Daredevil Villains #73: Project Reptile
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 elliptical. 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.
Matty-I’ve read all of Nocenti’s comic work. You don’t seem to enjoy Nocenti’s writing, and that’s fine. It’s subjective. I just found it odd to say that a person who spent their entire life in the comic industry doesn’t like comics. She must like comics, or she’d have moved on long ago.
@Chris V – He didn’t actually that she doesn’t want to be in comics.
Didn’t actually *say*, I meant. Whoops.
I like Nocenti’s writing in general, so I love her Daredevil run. I read a little of it as it came out, then tracked it down in back issues much later. Granted, Agents Hazzard and later, Crock, are not the first parts of the run that leap to mind, but as a whole the run has a wild vibe in that she throws all sorts of strange stuff at Daredevil, rather than ninjas and/or Bullseye.
(Given this was always an aspect of Waid’s DD run I liked, I apparently enjoy when people take Daredevil outside that wheelhouse.)
Even when I don’t get whatever it is Nocenti’s trying to say with her writing, I enjoy making the attempt to figure it out. She’s got a distinctive writing style which, annoys some people (obviously), but I’m not one of those them.
I guess pedantically speaking, no. The exact quote was: “It always read to me like the work of someone who didn’t like comics, and who didn’t like working in comics.” Which could be interpreted as “she doesn’t like her job, but she wants to work in comics. She’s truly the (less pathetic) Willy Loman of the comic book world.
Those 25th anniversary covers Marvel ran that month looked like placemats for children.
The New Mutants and Thor 25th anniversary covers were particularly uninspired. The former had an off-centre sketch of Magma in her human form. Thor’s picture was half blacked out in a way that suggests Simonson couldn’t get the eye right.
Chris V –
Hi !
“…The exact quote was: “It always read to me like the work of someone who didn’t like comics, and who didn’t like working in comics.” Which could be interpreted as “she doesn’t like her job, but she wants to work in comics.”
it could be interpreted that way for sure !
It isn’t what I intended, and that’s why I used the verb “read”
but I can clarify-
her work reads to me as someone who does not enjoy their job to the extent that I (subjectively) perceive a disdain for the medium.
She is undoubtedly competent, and I think you’d agree that the history of comics is littered with professional people who, ideally, would be working in another field.
Stan Lee, and Julius Schwartz come to mind, for example.
They were all pretty bad, honestly. I mean, it’s accurate but X-Factor with sad-sack Cyclops. West Coast Avengers with Hawkeye winking at the reader. I remember when I was a kid thinking those particular issues were all special issues rather than a typical story with a lame cover (well, I guess FF was an anniversary issue, at least).
Somewhere, Marvel editors of the mid-2000s years thought this month was the height of comic cover perfection. “Every comic book publisher every month should have the main character making a generic pose. That is what will bring in the readers.” Not simply confuse collectors looking for back-issues who could no longer tell one issue from another based on the cover telling a story about something within the contents.
Well, it was also the decompressed storytelling era, so covers depicting a character doing very little was a pretty accurate representation of the content within.
@Michael … Fair enough, fair enough. 🙂
That still gives you Bullet, Bushwacker, Typhoid Mary, Shotgun and Blackheart. Five enduring villains from one single DD-writer run put her in the upper tier, purely in terms of the numbers, right? (I haven’t actually done the math, but I’m goin’ by my gut!)
Matty-While it’s true that neither Lee nor Schwartz were interested in working in the comic book industry when they started, I think it’s also true that both learned to love the industry.
Schwartz, for one, I’m sure could have easily moved back into the world of prose science fiction as an editor if he didn’t come to enjoy working at DC Comics.
It‘s like Philip K. Dick. Granted that PKD was, at least, a sci-fi fan before entering the field. He wanted to be a respected “mainstream” fiction writer, but he was so damn good at writing science fiction that his dreams never materialized. I wouldn’t describe him as someone who didn’t have love and respect for science fiction; even though, and while he came to peace and acceptance with his career in science fiction, had he gotten his wish, he’d have been more Jonathan Lethem or Kurt Vonnegut.
I think it’s true to compare Nocenti to Lee or Schwartz though, that her intent wasn’t to work in the comic book industry, but that she developed a love and respect for comic books while working in the role. I think for Nocenti, she saw that comic books could serve well as agitprop. If you asked her for her feelings on some of the popular superhero characters, she probably wouldn’t have strong feelings for those characters though, no.
Alan Moore says he hates superheroes, but there’s little question that he loves (or he did love in the past, anyway) comic books.
“That still gives you Bullet, Bushwacker, Typhoid Mary, Shotgun and Blackheart. Five enduring villains”
Really? I’ve heard of two of those characters, and they are definitely neither *snicker* “Bullet” nor “Shotgun”.
What does Shotgun do? Run up to people about to get into their cars and call dibs on the passenger seat?
@Chris V:”I could understand thinking she doesn’t like superhero comics (she probably doesn’t like the idea of settling things by violence, based on what I know of Nocenti)”
Yeah, she’s talked about that in interviews, struggling with the “solving problem with violence.” You can see it play out on the page (and also the Page) in these early issues, too, with Karen expressing discomfort at the thought of Matt going out every night to beat on people.
Nocenti did try to embrace the “fisticuffs” aspect of the character and the genre, however, even going so far as to take boxing lessons at a local gym.
@Moo: “Really?”
Yes.
Moo-Bullett is actually a really interesting character. It’s his son that makes Bullett more interesting, but he’s much more nuanced than the typical “mainstream” supervillain.
@Si: Isn’t that Illyana on the cover of New Mutants 45?
@Jason: “Yes.”
You sure?
I believe that is Illyana on cover. Hard to tell since all of Barry Windsor’s women look like vegans.
@Moo:
…
…
No.
Whoops, that was in reply to “Not sure.”
Now it looks like I’m really offended at the thought of BWS drawing women who look like vegans.
Come to think of it, MAYBE I AM
Almost all of the New Mutants were blondes with blue eyes. There were no defining features. It could have been Cypher on a humid day. This just drives home how basic the sketch was.
The 2000s-era Marvel covers were Bill Jemas’ fault.
From Tom Brevoort’s blog:
“over time Bill Jemas developed a number of unrealistically narrow parameters for how covers should be done. Not only was he a proponent of the notion that the cover didn’t need to reflect the story on the inside of the issue, but past a certain point he only wanted covers that featured a single character, even on team titles such as AVENGERS, X-MEN or FANTASTIC FOUR. And ideally, that character would be a woman, and ideally, she’d be bending over something. I don’t know that I ever made him madder than when I did the cover to FANTASTIC FOUR #68 which followed the letter of all of his cover requirement commandments while ignoring or circumnavigating the spirit of them.”
https://tombrevoort.substack.com/p/76-gum-gum-gatling
I never looked at it that closely, but I’m looking at it online, and there are little pentacles in her hair, which seems like an Illyana-type thing. You know, the dark satanic magic and all that.
Actually, looking at it now, she kinda looks like Uma Thurman to me.
BWS and faces were like Liefeld and feet. I loved everything else he drew except faces. Look at the cover of New Mutants 40. It’s an action shot. Cap just knocked down Magneto. But going by just their faces, neither one of them looks as though they’re in a fight. Cap looks like he’s stumped by a crossword clue and Magneto looks like he’s relaxing to some classical music.
Apropos of anything else, it’s amazing how many memories that 25th anniversary border brings back, even all these years later.
As folks suggest, Nocenti’s run has an odd balance of having good characterization but overwrought politics — not unlike Miller in a fashion. Another stepping stone in the soap opera of what we understand to be the modern Daredevil.
“…but past a certain point he only wanted covers that featured a single character, even on team titles such as AVENGERS, X-MEN or FANTASTIC FOUR. And ideally, that character would be a woman, and ideally, she’d be bending over something. I don’t know that I ever made him madder than when I did the cover to FANTASTIC FOUR #68 which followed the letter of all of his cover requirement commandments while ignoring or circumnavigating the spirit of them.”
For anyone wondering, Brevoort is referring to the cover of FANTASTIC FOUR vol 3 #68 (2003), which shows toddler Valeria Richards playing with building blocks that spell DOOM. So it does meet the requirements of a single female character, but the blocks do actually feature in the story, and she isn’t bending over them.
My main issue with Nocenti was always that she either couldn’t or didn’t care to deliver her soapboxing in a way that would make any kind of diegetic sense.
“Unsubtle” seems like the wrong term considering she was following up on Frank Miller, who could never be accused of subtlety even at this stage of his career; in the old days we’d call it Anvilicious. She’s just never been able to make a point without dropping a metaphorical piano on her readers’ heads.
Regarding the 25th Anniversary covers, I kind of liked the X-Men one. It was a Mutant Massacre issue and it showed Wolverine with his mask torn.
Bullet and Typhoid could be interesting villains if they were not clamoring so viciously for some sort of resolution even as their very stories keep denying them that.
By which I mean, they do not work if they are “enduring”.
Even more than the often-discussed tension of Batman arresting Joker then expecting him to escape, it bothers me a lot that Daredevil keeps meeting both and just accepting that it will keep happening with no resolution or even advancement whatsoever.
I almost believe that Bullet and his son were meant as parodies or commentary on Frank Miller’s Hank and Chuckie Jurgens from Daredevil #191. The similarities are rather striking.
Which is why, darn it, I want some sort of resolution. It does not help that both fathers rub me in a very unpleasing way and I want them separated from their sons.
Yes, that’s definitely Illyana on the cover of New Mutants #45. The pentacles and shrunken heads in her hair give it away. Also, the hairstyle. It’s subtle, but he had to do something to make you look harder a cover that was basically “headshot with ugly border.” I’ll always defend BWS’s ’80s work because I love it so much. YMMV.
And Nocenti did move to Vertigo right after this Daredevil run to write Kid Eternity with art by Sean Phillips. If you’re looking for keywords to describe her writing, “unresolved” could definitely be one of them. That’s probably a consequence of her unique pacing — definitely not the typical superhero buildup/fight/denouement we’re used to.
I find her writing a little chatty for my tastes, but she’s worked with so many great artists: Windsor-Smith, JRJr., Phillips, Art Adams, and she always gives them amazing stuff to draw. I can’t fault her for that. A Nocenti-written comic is probably going to *look* fantastic if nothing else, and that’s not just up to the artist. I mean, look at Bendis’ chatty comics. Such bland art direction.
“he had to do something to make you look harder”
But ideally not for the purpose of trying to figure out which character he actually drew.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the hair accessories (that she never actually wore) were added in later because the editors couldn’t tell whether they were looking at Amara or Illyana.
Re: The Brevoort/Jemas cover wars.
Remember the cover to X-Treme X-Men 4? It featured Sage appearing as though we’d just come up behind her while she was taking a squat in the woods.
I remember when that issue came out because some reader asked Brevoort on an Avengers message board why the Avengers didn’t have covers like that and Brevoort very bluntly replied that he absolutely did not want any covers like that on Avengers.
@Luis Dantas: I’d be curious to know if you feel similarly about some of Batman’s more “tragic” villains, such as Two-Face or some versions of Mister Freeze.
Gosh. That cover was _something_. The placement and size of the X-sigil belt buckle that she had at her back was… something as well.
There is a bit of range in Two-Face and Mister Freeze, Omar. They can learn, repent somewhat, try other approaches and, yes, often and perhaps unavoidably fall back on their old ways.
I don’t think that can be said of Bullet, Nuke or Hazzard. I feel that every single story featuring those characters (granted, in practice that test can only be made with Bullet) has them starting the story at a certain place, showing that they Care Very Much despite being so violent, speaking solemnly to themselves, to those unfortunate enough to be listening to them, to their sons, and sometimes to Daredevil in the intervals between violent assaults.
Then they talk something to explain why it is very unreasonable to expect them to change their behavior to any significant degree.
Daredevil accepts that, even as he gives the most silent of indications that he would rather not.
We are left to wonder if this will go on until Lance turns 18, or indeed if he will manage to live that long and how much of his psyche will survive alongside his flesh.
We spare a moment to admire Daredevil’s heroic ability to be dismayed at every turn. Or something.
Repeat periodically.
Typhoid is very similar, although she has a _tiny_ bit more range than Bullet. Still, ultimately that is not a continuing plot advancing towards some sort of logical conclusion, but instead just an arbitrary state for writers to use and then discard at a moment’s notice.
She develops a new alter (“Blood Mary”) and that might as well have been forgotten after the immediate use in the then-current plot. She adopts the Mutant Zero identity in “Avengers: The Initiative” and explains on panel why she needs it and that is simply let go by the wayside. She marries Kingpin and that, too, seems to have been forgotten very soon, as soon as she is featured in “Realm of X”.
That does not feel like a character, even a fictional character. Perhaps more to the point, it does not feel like the other characters consider her real by the parameters of their own fictional reality. D. G. Chichester attempted to give her resolution in #297 and I wish that had stuck, because since then she feels much more like a mythical boogeyperson given human form than a character.
In all fairness, she would probably work best as a haunting ghost than as a living person right now. If nothing else, that would make the other characters’ remarkable casualness at neglecting her more understandable.
“…your toletance for this sort of thing may vary…”
This was the start of the good stuff.
“…does’t like comics…”
We all have our takes. Mine is that she didn’t like bad comics, and had irritation with writing that either had no point or was mindless mysogyny. Which is why what she edited or wrote tends to be so much better.
Written with my phone, so typos abound.
“The placement and size of the X-sigil belt buckle that she had at her back was… something as well.”
Yep. Tramp stamp placement. It certainly looks as though Larocca was going for “X marks the spot”.
It certainly marks a spot.
@Luis: That’s kind of similar to how she was portrayed in the Daredevil TV series. The Mary Walker and Typhoid Mary personalities both showed up, but the Bloody Mary persona was kept off camera and nobody, including Mary, was fully aware of who she was or what she was doing.
Sounds like we can all agree at least two things:
1.) The haircut on the cover of New Mutants 45 makes it blatantly obvious that it’s Illyana, and
2.) Ann Nocenti’s Daredevil run is great, and noteworthy for the perennially excellent villains she created.
Love to see this kind of critical consensus reached.
This is an interesting quote from Ann Nocenti about when she was first hired at Marvel.
“Once inside [Marvel …] I was stunned by the incendiary energy of words and pics shoved into little box grids, printed on toilet paper, to be rolled up and stuck in a back pocket like a rag. The whole thing seemed subversive. Why was all this psychedelic power crammed into such tiny, badly-printed packages? Were they peddling some new drug here? I knew right away I wanted a crack at making the things.”
It’s notable mainly, I think, for the way it drips with utter contempt for comics, the comics medium, the comics industry, comics professionals, and comics fandom.
Nocenti sure has a fiercely loyal, cult-like following. I’ll give her that. Zack Snyder’s going to have to up his game.
@Luis Dantas: Typhoid Mary’s awesome, but she’s a tough character to write well. Between the mental health issues, her use of sexuality, and the meta-commentary her character represents, I’m not surprised she gets mishandled more often than not.I would love to see a good writer take a crack at the character, similar to how G. Willow Wilson has with Poison Ivy.
@Moo: Nocenti has written some bad comics (particularly Nu52 Green Arrow and Catwoman), but as a 5th level Apprentice in the Followers of Ann, I can’t admit that in public. If I keep venerating her comics on forums like this, plus contribute another $5,000 and give them power of attorney, I’ll be a 1st level Adept in no time!
@Mike Loughlin- Well, that’s great for you. Comes with a nice badge too, I hear.
Meanwhile, I’m in real danger of losing my job! One of my coworkers recently overheard me criticizing Nocenti’s work and actually submitted a complaint to upper management. It’s still under review at the moment, but if it goes poorly for me, I could be fired for Annti-Nocentism.
Nah. Kidding, obviously. I don’t have a job.
But you do have universal health care. So, there’s that.
@Jason: “It’s notable mainly, I think, for the way it drips with utter contempt for comics, the comics medium, the comics industry, comics professionals, and comics fandom.”
The description by Nocenti you have quoted is positive and enthusiastic. She is saying that comics quickly excited her, that she was fascinated by how their material cheapness and disposability clashed with the art form’s fantastic power.
@Adam – Jason was being sarcastic.
@Moo: My mistake. I see that now. Sorry, Jason.