Daredevil Villains #79: Bushwacker
DAREDEVIL #248-249 (November/December 1987)
“A Cage in Search of a Bird” / “Kiss and Kill”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: Rick Leonardi
Inker: Al Williamson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourists: Petra Scotese (#248) and Max Scheele (#249)
Editor: Ralph Macchio.
For the first time in a while, we’ve skipped a couple of issues. Issue #246 is a fill-in issue by Jim Owlsey and Tom Morgan, and the guest villain is Chance, on loan from Spider-Man. Issue #247 is the second Project Reptile story, and we’ve already covered them. That takes us to issues #248-249, which lead into the second phase of Ann Nocenti’s run. Up to this point, we’ve had a lot of one-off villains, but from here on we start hitting names that stick around.
Somehow, a year into her run, the book still doesn’t have a regular penciller. That will finally change in the next story when John Romita Jr comes aboard. In the meantime, the last of the guest artists is Rick Leonardi. He was fairly well established by this point. Although Marvel hadn’t yet given him a regular assignment on an ongoing title, he had drawn Vision & The Scarlet Witch and two Cloak & Dagger minis, and fill-ins on high profile books like Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men. Naturally, he brings a lot of grace to Daredevil, and his Hell’s Kitchen is brightly kinetic. Under Leonardi, Daredevil looks like an optimistic comic.
The story opens with Karen Page setting up a legal advice clinic and trying to railroad Matt into getting involved. She’s been trying for a while to persuade him not to rely solely on violence. At first, Matt is less than thrilled – he doesn’t have a licence to practice law any more, and besides, the whole point of “Born Again” was that losing his professional life just made him free. But Karen argues that if he really wants to help in Hell’s Kitchen, then his legal skills are the ones that he really needs to be using.
Soon enough, Matt is won round. For one thing, hitting people turns out to be quite a bad way of resolving landlord-tenant disputes. For another, in an echo of Daredevil’s own origin story, a small boy called Tyrone Janson loses his sight while swimming, as a result of the sinister polluting practices of the Kelco corporation. And Tyrone needs Matt’s legal support. This takes up most of issue #248, but it’s the start of a lengthy Kingpin storyline that has nothing to do with Bushwacker, so we’ll come back to it in a future instalment.
The new villain finally shows up towards the end of the issue. We first see him as a hitman who’s going through a list of addresses, and gunning down the residents. We’re told later that the victims are all mutant geniuses – at this point in continuity, a rare outing for civilian mutants with actually useful powers. But Bushwacker seems to be killing them simply for money, rather than because of any particular anti-mutant animus of his own. It’s his unnamed employers who seem to have the issue with mutants. The story gives conflicting messages about Bushwacker’s approach to killing. In issue #249, we’re told that his killings are “distinctive, drawn out, tortuous”, and he’s generally presented as a sadist. But the murder in issue #248 is actually a fairly swift execution. And while he does string along one of his victims before murdering her in issue #249, he seems to be enjoying her obliviousness to what’s going to happen, rather than actively setting out to scare her.
Instead of simply carrying a normal gun, Bushwacker can shape-change his right arm into a built-in gun. This is his thing – it’s the gimmick that everyone remembers about him. On one view, the gun arm is almost a polite concession to the idea that Daredevil is a superhero book, and therefore ought to feature some supervillains. As Leonardi draws it, beneath the skin, Bushwacker’s gun is a normal-looking firearm. So for most practical purposes, Bushwacker’s superpower is that he has a gun. Sure, he incorporates the gun instead of carrying it… but at root, he’s a gunman. You can imagine situations where it would be genuinely useful to have the gun built in, of course. Getting past security searches would be an obvious example. But none of those situations are relevant here. He doesn’t really do anything that he couldn’t have achieved with a concealed firearm.
We get some fragments of his back story. At some point, we’re told, he was a priest. The gun arm, according to him, was an “old CIA present for me going to the right country in the wrong year”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Some mysterious event has left him traumatised, but he won’t explain what it was, even to his wife Marilyn. Now, Bushwacker is a thrillseeker who needs excitement in order to distract him from his awful memories. The real relevance of making the gun an implant seems to be that it implies something about the sort of work he was doing for the CIA in the past, and also adds him to the book’s list of mentally damaged living weapons.
This sets up a three-way conflict. First, there’s Bushwacker. He’s killing mutants, but only for the money and the thrills. Second, there’s Daredevil. He gets involved because Bushwacker’s wife Marilyn asks the law clinic for help. She suspects what he’s up to but insists that he’s a fundamentally decent man with mental health problems, and wants him taken into custody for everyone’s safety, including his own. Naturally, Matt assures Marilyn that her husband won’t come to any harm. Unfortunatelly, third, there’s Wolverine, who has very strong feelings about the killing of mutant artists. He wants Bushwacker dead.
In 2026, there would be a very obvious angle here: Bushwacker is another damaged living weapon, just like Wolverine himself, and Wolverine is misreading him as a simply anti-mutant extremist. The living weapon angle wasn’t so well established as an aspect of Wolverine’s character in 1987, but it was a major theme of Nocenti’s Daredevil and it seems key to the story. The main plot is as you’d expect: Daredevil wants to bring Bushwacker in, Wolverine wants him dead, and while the heroes are squabbling, Bushwacker kills again. But Bushwacker also claims to identify with Wolverine far more than with Daredevil – Wolverine, he says, is another impulse-driven killer, while Daredevil is a “mealy-mouthed bleeding-heart humanitarian”. And that ties in to a whole theme about the fragility of the legal and ethical framework that Daredevil claims to believe in, and whether it’s just a reassuring construct – something which is going to be a big part of the Kelco/Kingpin plot.
In the end, Bushwacker tries to commit suicide by blowing up a petrol tanker. He survives, but we’re told that he’s nearly dead (and he’s certainly in rough shape the next time we see him). Wolverine grudgingly concedes that he can’t justify killing a defeated enemy who’s already in this condition, and allows Daredevil to hand Bushwacker over to the authorities. And in the epilogue, Marilyn tells Matt how horrible it is that her decent, troubled husband has been left mutilated after an encounter with two supposed heroes. So even though Bushwacker is off the streets at the end of the story, Daredevil himself achieves very little. He doesn’t manage to protect Bushwacker from himself or get him off the streets before he kills again. Whether he might have done better if Wolverine hadn’t got involved is left to our imagination.
Some later stories have taken issue #248 to mean that Bushwacker is a kind of artist murderer, but Nocenti’s original idea seems to have been simply that he was another mentally broken super-soldier, driven into some sort of emotional detachment by his traumatic experiences and searching for intense experiences that could keep his demons at bay – something that mostly seems to work for him. Where the priest stuff was meant to fit into that is anyone’s guess. Nocenti herself only uses Bushwacker once more in her run, in issues #259-260. But that’s not really a sequel – it’s one of those stories where Daredevil has to fight all of his recent villains at the same time. After that, Nocenti just leaves his plot where it lies.
His next appearance was in a back-up strip by Gregory Wright and Whilce Poractio in the 1989 Daredevil Annual (the one that’s listed on Marvel Unlimited as Annual #5, though it was mistakenly published as a second Annual #4). This story reveals that Bushwacker was a priest who was driven mad when some of his child parishioners died from drug overdoses, and he yearns for revenge on the local drug lord. Technically this resolves loose ends from Nocenti’s stories, but not in an interesting way; it seals off far more potential than it generates.
Bushwacker does eventually return in some more Daredevil stories – he’s in issues #334-336 from Gregory Wright’s run in 1994, and he shows up in the final issue of volume 1 in 1998. Charles Soule also used him in 2018. But mostly, rather than sticking around in Daredevil’s rogue’s gallery, he became a recognisable Marvel Universe utility player, because the visual of the gun arm sticks in the mind, particularly with the uncomfortably fleshy look that Leonardi gives it. The gun is what people remember about Bushwacker – frankly, it’s the only thing they remember about Bushwacker, since much of his starting concept and personality as a damaged thrillseeker have long since fallen by the wayside.
But even without those elements, his look and gimmick have proved memorable enough to keep him coming back for over 30 years now. Sometimes all you need is a man with a built-in gun.
Annoyingly the writers and artists couldn’t keep straight whether Bushwacker’s face was supposed to be disfigured after his first story.
In a Punisher story, Bushwacker was said to be working for the Marauders. This completely contradicts the eventual explanation for the Mutant Massacre and was eventually ignored.
Bushwacker is eventually retconned into a mutant himself in the Daredevil vs. Punisher miniseries.
I remembered Chance as having debuted in Daredevil before moving over to Spider-Man, but I must have that timeline wrong.
Bushwacker’s appeal is that he doesn’t need much explanation. His power is gun. You don’t need an exposition box to explain what the blasts do. You do get some cool visuals of him morphing his arm, eating bullets, etcetera, which you wouldn’t with a generic gun-toting goon. His motivation is kill people for money, or occasionally, kill people out of bigotry. A very easy guy to have beaten up in the first three pages of a story about something else.
Meanwhile, the legal advice clinic means we are into the Nocenti era proper. “Matt can’t appear in court but still gives legal advice” is an idea future writers will return to, most notably Mark Waid.
@Skippy- Chance had one appearance in Web of Spider-Man 15, then appeared in Daredevil 246, then went back to Spider-Man. Maybe you never read Web of Spider-Man 15 and assumed that Daredevil 246 was Chance’s first appearance.
(Note: there is a reference to #247 in the article that is probably meant to read #249.)
Bushwacker strikes me as something of another Bullet prototype – a nearly finised one, with his wife Marilyn fulfilling some of the same roles that Bullet’s son Lance has.
It may or may not have ever turned up again, but in this pair of stories a main trait from Bushwacker is his deep hypocrisy. He has hardly any impulse control whatsoever, and seems to find the idea of respect for women quite alien. Even physically he reminds one a lot of early Eddie Brock, down to being a beefy blond mullet wearer.
His wife Marilyn is slightly more subtly yet still very deeply damaged. One gets the sense that she lives in denial literally all the time and it is something of a miracle that she found the courage to do anything at all about her husband’s murder hobby. I wonder if Nocenti meant her to be a dark mirror version of Karen Page.
By this point the general tone of this run was well established. We get a variety of scenes lampshading the contrast between statements and reality. My favorite may be Matt telling the officers at the police station that “there always ways” in #248 at the police station just seconds before deciding that he has no way of giving witness to the situation that blinded Tyrone. I so hate that lazy-and-proud expression…
I might guess that Bushwacker is referring to Vietnam, sometime prior to 1964. The CIA had been operating in Vietnam since the 1950s, long before the Vietnam War was started. Although, I guess that would depend on Bushwacker’s intended age. I can’t see many other real-world examples at the time that would fit with Bushwacker’s comment. If it was specifically a secret ops mission on the CIA’s part, he wouldn’t say it was the “wrong year”, which implies that it was something at the time covert that would turn into an openly declared war.
@Luis: Thanks, I’ve corrected that.
No mention of Random, the more xtreem version of the same character that came along a few years later?
The Random from Peter David’s X-Factor?
They are not at all similar IMO. Not even in powers.
And if anything, Bushwacker is far more of a dangerous nutcase than Random, who is just a mercenary with weird powers. He is more comparable to Paladin than to Bushwacker.
Before Random, before Bushwacker…there was Grimjack.
Right up until you said this guy had a gun for an arm I assumed he was a member of the Serpent Society, but that’s Bushmaster.
Random was developed into a unique character over time, but at the start, he was a big beefy amoral mercenary who had an arm that turned into a meaty gun. He was basically the same guy.
By the way, I like to think that when Daredevil and Wolverine meet, they have all their conversations in low whispers, like actors in a modern TV drama.
I liked when they kind of gave Random the “Claremont Mr. Sinister” makeover and revealed that Random was a goofy ‘90s teenager who looked and acted like such a cliche because he thought that all those terrible early-‘90s pop culture stereotypes were awesome.
Yeah that was cool. I like all those characters who are boys pretending to be men and getting it just a bit wrong. Rage, Shazam, Tom Hanks, they’re always fun. It’s probably for the same reason I’m always entertained by people trying to do Australian accents.
Man, this has nothing to do with anything, but every time I see Wolverine’s brown-and-tans drawn by a good artist, I get retroactively mad over how many years Marvel insisted on keeping him in yellow and blue. Like, what the hell, Jim Lee?! I’m as nostalgic as the next guy (and the guy after him), but a better costume is a better costume. Sure, the New Mutants look great in yellow, but almost no one else does.
Bushwacker’s attachment to the Punisher in the 90s managed to get him an appearance as a boss in Capcom’s 1993 beat-’em-up game starring the vigilante, which was their first Marvel licensed game. Amusingly, he appeared there alongside two members of the Reavers — Bonebreaker and Pretty Boy — and Bushwacker wouldn’t have been a bad member of that team.
He also appeared in two Punisher games in 2005 and 2009. Aside for Bullseye and Elektra, I don’t know if any other Daredevil villains fared that well in video games.
Priest, CIA, “right country – wrong year”, 1987.
Sounds like Nicaragua.
“The living weapon angle wasn’t so well established as an aspect of Wolverine’s character in 1987, but it was a major theme of Nocenti’s Daredevil and it seems key to the story.”
I’m curious as to when this became a key part of Wolverine’s lore (is it the BWS ‘Weapon X’ story?), especially since it seems to be a touchpoint in her work.
(It’s kind of interesting that Nuke has now appeared in more Wolverine stories than Daredevil stories. Nocenti never wrote Nuke, but her first issue with Hazzard continues to explore the same ideas, and we see that again with Bushwhacker here. Of course, Miller also dealt with similar ideas, but generally in a less nuanced way.)
The priest background was a ret-con by a different writer which also wasn’t a very good one (as pointed out). I’m not sure why the later writer thought it was a good idea…Nocenti established he was working for the CIA. So, he saw street drugs kill some of his young parishioners and it…influenced him to join the CIA to go on covert ops missions…? How do you get from point A to point B?
I had a feeling Random would come up in the replies. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to get the two characters confused, especially considering PAD’s original characterization of Random as a walking lampoon of ’90s cliches. They do (or did) have a bit more in common superficially than “guy with gun for an arm.”
I’m reminded of a weird bit from the X-Factor annual that introduced 1993 character find Charon, a childhood acquaintance of Guido turned demonic villain. In a twisted parody of Batman’s origin, there’s a flashback to young Charon’s parent’s being murdered by a mysterious gunman heavily implied to be Random, of all people. This was never confirmed or followed up on. I thought it would have been a fun twist and in-joke very befitting of Peter David if that had turned out to be Bushwhacker instead of Random. Unfortunately PAD left the series soon thereafter and I have no idea where he ultimately planned to take Random’s character, had he even continued to develop him further.
The priest background is in the original story.
When he’s talking to himself after killing his victim in issue #248, Bushwacker says: “I should’ve stayed a priest. Hope this anti-mutant craze keeps up. Killin’ mutants pays top rates. I’m gettin’ rich, fast. Pays better than prayin’ for it ever did.”
His wife also mentions it in issue #249: “You know he was a priest before I met him, but he quit.”
Oh, OK. I haven’t read these comics since 2005, so I don’t remember everything. At least the nonsensical street drugs motivation background was added by a different writer. Yeah, that timeline is not going to work for Vietnam unless Bushwacker was approaching 50 by 1987.
It is most likely a reference to Nicaragua then. The “wrong year” might refer to Bushwacker going there after the Boland Amendment was passed.
It seems like one of the big differences between Nuke and Bushwacker is Nuke’s specificity vs. Bushwacker’s broader themes.
Nuke is very tied to specific time periods, namely the Vietnam War of the 1970s and its role in 1980s political and pop culture. Nuke comes across as Frank Miller’s commentary about both the foolishness of cultural desires to somehow “undo” or “make up for” the U.S.’s failure in Vietnam through fantasies of redemptive violence and through ongoing proxy wars in Latin and South America.
Miller’s Nuke himself is recognizable as an exaggeration of the pop culture tropes around the “damaged” Vietnam veteran, still hurt by the war and by the mistreatment of its veterans, willing to burn down the village to save it, and addicted to drugs.
In contrast, Bushwacker seems to be set up with a more general set of what Nocenti seems to see as American pathologies. He’s a swaggering jerk who sees violence as so much a part of his identity that he’s literally had himself made into a gun. He’s got a vaguely religious background, but thinks of the priesthood as a less profitable vocation than killing.
And while he does refer to past trauma, he buries it under his desire for violence, and his anger in his second and final Nocenti story has to do with the cosmetic damage to his face that he blames on Daredevil and Wolverine, suggesting it’s about self-image as much as anything else.
If Project: Reptile’s agent Hazzard was, per Paul’s analysis, Nuke played as a character and not a symbol, I think Bushwacker reads more as a Nocenti-like take on a set of themes than as a well-developed character with a distinct psychology.
He’s a crass mercenary in personality, a very literal weapon to point at others in concept, and a character whose vague past gestures at depth even as Bushwacker is fundamentally nothing but swaggering, entitled violence in actual behavior.
When he returns for issues #259-60, his attack on DD has him ranting about gruesomely killing Daredevil in revenge for his facial scarring, then gloating about how he “loves a good bang” as he blasts a large parade balloon on which Daredevil has fallen. But then, most of the villains there get little characterization in their splash-page-followed-by-winning sequences, save Typhoid and arguably Bullet.
Bushwacker’s wife, too, comes across as a satire of the devoted woman, the perfect wife who stands by her man no matter what. Her relationship to him seems as if it can’t be read as realism, but rather as absurdity. When Bushwacker turns up again in issue #259, she’s nowhere to be seen. (In contrast, in that same issue, we get a scene of especially vile paternal neglect on Bullet’s part.) In that story, he’s just an revenge-crazed maniac with a shade of paranoia who wants his gun arm reattached with no surprises.
We’ll get similarly ironic takes on this feminine archetype with Typhoid’s Mary persona and with Number Nine later in the run. With that in mind, I think it makes sense to read Bushwacker (and the next bad guy, Bullet) as Nocenti’s takes on masculinity and its myths and archetypes in American culture.
‘Wacker’s appearances in the “Acts of Vengeance” story in Punisher War Journal seems to me as if they’re written to be the character’s last appearance. His wife abandons him, there’s a perfunctory reveal about who was paying him to kill mutants tossed off in the dialogue, and Frank Castle seemingly kills him at the end as Bushwacker engages in futile prayer. This may be part of why the story seems so “off.”
As far as later uses go, I quite liked Al Ewing making him a particularly psychopathic” man in black” type working for General Fortean in Immortal Hulk, where most of the dialogue called him “Agent Burbank.” That felt like it actually built on the themes Nocenti established for the character.
As for Random, I can see the superficial similarity with the gun-arm morphing, but Random’s gimmick in his early appearances was that he was endlessly adaptable protoplasm. His gun arm didn’t shoot bullets and bombs, but rather whatever would neutralize his opponents (which included a tornado and a weird…disc thing that could hurt Madrox without making him split off duplicates).
I read PAD’s Random more as a parody of vaguely overpowered, superficially badass 90s villains and heroes, with a name flagging up the plot-serving, “random” nature of his abilities.
Where does Wolverine’s appearence here fit in with his appearences in Uncanny X-men?
wwk5d: According to Paul’s post “The Incomplete Wolverine – 1987” it’s after Uncanny X-Men #220 and before Alpha Flight #52.
Always happy to see Leonardi on art duties, but I prefer Terry Austin as his inker.
Interesting to think of Daredevil stories in the ’80s in terms of men’s roles in society: protection/physical strength/violence/Daredevil v. support/compassion/advocacy/Matt Murdock.
I read this and was a little confused because I remember Bushwacker being the villain in Luke Cage season 2, and having a whole different deal. But then I looked it up, and that was Bushmaster.
@John, then let’s do this Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe style!
Bushwacher (Carl Burbank), not to be confused with:
– Bushmaster (John McIver), enemy of Luke Cage & Iron Fist
– Bushmaster, Cruz, John McIver’s son
– Bushmaster (Quincy McIver), brother of John, member of the Serpent Society
– Bushman (Raoul Bushman), nemesis of Moon Knight
– Bassmaster Classic, an annual professional bass fishing tournament held on Lake Mead, Nevada since 1971, a sport which Hawkeye (Clint Barton) once played a simulation of as a video game in front of Black Widow (Natasha Romanov). This is one reason why Clint’s wife left him. The other was he took the word of her rapist’s ghost over her. Never date Hawkeye.
Gah, that should read “Bushwacker.” I want to bushwack this lack of an edit option.
Also not to be confused with:
Bushwhacker-(Australian) a person, often a criminal, who lives off the land.
Bushbaby-A very cute small primate living in Africa.
In listing characters with guns in their bod, there’s also Akihito Yoshitomi’s manga Eat-Man about a guy who can eat disassembled guns piece by piece and then generate them from his body later.
Back at Marvel, there’s also Lionel Dibbs from Amazing Adventures v.2 #6 through 8, a “relevant” villain who got a cybernetic gun-hand from Stark Industries (!) and then tried to use an amnesiac Black Bolt to destroy a slum to make a political point.
Why yes, he was named “Dibbs” for the sake of referencing the most famous line of dialogue from the film In the Heat of the Night.
There’s a lot of questions raised by the Lionel Dibbs story-line. It wasn’t the most thought-out plotting by Mr. Roy Thomas.
Lionel Dibbs wants to destroy the slum where he grew up before he dies so no one else has to have that childhood. Except, where are all the poor people supposed to go after the slums are razed? Usually that plot goes along with a developer’s scheme to gentrify the neighbourhood after all the poor people are forced out.
Next, Tony Stark just randomly gives out prosthetic weapon hands to people? Which brings up myriad more pondering. Does Stark only gift this people who will die soon? That seems to be sort of a waste, when he could presumably also give prosthetics to people who won’t soon be dead. Is Stark a mad scientist? “Please, Mr. Stark. I lost my leg in the war.” “You get a free laser sword prosthetic.” “What? What would I do with…? Can’t you give me a free prosthetic leg?” “No. I make weapons. It’s what I do. How would I know about making replacement prosthetic limbs? You can get a free gun hand or the laser sword leg. Nothing else.”
Thom H: “Always happy to see Leonardi on art duties, but I prefer Terry Austin as his inker.”
Yeah, I looked up this issue just because Paul mentioned Leonardi. And he was certainly good at this time, but man, SPIDER-MAN 2099…
@Chris V- Those Inhumans stories in Amazing Adventures were a mess. There was the criminal who puts on Black Bolt’s costume and tries to use his powers only to be killed by a lighrning bolt for some reason. (The narration implies it’s because he’s not Inhuman.) There’s no explanation of what the Trikon are or where they come from. And the boy Joey is kidnapped by the Trikon and he shows up in Avengers 95 but there’s no clear explanation of what happened to the Trikon. Some of this is due to the Inhumans feature being cancelled early but not all of it. And Marvel didn’t bother to explain what the Trikon were or what happened to them for nearly two decades.