DAREDEVIL #241 (April 1987)
“Black Christmas”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciler: Todd McFarlane
Inker: Al Milgrom
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Christie Scheele
Editor: Ralph Macchio

With Daredevil still lacking a regular artist, this issue features guest art from a pre-stardom Todd McFarlane. Not all that pre-stardom, mind you – he’d been working for Marvel and DC for a couple of years by this point, and his run on Incredible Hulk started the same month. He’s still not an obvious fit for an Ann Nocenti story. But this is fill-in work, so it’s quite conservative and largely in line with Marvel house style. (The generic cover art, which is by Mike Zeck and Klaus Janson, looks nothing like the interior.)

It’s Christmas Day in New York, and the Trixter is spending it alone in a 42nd Street hotel room. According to his monologue, he’s a world famous magician and master of disguise, whose real name is a secret. He implies that he doesn’t even remember his own real name, having spent so much of his life subsumed in his Trixter persona or his various disguises. He finds his life empty. He’s fascinated by Daredevil, who he regards as “a bit of a trickster, a stuntman” – but who chose to be a hero instead of an entertainer. So, apparently hoping to learn something, he decides to meet Daredevil and let him “decide my fate.” He seems to be contemplating suicide depending on how his meeting with Daredevil goes.

So the Trixter goes to a costume shop (which is inexplicably open on Christmas Day and where the owner doesn’t seem to recognise him at all) and asks for a Daredevil costume. They don’t stock those, so he ends up leaving with a horned skull mask instead.

Next, the Trixter shows up at the Rockefeller Center, wearing the skull mask and an angel costume, for a bit of illicit tightrope walking. Again, there are a remarkable number of bystanders around, considering that it’s meant to be Christmas Day. Daredevil shows up, and senses that the Trixter is wearing some sort of device that issues “chaotic force waves” which are “adding stress to walls, loosening bricks”. Since this is potentially dangerous, Daredevil goes onto the wire and asks the Trixter politely to turn his device off. The Trixter tries to question Daredevil about why he became a hero, only to be  disappointed by a bland answer about doing what feels right. A bit of fighting follows, with the Trixter apparently probing for some sort of display of vulnerability on Daredevil’s part to make him feel less inadequate about his own life. After feigning suicide by hanging, the Trixter reveals that he was faking it, and leaves.

Daredevil catches up with him later, by which time he’s performing as a street dancer. Once again, the crowd show no signs of recognising him, yet he doesn’t seem to be in disguise, and Daredevil confirms that he’s a  “world-famous stuntman”.

After a brief diversion to deal with a subplot, Daredevil catches up with the Trixter again as he starts scaling the Empire State Building. By this point his device is actually causing some masonry to fall. Trixter gets to save Daredevil from a fall at one point, but doesn’t seem to find this act of heroism particularly satisfying. At the top of the building, the Trixter somehow manages to lash himself to the spire in order that he can die by lightning strike in a thunderstorm. Did I not mention that there was a thunderstorm on? Don’t worry, neither did the story. In fact, the art up to this point shows clear blue skies.

The Trixter seems to have a last minute change of heart, and seems encouraged by Daredevil telling him that his audience appreciates him, but then just gets struck by lightning and dies. And that’s that.

There’s a lot to admire in the Ann Nocenti run, and a lot of very successful creations to come, but this is what bad Ann Nocenti looks like. In theory, the Trixter is someone who was very similar to Daredevil but chose to become an entertainer rather than a hero, feels that he’s wasted his life, and is having an existential crisis about it. But the parallels feel forced. He’s a kind of stuntman, sure, but he’s not a trickster figure. The story would have worked much better with Spider-Man, who is both closer to being a trickster and has an entertainment industry back story.

On top of that, the Trixter himself is a fundamentally confused creation. He’s introduced as an illusionist, and a stuntman, and a master of diguise, when only the stuntman part seems to matter. The disguise element seems to be intended to suggest that he’s lost his sense of his core identity, but there’s a difference between disappearing into a public persona (which seems to be the real idea) and adopting a series of personalities (which is an angle that will eventually work for the Human Target). Besides, we never get any sense of the Trixter’s public persona – nobody seems to recognise him and nothing plays off the fact that he’s famous. It’s just asserted as a fact rather than actually being adequately set up. Nor does he ever come across as a natural entertainer – he’s just a guy who does stuff in public. There’s a huge mismatch between what the story claims for the Trixter, and what he actually shows.

I mentioned last time that the Nocenti run opens with a string of characters defined by mental illness: Jack Hazzard in issue #236, Sabretooth in issue #238, Rotgut in issues #239-240. Well, here’s number four. But the others feel more plausibly human, if unwell – or at least more plausibly animalistic, in Sabretooth’s case. Hazzard and Rotgut have recognisable human impulses, if fractured through mental illness. But the Trixter simply doesn’t. There’s nothing to hold on to with him.

You could, of course, say that that’s the whole point of the story. He doesn’t think there’s anything to himself beneath the surface, after all. But even if that is deliberate, where does it take us? The story doesn’t actually have anything to say about the value of entertainment, the impulse to entertain, or the impulse to be a hero – Daredevil simply doesn’t engage in the question of why he does what he does, not even to the point of citing his origin story. Nocenti has a tendency to create characters who are primarily delivery systems for her argument, which is fine when she has something to say about the subject. Here, she really doesn’t.