DAREDEVIL #252 (March 1988)
“Ground Zero”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: John Romita Jr.
Inker: Al Williamson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Max Scheele
Editor: Ralph Macchio

For some reason, Daredevil #252 is a double sized issue. It’s not an anniversary issue. It’s not a fresh start. It’s not the climax of a long running storyline. It’s not even a turning point. Instead, it’s a tie-in to “Fall of the Mutants”, which was taking place over in Uncanny X-Men, New Mutants and X-Factor.

“Fall of the Mutants” wasn’t even a crossover. It consisted of three separate turning-point storylines that barely interacted with one another. But despite that, there were four tie-in issues. All four of them linked to X-Factor‘s storyline, in which Apocalypse and his Horsemen attack New York. The only connection with Daredevil is that it happens to take place in his city.

This turns out not to be a problem. Ann Nocenti has a story that she wants to tell here, and it’s about how everyone in Hell’s Kitchen reacts when a disaster hits and they fear the world might be ending. To do that story, you need a disaster, but the disaster itself isn’t the point, and so Nocenti doesn’t want to waste time in this book on actually setting it up or resolving it. A crossover provides a wonderful solution to this problem: it means that she doesn’t have to explain the disaster at all, and anyone who really cares can be referred to another book where the details actually matter. She doesn’t even need to recap the plot of the crossover, because it doesn’t matter. If you don’t know what’s happening or why… well, nor do any of the regular characters, and that’s the whole point.

Any X-Factor readers who bought this book on the strength of the crossover branding might have been a little disappointed, admittedly. X-Factor don’t appear at all. Apocalypse’s Horsemen are in it for two pages. Still, you can’t say it’s false advertised; the whole plot depends on the consequences of the X-Factor plot passing through.

You could also point out that these are New Yorkers from the Marvel Universe, and you might expect them to be a little bit more acclimatised to this sort of thing. But ultimately the Marvel Universe doesn’t exist to provide a single coherent setting; it’s a device for crossovers between different titles. These aren’t Marvel Universe New Yorkers, they’re Daredevil New Yorkers, and this sort of thing doesn’t happen in Daredevil.

Once the lights and the power are out, the story turns into a montage of various characters reacting to the chaos in different ways. And that’s where we get to Ammo.

Ammo’s strand of the story begins with him rallying followers to his cause. He declares that civilisation has fallen and that the world will now be “divided between the victors and the victims”. Basically he’s presenting himself as a Mad Max type alpha male, delighted at the collapse of all this stifling law and order. In appearance, Ammo is more of a New Romantic with a bit of army surplus gear. A lot of Nocenti’s New Yorkers seem to be completely on board with following him, and so Ammo leads them off to raid the armory. At first glance they seem like a bunch of bystanders, but the intention seems to be that they’re mostly drug addicts and the like.

Once they’re fully tooled up with guns, Ammo twigs that there may have been a problem with this idea. He now has an improvised militia of heavily armed lunatics who are emotionally exhausted and coming down from drugs. Ammo, who seems to be on cocaine himself, concludes that the solution to this problem is to attack a hospital and steal more drugs. It’s not exactly a long term plan – Ammo’s post-civilisation world seems largely to involve raiding the outposts of civilisation and hoping that somebody else will sort it all out before he runs out of resources. But Ammo’s not a long term thinker.

All this sits in contrast to Daredevil’s strand of the story, in which he helps Hell’s Kitchen residents make their way to that very same hospital in search of refuge, and generally tries to keep the show on the road while waiting for an actual plan to present itself. Obviously, that leads Daredevil and Ammo into conflict. There’s also a third thread, which never interacts with the other two, in which a criminal escapes jail during the chaos, only to find an abandoned baby and become its new carer.

Ammo is a Vietnam veteran – which means he must be pushing 30 at least, despite his appearance. He seems to have derived a might-makes-right lesson from his experiences there. But the story seems at pains to stress that the problem here is Ammo himself. Another group of veterans show up trying to do the right thing and use what they’ve learned to maintain some degree of order amidst the chaos, and they team up with Daredevil. In the end, the fight degenerates into Ammo going on a gun-toting rampage from the roof of an improvised tank. Daredevil defeats him, but then keeps beating the guy up just a little too long for the crowd’s comfort – he shrugs off their concerns, but we’re clearly meant to take this as troubling, as if there was a little more in common between the characters than Daredevil can recognise.

It’s a very good issue with a surprisingly oppressive atmosphere. It’s given a sickly quality by the colouring choices that are used to convey darkness – which don’t look like normal comic book darkness and result in pages of light blue or sequences that seem to take place in a fogbank. Ammo’s own thread is just one part of that, and makes more sense in that context. He also plays into the wider storyline theme of Kingpin trying to break Matt’s belief in the law and the system; Ammo represents a debased version of what happens without that. At the same time, his might-makes-right aspects have echoes of Daredevil’s vigilantism.

Without that wider context, Ammo is a lunatic who’s weirdly enthusiastic about the fall of civilisation; he just seems to want to watch everything burn. He’s apparently a decent enough fighter, since he manages to hold his own against Daredevil for several pages. But he doesn’t lend himself to being a recurring character. Nocenti uses him again in issues #259-260, but that’s a “Daredevil fights all the villains from the last year” story. After that, Ammo doesn’t appear again until 2017, when Charles Soule had him leading a group called the Munition Militia and trying to bring about the post-apocalyptic world of his dreams. That makes sense, if you’re going to use him, but like a character designed as a one-off for this specific issue.