Daredevil Villains #77: The Nameless One
DAREDEVIL #243-244 (June & July 1987)
“Don’t Touch Me” / “Touch Me”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: Louis Williams
Inkers: Al Williamson, Danny Bulanadi & Tony DeZuinga
Colourists: Christie Scheele & Paul Becton
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio
(Note: I skipped this post by mistake last time, so it’s appearing out of sequence. For #78, see here.)
After a string of one-off villains, most of whom are mentally ill serial killers, Ann Nocenti goes in a different direction: magic. Specifically, voodoo.
The last time Daredevil did voodoo was in issue #130, cover date February 1976. That’s a story by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown and Klaus Janson, in which a voodoo priest called Brother Zed uses his illusion powers to convince his followers that he has real magical power, and then exploits their belief for his own gain. The basic concept isn’t too bad when taken in isolation, but the story came out at a time when black characters were largely absent from Daredevil, and if your sole representation of black America is to have them decapitating chickens in Central Park, then that’s a problem.
Eleven years have passed, since then, but in terms of the diversity of its cast, less has changed in Daredevil than you might think. The generic bystanders certainly have a lot more variation than they used to. But the book’s most prominent black character is still Turk, a comic relief character, and even he hasn’t appeared in Nocenti’s run. The Hell’s Kitchen supporting cast is small, and consists of Karen Page and a group of street kids called the Fatboys – they aren’t all white, but the ones with developed personalities are. Rotgut and his mother were black, to be fair, although Rotgut himself was an albino. So while things have changed in 11 years, this still stands out as a Story With A Lot Of Black People In It.
Danny Guitar, so called because he carries his gun in a guitar case, is a Haitian immigrant drug dealer. His gimmick is that he uses voodoo, or at least voodoo symbolism, to keep his underlings in line. When one of his drug runners tries to leave the group, Danny has him injected with a drug overdose that sends him to the hospital – and it’s 1987, so let’s give a big Daredevil welcome to crack! But Danny also has the kid’s house filled with voodoo patterns and symbols in order to send a message. Privately, Danny claims that he doesn’t believe in any of this stuff any more – he used to when he lived in Haiti, but he freed himself from fear and superstition by moving to New York. Or that’s his story, anyway.
Up to this point, the core idea is very similar to Wolfman’s story. But there are differences. Nocenti treats voodoo as a particularly colourful example of superstition in general, something exceptional in degree rather than in kind. The story ties in to a theme she’s been developing about Daredevil’s own use of religious imagery, the intimidation factor that goes with it, and how his self-image as a hero squares with the reality of being a man who beats up drug dealers in alleyways. This story’s B-plot involves Karen Page and police officer “Bucko” Leary encouraging Daredevil to maybe use some of those legal skills of his and gather some actual evidence to convict criminals, instead of just beating them unconscious and dumping them outside a police station. “We don’t need to use voodoo and fascism to get justice done,” says Leary.
The other difference is that in Wolfman’s story, voodoo was all an illusion and the believers were just gullible. In this version, voodoo is real. So Danny’s old mambo (priestess) shows up in New York with her followers, planning to punish Danny for taking voodoo in vain. The Nameless One is a magical creation that she sends after Danny. He seems to be one of Danny’s victims from earlier in the issue, raised from the dead, and empowered by the mambo’s followers sacrificing their lives. Basically he’s a zombie animated by the souls of the believers.
While this is happening, Daredevil is dutifully trying to gather evidence on Danny, by tailing him and recording his conversations with a portable tape deck. For some reason, Daredevil has decided that it would be an excellent idea to dress up as a black man while doing this. Or I think that’s what’s happening. The art is confusing – the colouring vanishes immediately once he switches to his Daredevil costume. So I guess it’s a mask, but it hasn’t aged well either way. At any rate, this leads to the mambo sending the Nameless One after Daredevil, not because she has anything in particular against him, but simply because she’s trying to pursue her own crusade against Danny Guitar, and Daredevil is in the way.
The Nameless One is a superhumanly strong man with chalk white skin, patterns drawn onto his body, and minimal speech. He’s just a weapon, really. Everyone assures us that he still smells like a corpse. He easily despatches Daredevil, and leaves the hero’s bloody glove in his and Karen’s apartment as a warning. This in turn ties back to a subplot in which Karen has been agonising about the conflict in her mind between the man she loves and the violence she hates – she regards the glove as symbolising both Matt’s loving hand and Daredevil’s fist. She also blames herself for getting Daredevil into trouble by trying to make him, you know, prove anything.
Daredevil wakes up to find his mask and glove both missing. He improvises a new mask, but thanks to the power of voodoo, it feels as if his ungloved hand doesn’t work. He’s also uncharacteristically intimidated at the thought of a rematch with the Nameless Ones. The basic idea is that the mambo is trying to sideline Daredevil, and that if violence is his only weapon then it’s a good enough solution to make him scared of it. She gives Daredevil’s real mask to the Nameless One, and declares him to be the new Man Without Fear.
Danny, meanwhile, is being driven insane by voodoo, and starts appearing in public with facepaint that he doesn’t even realise he’s wearing. He gets arrested by Leary’s cops, only for the Nameless One to show up and overpower everyone. At first Leary thinks it’s just an illusion, but he finds out the hard way that the Nameless One is bulletproof. Of course, since it’s his book, Daredevil still shows up to save the day, and puts up a respectable fight anyway until he retrieves his mask and glove, which seems to break the spell. He and the Nameless One have a staredown, after which Daredevil takes him out with a single punch. The defeated Nameless One seems to melt away, but apparently it’s an illusion, since he shows up at the end of the issue with his mambo. That scene seems to promise a rematch, but Nocenti never comes back to the story.
The Nameless One’s story has aged a little better than its 1970s predecessor. Not only does it treat voodoo as part of a wider theme of symbolic initimidation, but this time the characters who take voodoo seriously are right. On the other hand, the very fact that it isn’t just a symbol slightly undercuts the point, and the B-plot about whether Daredevil should be trying to gather evidence runs into a common problem with stories that query the ground rules of the superhero genre. Once you’ve raised the question of whether vigilante violence is really acceptable, you’ve backed yourself into a corner, because if the answer is “no” then either the main character becomes an antihero or the book ends. In the long run, Nocenti is more willing than most to explore the possibility of Daredevil being an antihero who thinks he’s a hero, but in the short term the book can’t help but cycle back to him being right.
The Nameless One eventually makes a further appearance in issue #310, an Infinity War tie-in. That story also retcons his mambo, who becomes the sister of Calypso, a somewhat similar Spider-Man character. Aside from that, the Nameless One doesn’t appear again, even though Nocenti seems to have had it in mind to go back to him.
It’s not that Nocenti avoids magic – there’s a lot of magic in upcoming stories. But the Nameless One is still a relatively street-level character; he’s a glorified zombie being sent to take revenge on a drug dealer. When Nocenti leans into magical elements in the future, they’ll be much bigger, much more abstract and conceptual, and frequently downright surreal. In that context, perhaps the Nameless One was just a little too ordinary to fit.
Clearly Matt was taking disguise lessons from Amara Aquilla.
Turk doesn’t appear in Daredevil itself after Born Again until Daredevil 351. He appears in a Daredevil Graphic Novel written by Miller, a couple of Marvel Comics Presents stories and a Night Thrasher issue. But Nocenti, Chichester and DeMatteis didn’t want to use him.
I’ve been reading Paul’s work for something like 30 years now, and “it’s 1987, so let’s give a big Daredevil welcome to crack!” might be my favorite phrase he’s ever written. I have no idea why, but it hit perfectly for me.
I need to see the sequence where a blind man puts on convincing makeup or gets the color right on a mask…
Maybe Karen did it for him? She used to be an actress.
There also seems to be a lot of play with identity in this story. The Nameless One and the mambo are defined by their functions. Daredevil, in turn, loses part of his identity to the Nameless one ad wins when he reclaims it.
There’s a parallel to the tough questions the other characters raise about Matt, playing off of the themes Frank Miller had earlier emphasized. Who is Daredevil? An agent who supplements the system, one who serves a higher Law, or simply a thrillseeker or vengeance-seeker indulging his personal desires and pretending it’s justice?
Even Danny Guitar has an identity issue, albeit in a culturally reductive fashion we wouldn’t see in a story today. He thinks he’s broken from is old beliefs and culture enough to cynically use them as a tool in his new life, but then his past shows up and loses that whole new sense of self.
RIP Gerry Conway.
Ah, voodoo comics. I usually saw them as the dark side of the “magical black person” in franchises about white people, as Spike Lee used to call them (without using the word he used). Marvel, in particular, used to LOVE their evil voodoo people, including types like Black Talon (who was just Evil Chicken Man). True, you had Brother Voodoo, who was good, but he wouldn’t be taken terribly seriously until the 2000s. Even back when the comics code wouldn’t let zombies be called “zombies,” you had crazy voodoo villains. It was the black version of “evil Natives with magic” or “evil Asians with magic and lots of rings” or “evil Arabs with magic and lots of ring and turbans and flying carpets” and so on. They’ve all aged poorly, though the late 1980s was still a time when they were common enough.
As for the Nameless One, he reminded me how there have been many zombie villains in comics, but the one who has endured the most and seen the most mainstream success was/is Solomon Grundy. The connection to the 19th century nursery rhyme helps, but so does a ton of usage, and appearing on SuperFriends. Maybe it helped that his reanimation had nothing to do with ethnic stereotypes, unlike most of these voodoo zombies. There’s Simon Garth, Marvel’s titular Zombie, but he’s an anti-hero and still not as mainstream.
As a kid, I liked Houngan, where you had a voodoo guy mixed with (comic book) super science.
In fairness, the “African Storm” episode of X-MEN EVOLUTION from 2001 featured a voodoo Hungan villain named…the Hungan. So some of those stereotypical villains were still popping up in comic related media into the 21st century.
Solomon Grundy’s an odd case, since he was inspired by Theodore Sturgeon’s story “It” and bears little resemblance to pop-culture takes on the Voudon zombie. Grundy’s origin lifts from “It” in suggesting a weird natural phenomenon that builds a new, not-quite-living creature around a corpse in a bog.
In his first story, he’s closer to a tabula rasa t han anything, and his second appearance plays up the “plant matter” angle by having him revived with a chlorophyll injection.
He doesn’t get written as a zombie-like creature until the 1990s. Prior to that, he’s more of a bizarre freak occurrence as in the Sturgeon story. Heck, after his first appearance, the Golden Age comics drop references to the skeleton of Cyrus Gold and retell Grundy’s origin as if he’s the result of spontaneous generation due to sunlight and swamp muck.
More broadly, when Grundy was created, zombies in popular fiction were usually treated like entranced people, not reanimated corpses. Depressingly, these depictions were often an outgrowth of racist media fabrications regarding “white slavery” and depictions of cultures of color as primitive and superstitious.
It wasn’t just comic media. The movie The Devil’s Advocate (1997) blatantly equated Voodoo with Satanism.
@Mark Coale: I thought Houngan was so cool! I’m a big Brotherhood of Evil fan, though, so I’m easy to impress.
His costume has been updated in his most recent appearances (AFAIK), which is probably best. Perez was amazing, obviously, but sometimes a little too flamboyant with the costume designs.
Grundy is def more related to swamp Thing and Man Thing than zombies.
At one point, the deal was Grundys personality changed everything he was reanimated. Hence, the good/benevolent version in Starman. You also get the occasional “smart Grundy” usually with the writer wanting to make some commentary about brain v brawn. Like when we had the smart Blockbuster.
I dated a Haitian-American girl in high school (a loooong time ago), and she mentioned that her Catholic parents wouldn’t let her watch the 1988 movie The Serpent and the Rainbow because of its depiction of Voodoo. I don’t remember if it was because it was too real or presented Voodoo as too powerful, however. Either way, it’s another example of “evil Voodoo” being in the ‘80s/‘90s zeitgeist.
The Serpent and the Rainbow wasn’t bad in its portrayal of Vodou, especially for the time. It was much more even-handed, and it included a lot of political commentary. A houngan is depicted in a positive light. The Tonton Macoutes are the villains.
I remember talk at the time that serpent/rainbow was “well researched” on its subjects. But whether what was true in 1988 would pass muster in 2026 …
@Chris V – It was Santeria in the Devil’s Advocate, not voodoo. Santeria today arguably has a worse reputation than voodoo- partially because it’s been accused of cruelty to animals and partly because of the alleged links between Santeria and organized crime.
I haven’t seen the movie since it was first released on VHS. Did they specifically mention he was a practitioner of Santeria, or make the point that the guy was from Cuba or something? I don’t remember.
The movie wasn’t particularly smartly written. I expected that they would have made the association with Voodoo, as it was a practitioner living in the United States (although New York), and I kind of doubted their research went any further than “this is something else that will shock Christians or middle class white people”. I don’t know if there would have been something in the media about Santeria during the late-‘90s which would have caught the attention of the scriptwriter of the Devil’s Advocate.
Vodou does involve ritual sacrifice of animals too though. Especially for Petro lwa. Chicken or pigs often tend to be the animals sacrificed.
I will now have that sublime song stuck in my head,.
@Chris V- We’re both wrong. I found the quote on IMSDb:
” No. This is not Santeria. We are
not Voodoo. Candomble.
Obeayisne. None of that. We are
much older. Before. Before all
of it.”