DAREDEVIL #236 (November 1986)
“American Dreamer”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller, co-inker: Barry Windsor-Smith
Co-inker: Bob Wiacek
Colourist: Max Scheele
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio

“Born Again” completely upended the series. By the end, Matt has lost his licence to practice law and started a new life in Hell’s Kitchen as a diner chef, happily reunited with Karen Page for a fresh start. Oh, and the star name creators from “Born Again” have left. So how do you follow that?

Well, this is Daredevil, so the short-term answer is “with fill-in stories”. The first two don’t concern us. Issue #234, by the improbable creative team of Mark Gruenwald, Steve Ditko and Klaus Janson, features Madcap (from Captain America) and the Rose (from Amazing Spider-Man). Issue #235 is a Mr Hyde story by Danny Fingeroth, Steve Ditko and Danny Bulandi. Both acknowledge the new status quo, but don’t really attempt to do anything with it.

That brings us to issue #236, by the book’s new regular writer Ann Nocenti and guest artist Barry Windsor-Smith. Nocenti was the editor of Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants at this point, and would remain so for another couple of years. As well as various fill-ins and anthology contributions, she’d written the final four issues of Spider-Woman, the Dazzler/Beast miniseries Beauty and the Beast and one of her signature works, the Longshot miniseries. Daredevil was her first substantial run on an ongoing title, and turned out to be by far her longest run on any book.

But she wasn’t the regular writer yet. Issue #236 was supposed to be a third fill-in issue, after which Steve Englehart would take over. Instead, he wrote just issue #237 – under the “John Harkness” pen name that he used when he wanted to take his name off something – and then Nocenti took over for real with issue #238. Englehart’s plan was for Daredevil to make a fresh start in California and join the West Coast Avengers, and the Black Widow was going to rejoin the supporting  cast. Englehart’s version of events is that Nocenti’s fill-in story clashed with his plans by bringing back the Widow in a different way, and when Marvel refused to have it changed, he quit. So Nocenti became the regular writer instead, and instead of going back to California, she doubled down on the new Hell’s Kitchen setting.

That’s for the future, though. Her first issue, being a fill-in, doesn’t really engage with the new status quo.

Even so, there is no mistaking an Ann Nocenti comic. She’s a writer of ideas and arguments, and tends to write stories in which characters draw attention to the themes in ways that are simultaneously explicit and elliptically. For example, issue #236 opens with a government scientist giving a briefing to Black Widow. One main purpose of this scene is to explain the plot. A government super soldier project suppresses the memories and emotions of their agents to make them more effective. Agent Jack Hazzard’s suppressed personality has started to re-emerge, which is driving him mad. Hazzard is hallucinating and dangerous, and Black Widow’s mission is to kill him before he kills someone else.

Another main purpose is to make clear that the doctor is oblivious to how creepy the whole thing is. Even as he’s explaining how it went wrong with Hazzard, he’s trying to sell Natasha on signing up for the same treatment herself.

None of this is especially complicated. But here’s the doctor’s opening speech – the first line of dialogue in the first scene in the first Ann Nocenti issue:

…the brain is the blind spot between the eyes. This gray sponge buzzes with the white noise of synapses, which most humans mistake for the sound of themselves thinking. The heart beats on doors it should never open. We simply disconnect it. Psychologically, of course. Somewhere inbetween [sic], they say there rests the elusive soul. I have yet to locate one. Perhaps it is really located below the belt. The only thing we leave intact are those vitals that women call beastly and men call their guts. Anyway, the rest is just a twisting mass of nerves, muscles and bones – all working off the violent sparks of the brain. Man flails about in this sea of impulses, memories, phobias… and is ultimately rendered impotent. I take the reins in my fists and twist them into a coil that I can direct as I please.

Obviously, your tolerance for this sort of thing may vary, and the scientist is meant to be bizarrely pleased with himself. Also, in amongst this flurry of thematic discussion, the briefing loses sight of a major plot point: Hazzard has the power to stop people’s hearts, which is why he might kill people during his hallucinations. But you can’t you can’t say it sounds like anything else in Marvel’s superhero line in 1986.

Hazzard’s tailspin was triggered by seeing Daredevil’s fight with Nuke. Having gone through similar procedures, Hazzard is naturally alarmed to see Nuke’s mental state. But Nuke was a deliberately one-note character and a pure symbol. Hazzard is normal by comparison. He loves his country. He loves his mom. But he’s also alarmed at what he’s become, feels unable to return to a normal life, and resents the ordinary people who have no respect for his sacrifices. He lashes out at people who make him angry, but he regrets it and seems to be making a genuine effort to exercise self-control despite his disturbed state. He’s a danger to those around him because of his instant-kill power and his mental instability, but he doesn’t seem so bad.

Hazzard is also a Vietnam veteran who joined the secret service instead of returning to civilian life. All this stuff about the government suppressing his emotions seems to be a literal version of the trauma of his career. The story takes place on the Fourth of July, by the way, for added patriotic irony. Hazzard’s elderly mother is delighted to see him back, and she’s looking after a boy called Tommy, who idolises Hazzard. So Hazzard gives Tommy a rambling speech about patriotism and America, and gets Tommy to point a loaded gun at him. He seems to be trying to revert to normal civilian behaviour without having a clear idea of how to do so.

Black Widow enlists Daredevil to help with Hazzard, because she secretly hopes that Daredevil’s demonic iconography will trigger Hazzard’s religious beliefs and freak him out. After she stops Hazzard from killing Daredevil with his heart-stopping power, Hazzard asks her to kill him. Then he produces a home insurance advert, which he apparently believes to be a photograph of his wife and child. Finally, he grabs the Widow’s hand and forces her to shoot him in the head. And the story ends with the Fourth of July fireworks and Tommy playing patriotically with the loaded gun that Hazzard left him. Ann Nocenti likes a metaphor.

In principle, Hazzard is Nuke played as a character rather than a symbol, albeit presented in a very fractured way. Windsor-Smith draws him as a fairly normal looking soldier and he comes across as a broadly sympathetic figure. He knows he’s a danger to those around him and ultimately he chooses to die before he hurts someone else. But instead of a coherent personality, we get a mass of conflicting impulses which shift almost from panel to panel. You could say this is a Picasso-esque approach to conveying Hazzard’s personality; you might also see it as making Hazzard as abstract as Nuke, just in a different way. At root, Hazzard is simply a good soldier who’s devoted his life to his country in perfect good faith, only to be ruined and cast aside by the authority figures who exploited him.

Nocenti returns to this plotline in issue #247. That issue implies that Hazzard actually survived being shot in the head (though he never appears again), but focusses on an “Agent Crock”. Crock has escaped Project Reptile with wires still stuck in his head that allow him to relive certain memories by jiggling them a bit. Much of the story involves Black Widow being traumatised at having killed Hazzard and being psychologically unable to fight Crock until the last minute, all of which reads very oddly for any modern interpretation of the Widow.

These stories seem to set up a showdown with Project Reptile in due course, but in fact the plot seems to be dropped. Nocenti seems more interested in making points about how the personality is formed by memory – and how the Widow herself might have suffered similar trauma in a less literal way – than in the mechanics of Project Reptile itself. The obvious irony is that the doctor seems to have the same lack of emotion as his victims, and might even have been through the same process himself, making it a vicious cycle. From a plot perspective, though, the main problem with Project Reptile as recurring villains is that we never see it actually work. As best we can tell, all it’s ever achieved is to give some people major psychological problems and lose control of them. The key idea of a “reptilian” agent being effective at, well, anything, is never borne out on the page.

Perhaps that’s the idea – it’s not just an attempt at exploitation but an exercise in utter futility. But it feels more like a story that jumped straight to the final act where it all goes wrong. There’s certainly something in the idea of a government project trying to do by surgical mutilation what would otherwise be done by command structures and by trauma, but it feels like Nocenti finishes saying what she wants to say about those themes in two issues of set-up and leaves it at that.