it’s entirely too plausible. It’s entirely in-line with the people involved
Google AI’ll be spitting that out as the real answer within a month.
“Google AI’ll be spitting that out as the real answer within a month.”
Wonderful. I hope you’re happy with yourself, Chris. “Whats the deal with Daredevil 224 anyway?” is one the most common questions searched in Google. Millions of people will be fooled by your plausible-sounding explanation.
@Moo: “They should create a new Sunturion completely unrelated to these two. Make him the avatar of the sun god, Apollo (or make him delusionally believe that he’s the avatar of Apollo). Set him up as a Moon Knight villain.”
That would be redundant with existing Moon Knight villain, the Sun King, empowered by Atum Ra.
Damned writers keep stealing my ideas and publishing them before I post them online.
Moo: “retro-plagiarism”