Daredevil Villains #82: The Wildboys
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.
I can see that alternative world, but it would have to happen after Ann Nocenti ended her run.
To the extent that Nocenti uses comedy characters for levity (not much), they tend to be the protagonists.
I like that Matt is unusually violent in this issue with no explicit justification.
I have to assume that, besides the grit and frustrations that we have seen he go through during pretty much this whole run making him blunter around the edges, the Wildboys are the perfect representation of what he most fears and despises: the self-indulgent fools that his father kept scaring him away from ever becoming.
Jack Murdock may have loved his son, but from what we see on-panel he just kept building the pressure for Matt to pay the price of the promise that he, Jack, made to his wife. We see plenty of flashbacks to his time raising Matt alone and it is all just so bleak, and then he dies for the most ambiguous of motivations. It is really worrisome that we hardly ever see any scene of Jack interacting with Matt in any way that does not involve pressuring his son into demanding even more of himself.
That may be the true core subject matter of the run: Matt Murdock as a broken man running on automatic, fueled and directed by the guilt and crushing demands that he was raised on, damaged by a very flawed father that he attempts to sanctify pretty much all the time and, as we have seen since the second Miller run, by a particularly huge amount of Catholic fear and hypocrisy. We even had a scene of Natasha calling out Matt for choosing the image of a devil and then posturing as some sort of saint all the time back in the first issue of this run, #236. Who better to tell you who you really are than a former lover?
I feel that every single entry in this series since #73 (Nocenti’s debut) has me reconsidering what this whole run is all about and concluding that now I found it. Again.
The Wild Boys eventually get killed off by Bullseye in Old Man Logan.
Miller had Turk paired up with the white thug Grotto later in his run, but Turk’s brand of buffoonery still carried some nasty connotations. The Wildboys’ assholishness seems less racially coded.
The OHOTMU stuff about the Wildboys may have either been created by or inspired assistant editor Gregory Wright, who wrote a lot of annual backup stories, one of which featured the Wildboys (with art by Jim Lee!)
D.G. Chichester also brought them back as villains in a comedy two-parter meant as a palate cleanser before the “grittier” revamp of “Fall from Grace,” which seems more like the kind of use Paul suggests in this entry.
After that, they seem to have simply vanished until their death scene as noted by Michael above.
I looked up Turk after reading this entry to find out whatever happened to the character and learned that he was apparently last seen giving Dr. Strange problems
in 2018 while briefly possessing the Mind Infinity Gem. O-K.
It’s a shame that Nocenti didn’t write those short stories for the DD Annual instead of Wright. I would have liked to see her flesh out the Wildboys characters instead of the total comedic, yet unfunny, tone of Wright’s two shorts. I understand why she might not have wanted anything to do with the lead features in those Annuals, but she could have contributed some back-ups that would have added to the background she was creating for Matt. Well, maybe she couldn’t find the time.
Jeez, Wright did three Wildboys stories, found in Daredevil Annual v.1 #4B, 6, and 8!
In addition to the comedy stories in Annual #4B, Wright wrote them into the “Lifeform” crossover in #6 and used them as victims of his deeply unpleasant co-creation Crippler in #8.
And yes, more by Nocenti would have been greatly preferable.
@Adam- Not quite. Turk appeared after that in Greg Weisman’s Spectacular Spider-Men. At the end of that series it’s revealed that he’s been possessed by an evil AI and that plot’s never been resolved.
Surprised not to see it mentioned yet: After their first appearance, Jet and Spit exchange names. In this first appearance, as Paul notes, it’s Jet who has the weirdly long tongue. But in subsequent appearances, weirdly-long-tongue guy is Spit, and the other one is Jet.
Definite Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern vibes.
Another Nocenti Daredevil story featuring a kid losing his innocence. Though this one does get a Christmas miracle ending rather than a death on his conscience.
No antisocial villain named after military hardware though. Jets probably don’t count.
I’ve not read Nocenti’s Daredevil run since I was a kid, but we have to be getting close to Typhoid Mary, right? Then we’ll get Blackheart not long after!
@Chris M- Typhoid Mary is next issue.
Original Blackheart is fine, but I was quite amused by that Avengers Academy comic that recast him as some sort of queer Gothic teen antihero.
Blackheart probably is queer. Mephisto definitely is; Nocenti established that.
Oh yes, the queerness is the least noteworthy part of it, but I’m pretty sure it’s all part of some genre of manga that I don’t know the name of.
I just like the idea that someone could take a character who is so evil his dad Satan thought it was too much, turn him into a Byronic tragedy, and put him on a team with Moon Girl.
That wasn’t Nocenti’s back-story for Blackheart though. Blackheart changes his mind, concluding that free will will always win out over Mephisto’s evil, which doesn’t exactly make sense, since the idea is that “free will” (in the monotheistic religious sense) gives humanity the option to choose evil, but whatever. I’m sure Nocenti sees these concepts in a non-Christian lens, such that “evil” is when good people do nothing, or “evil” is obeying rather than doing what one knows is right in the face of oppression. Hence, free will being the enemy of “evil”. Anyway, Mephisto then kicks Blackheart out of Hell.
Blackheart is always associated with black roses too. I could definitely see him as this Romantic Gothic gay idol.
Goth Blackheart has become a staple go-to at this point. Rick Remender and Tony Moore had him looking like Doyle from the Misfits during the Venom “Circle of Four” storyline.
Why is Wilson’s chin glowing? Does he have a spotlight taped to his chest and pointed up at his face?
I think his chin’s glowing because he’s clenching his jaw so hard it’s producing pizeoluminescence.