DAREDEVIL #232-233 (July & August 1986)
“God and Country” / “Armageddon”
Writer: Frank Miller
Artist: David Mazzuchelli
Colourist: Max Scheele
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio

We’ve skipped a few more issues here, including the tail end of Denny O’Neil’s run. The villain in issue #225 is the Vulture, on loan from Amazing Spider-Man. Issue #226, O’Neil’s final issue, is a Gladiator story. And that brings us to issues #227-233: a six-issue return for Frank Miller as writer, and the end of David Mazzuchelli’s run as artist. This is “Born Again”, one of the best known stories in Daredevil‘s history. The main villain is the Kingpin, and we’ve covered him before. But he brings in a hired gun for the final two issues, and Nuke is absolutely within our remit.

Before we get to Nuke, though, we need to take a look at what’s already happened. In part, that’s because “Born Again” is important – not just in the sense that it’s an acknowledged classic, but because it makes sweeping changes to the character and to the book’s status quo that will be important going forward. But we also need to look at it simply to figure out what Nuke is doing in this story at all.

The basic idea of “Born Again” is very simple. Although it’s only six issues long, the story covers an unusually long time frame. By modern standards it’s extremely compressed, but it’s for the best, since the plot calls for long stretches of Matt doing very little and being wholly ineffective – told at a modern pace, it would be glacially depressing.

The story brings back Karen Page, Matt’s Silver Age love interest who left to become an actress. She hasn’t been a regular character since issue #86. Her career has collapsed, and she’s now making porn and addicted to heroin. When she trades Daredevil’s secret identity for drugs, the information makes its way to the Kingpin, who sets about destroying Matt’s life. Matt and Foggy’s law firm had already collapsed by this point. Now the IRS freeze his bank account, the bank repossess his house, he’s falsely accused of bribing a witness, Glorianna dumps him (we won’t be needing her any more), and he loses his licence to practice law. The plan is meant to end up with Matt going to jail, but Foggy manages to stop that. So the Kingpin blows up Matt’s house instead.

Matt winds up homeless and has a nervous breakdown. He fights the Kingpin and loses. Kingpin tries to have him drowned, but Matt escapes, and he’s nursed back to health by nuns who improbably include his long-missing mother Maggie. This is the turning point. Later writers have tended to lose sight of this, but Matt wasn’t noticeably religious up to this point. He finds religion as an adult when at rock bottom and it becomes a much bigger part of his character from this point onwards. Hence “Born Again”.

Meanwhile, the Kingpin is trying to kill everyone else who might have learned Daredevil’s identity along the way, which includes Karen herself. She returns to New York hoping that Matt will protect her. In part four, an out-of-costume Matt rescues her from a Daredevil impostor working for the Kingpin – his first actual win of the storyline. He forgives her and, by the start of issue #5, the two are reunited and starting to rebuild, with Matt working as a diner chef. Infuriated, the Kingpin becomes obsessed with finishing the job, and this is where he brings in Nuke.

Nuke is a bare-chested blond soldier with bullets draped over his shoulders, a massive gun, and an American flag apparently tattooed on his face. The flag is done purely in colouring; there are no lines, at least in the finished art. He takes red pills before going into action – he also has white and blue ones, which seem to keep him under control. We first see him in Nicaragua, on a mission to blow up some military installation. But despite his handler gently reminding him that he’s in Nicaragua, Nuke is utterly convinced that he’s in Vietnam, attacking a POW camp to liberate “our boys”. In other words, he thinks he’s in Rambo, which came out the previous year.

He’s an American government super-soldier, ostensibly in the tradition of Captain America, but the Kingpin has obtained his services by blackmailing a general. The Kingpin briefs Nuke in an office bedecked with American flags. It’s the usual right-wing stuff about true patriots being under siege, with some nonsense thrown in about how the poor Kingpin has simply been forced to break the law just in order to keep the American dream of free enterprise alive in the face of “endless, corrosive legislation”. Nuke listens to all this attentively – well, as attentively as he can, given that the can barely contain himself at the mention of “our boys” – and seems to be clearly on board with this paranoid worldview of liberals.

Nuke dutifully attacks Hell’s Kitchen with ordnance, prompting Matt to finally return to action as Daredevil. The ensuing fight causes so much chaos that even the Kingpin won’t be able to cover up. Daredevil manages to beat Nuke, only for the Avengers to turn up and take him into federal custody – presumably at the behest of the corrupt general who supplied Nuke’s services in the first place. But Daredevil doesn’t find Nuke all that interesting, and turns his attentions back to the Kingpin. Instead, it’s Captain America who investigates Nuke. He learns that Nuke is Frank Simpson, and that he is indeed the final survivor of a botched attempt to create new super-soldiers.

Unfortunately for the military, now that he’s been released onto American streets, Nuke has become convinced that he needs to fight the vaguely-defined enemy at home. So he breaks out of custody in order to return to his mission. Captain America defeats him, and Daredevil winds up taking him to the Daily Bugle as evidence. The strong indication in Miller’s story is that Nuke is mortally injured – he consciously chooses not to take Nuke to hospital, on the grounds that there’s “one purpose he can still serve”.

In the context of “Born Again”, Nuke is an odd character. The rest of the story is a psychological melodrama which tears down the book’s status quo and leaves a clean slate for the next writer to rebuild. In trying to destroy Matt, the Kingpin ends up simply freeing him from the shackles of his dual identity, and giving him the impetus he needed to start a new life, truer to himself. Matt could have had a rematch with the Kingpin for the final act, but that had been done before, and so it makes some sense to bring in a proxy in order to raise the stakes. But the proxy in question is an intentionally broad Rambo parody who isn’t even sure what continent he’s in. What’s he doing here, in this story?

Well… it’s a story about the fragility of the system in which Matt has placed its faith, with the whole thing collapsing in the face of corruption. Even though only one senior military officer actually seems to be outright compromised by the Kingpin, everyone else is willing to go along with his orders anyway. And in a story about the emptiness of the structures that Matt’s life relied upon, Nuke, a literal embodiment of government force, is the final distillation of that. He’s barely a functioning character at all; instead, he’s an intentionally empty symbol, driven completely mad by the same blind faith in the system that had trapped Matt.

Captain America, of course, is here to represent a more decent side of patriotism. But he also lacks the blind faith in the institutions that claim to embody that patriotism; he has no hesitation about distrusting the army and pressing his investigation. More to the point, he finds Nuke offensive. Perhaps the key scene here comes when Cap tries to ask Daredevil about Nuke. Daredevil clearly doesn’t think Nuke is a very interesting topic of conversation, and asks why Cap cares about him. Cap answers that “He wears the flag”, to which Matt replies “I hadn’t noticed.”

For Matt, of course, this is literally true – he can’t perceive colour, so he has no idea that Nuke has a flag tattooed on his face. He just registers a cartoon soldier. But Cap doesn’t know that, and he takes it as a statement that the flag no longer means anything to Matt. Perhaps he’s right there too. The flag means an awful lot to Nuke, of course, but the wrong things.

In some ways, Nuke is almost sympathetic. He’s paranoid and insane, but he’s sincere. He’s not out for himself. He really, honestly believes he’s defending his country. He just believed too much that the system represented the greater good, and this is what it did to him. His patriotism has been exploited by cynics – not just the Kingpin, but the Pentagon. But at the same time, they overestimate their ability to control his deranged nationalistic fervour, and he winds up contributing to the Kingpin’s downfall without realising it. If he was smart enough to understand the plot, he might even approve.

Nuke doesn’t appear in Daredevil again. Miller strongly implied that he was dead, and while that’s hardly conclusive in superhero comics, you can see why it would put people off bringing him back. He finally showed up alive and well in Wolverine: Origins in 2006, in a story that actually had a use for a damaged super-soldier. Since then, he’s wandered around the Marvel Universe and even had a stint in the Thunderbolts.

But Miller’s Nuke was relentlessly one note by design. In theory you could develop him beyond that, but in the context of Daredevil, it would miss  the point. Not only would the resulting character would be a more natural fit for Captain America or Wolverine, both of whom have rather stronger feelings about Nuke’s symbolism or his back story, but the “reborn” Daredevil just doesn’t find Nuke very interesting. He represents the forces that Daredevil is moving past, and the book doesn’t have any use for a second Nuke story.