DAREDEVIL #253 (April 1988)
“Merry Christmas, Kingpin”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: John Romita Jr
Inker: Al Williamson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Max Scheele
Editor: Ralph Macchio

You might have picked up from the cover and the title that this story isn’t really about the Wildboys. It’s a Christmas story, and the main plot is basically that the Kingpin is Scrooge without the epiphany. He doesn’t see any ghosts, but he does refuse to give his staff the day off for Christmas (“a useless waste of a business day”), and he fails to intimidate a property owner because he doesn’t understand the power of the festive season. It’s that sort of issue.

The Wildboys – Jet and Spit – are a B-plot, and they only actually appear on six pages of this issue. But they do come back. They’ve made nine appearances in total, eight of which were in Daredevil. In particular, they’ll be included among the returning villains in issues #259-260. So they merit an entry, even if they don’t really have a spotlight story to debut in. (The Official Handbook claims that they were also among Ammo’s gang in the previous issue, but so far as I can see, there’s nothing on the page to support that.)

The issue opens on Christmas Eve, with the Wildboys driving through Hell’s Kitchen and making a general nuisance of themselves. They’re harassing women, driving onto the pavement so that pedestrians have to dive out of their way, and robbing charity collectors. Basically, they’re just a couple of assholes. Everyone hates them – one person even says that he hopes they get shot.

The single exception to that is Eightball. He’s one of the Fatboys skater kids who’ve been hanging around in the background throughout the Hell’s Kitchen run. The Fatboys are a group of pre-teen children, who serve as a continuing background presence for Daredevil to interact with, though most of them remain anonymous and interchangeable. Eightball stops to help someone who was hurt by the Wildboys, but even so, he’s blown away by how fearless and cool these guys are. They can do whatever they like! When Daredevil shows up, Eightball is unable to conceal how awesome he thinks the Wildboys are, and is embarrassed when Daredevil picks up on what he’s thinking.

We catch up with the Wildboys again later in the issue. They’re ransacking shops. To the extent they have a plan at all, it’s simply that the police tend to be underresourced on Christmas Eve, so they’re likely to get away with more. Naturally, Daredevil catches up to them. They put up a bit of “he’s just a guy with a stick” bravado, and then Daredevil defeats them in one page without them getting in a single blow.

Admittedly, Daredevil is rather more brutal in this than you might normally expect. He deliberately chokes them into unconsciousness, while telling them “Merry Christmas, scum.” A crowd applauds. (“Another mugger off the streets is the best present a New Yorker can get.”) Eightball shows up and tries to appropriate some of the Wildboys’ stolen goods for himself. But he runs away after a stern talking to from Daredevil.

The issue wraps up with Eightball giving his beloved skateboard to his friend Darla as a present (and getting a replacement from Matt as a reward). Matt celebrates Christmas at the law clinic with all the people that he’s helped. And the Kingpin grouches about how Matt surely has to be miserable now that he’s spending his life hanging around with these low-income losers, right? Right?

In plot terms, the Wildboys are just a pair of annoying thugs who make Hell’s Kitchen a worse place to live. For Daredevil, they’re a nuisance rather than a threat. They’re doing enough damage to merit his attention but that’s about it. They exist to be beaten up in a way that furthers a subplot about Daredevil’s own mental stability. But Romita gives them plenty of charisma in their character designs, complete with Jet’s weirdly long tongue and a real sense of glee in their rampage. And the fact that there’s just the two of them – not a loner, not a gang – gives them something. Awful as they are, they clearly care about one another.

Eightball’s not entirely wrong – there’s something kind of enviable about their complete fearlessness and refusal to play by the rules. Right up to the point where they run into someone who can actually force them into line. Then it all goes to pieces. They cannot, in fact, do what they like.

Bizarre as it seems, you really do feel that they could have worked as regular characters. Not, to be clear, by positioning them as a real threat. Instead, they help to support Daredevil’s status as the neighbourhood hero of Hell’s Kitchen, by giving him a street level problem that just about merits his attention, and that everyone else can unite against. In fact, when they come back in issue #260, they do get to deliver the final blow to Daredevil – but the guy is already beaten down and hallucinating by the time they get anywhere near him, so it hardly counts.

Still, the Wildboys could have developed into recurring neighbourhood figures that Daredevil needed to keep in line. In other words, they could have slipped into Turk’s role as the low-level comedy villains that Daredevil beats up for information. You suspect that might well have been the original idea – as a mixed-race duo, the Wildboys are a lot less problematic than Turk was. And they’re somewhat well placed to take on his role. But as we’ll see, Nocenti winds up moving on from the Hell’s Kitchen setting fairly soon. Without that context, it wouldn’t really make sense to use the Wildboys. There’s an alternative world, though, where they became staples of the series.