Daredevil Villains #84: Bengal
DAREDEVIL #258 (September 1988)
“I Heard The Jungle Breathe”
Writer: Fabian Nicieza
Penciller: Ron Lim
Inker: Jim Sanders III
Letterer: Diana Alberts
Colourist: Bob Sharen
Editor: Ralph Macchio
We’ve skipped issue #257, which is a crossover with Punisher. Technically the villain in that story is a guy called Alfred Coppersmith, but his story plays out mostly in Punisher, so we’ll pass him over. That brings us to issue #258, which is a fill-in story by Fabian Nicieza and Ron Lim. Inevitably, it bears little resemblance to the Nocenti/Romita issues that surround it. But it does introduce a new supervillain, and one who actually comes back.
This issue brings back Willie Lincoln, a short-lived supporting character who hadn’t appeared since issue #59. In the original stories, he was a Vietnam veteran who had been blinded in action. Daredevil helped him to clear his name after he was framed by a mobster, and finally he got his old job back with the NYPD. It’s an overcoming-adversity story. After that, he occasionally popped up to help out, before being quietly forgotten about.
That was the 1960s. This is 1988, and American attitudes to the Vietnam War have moved on. Willie remains anchored to late 60s Vietnam despite the floating timeline, with other aspects of the original story being retconned accordingly. We open with a flashback to Willie serving in Vietnam in 1968, as the panicky soldiers in his patrol start killing innocent villagers. This turns out to be the mission on which he got blinded. Nicieza doesn’t quite throw Willie under the bus here – he’s at least dithering about what he can do to stop it, before the question is taken out of his hands when the enemy shows up. Daredevil assures us later on that Willie isn’t to blame. But his blinding is still recast as an ironic punishment for Lincoln wishing that he didn’t have to watch this happen.
In the present day, the surviving members of Willie’s patrol are being attacked and killed in their homes by the Bengal – a man wearing a tiger-themed costume and carrying a sai. He’s a child from the village, who survived the massacre, charged after the departing Americans’ helicopter, grabbed onto the skids as it took off, and got booted off, presumably to fall to his death. But he survived and dedicated his life to revenge.
He doesn’t have a huge amount of personality beyond that, aside from being something of an ascetic. The only things he actually says in the issue are variants on “Did the jungle breathe?”, either in Vietnamese or in broken English. He doesn’t speak English, and can’t interact with the other characters except through violence. Even his origin flashback is delivered via the narrator, rather than by giving his voice in translation. His catchphrase refers to what the American soldiers were panicking about – they thought they could hear enemy soldiers in the trees. Come to think of it, given how quickly they get attacked, they were probably right, though that obviously doesn’t justify them killing the villagers.
Willie is next on the Bengal’s list, and Daredevil is there to protect him. We get five pages of mostly silent combat before Daredevil wins. Then Daredevil brings the unconscious Bengal back to Willie’s apartment so that they can lament the futile cycle of violence. Somehow, the Bengal is somehow convinced of Willie’s innocence when he comes round and sees that Willie is blind. I suppose the idea is that he has a blinding realisation that at least some of the Americans were also victims. So the Bengal hurls himself out of a window, and Daredevil declares him dead. It’s all a bit of a mess and reads like something got changes late in the day.
In itself, this is an awkward story. The ending doesn’t work, and the story feels like it’s trying too hard to exonerate Willie. The bengal tiger imagery is a puzzling choice for a Vietnamese avenger, too – Bengal is nowhere remotely close to Vietnam. I realise the Indochinese Tiger doesn’t have the same ring to it, but even so.
Still, you can see why someone might have thought he was worth another go. The costume design is strong, and there’s room for developing his vendetta into a broader retaliation against American interference. Nonetheless, he won’t return in Daredevil. Instead, Nicieza will keep coming back to him for a few years to come.
Within a year, the Bengal returns in a short Red Wolf story in Marvel Comics Presents #15, which isn’t available online, but seems to have been some sort of prequel. Then, in 1991, Nicieza brought him back again for New Warriors #7-9. In that story, the Bengal is still on his mission of revenge. We learn that the officer in charge of Willie’s platoon was court martialled, found God and became a priest. Once again, the Bengal is a non-speaking character, and once again he backs down after seeing how his target has changed. It feels like Nicieza taking another crack at getting the story right.
In 1992, Nicieza brought him back again in Night Thrasher: Four Control #1. This time, the Bengal has moved on to seeking revenge on atrocity-committers more generally, include the North Vietnamese general who was in charge of the other forces involved in the destruction of his village. This is all a bit weird, since in the original story they don’t do much more than attack the Americans who are already attacking civilians. The fact that he barely speaks contributes to the idea that this is a character hollowed-out by his obsession, rather than an avenger.
After that story, Bengal passes out of Nicieza’s control. In Marvel Knights #11-12, Chuck Dixon writes him as a generic martial artist working for Tombstone. Then, in a bemusing turn of events, he shows up in Avengers: The Initiative, where he has a wife and child and seems to have become a hero. At the end, he retires to open a martial arts dojo. Most recently, he showed up in Spider-Boy as a martial arts type with his son in tow as a sidekick.
None of that has anything to do with the original concept. He’s meant to be a monomania character, a vehicle to lament the destructiveness of obsession and the cycle of violence. There’s a limit to how far you can take that, although it could have been developed into a broader mission of revenge on America, or something on those lines. Even in Nicieza’s stories, he doesn’t really work, because his two main character traits – a lifelong obsession with revenge and a willingness to entertain forgiveness when he actually meets his victims – don’t feel like a coherent if conflicted whole. They just feel contradictory.
As a result, the Bengal has wound up as a generic martial arts fighter with an unusually good costume. If he has anything else these days to make him stand out, it’s the fact that he used to be an obsessive and got over it. But the potential was there to do something more.
Given he later appeared in New Warriors and Night Thrasher, Al should have guest written this entry.
I think Alfred Coppersmith should have gotten an entry. Nocenti portrays him as sympathetic because he lost his job to a. younger man who knew about computers even though he was poisoning members of the public. And Matt tries to get him a lighter sentence. It’s incredible how obtuse Nocenti’s mortality is.
The Bengal, like Stunt-Master and the X-Cutioner. is one of those reformed villains who saw the error of his ways and got a happy ending. Which means that some writer will probably revert him to being a villain at some point.
The Red Wolf story established Red Wolf was also one of the soldiers who destroyed the Bengal’s village. The Bengal attacks him and kills Lobo. And he had to decide whether to live or die. I thought it was good.
I also liked New Warriors 7-9.
The pilot of the chopper was Rhodey but that never comes to anything.
I think that what happened in the village is this- the soldiers go into the village but don’t immediately open fire. Janes is acting like a jerk and Willie is going to restrain him. Then Willie gets attacked and blinded and the soldiers open fire.
My favorite part about the Alfred Coppersmith story is when Greg Rucka revisited it during his Punisher run. Turns out Murdock did get Coppersmith a lighter sentence, he served his time, and when he got out the Punisher tracked him down and killed him anyway. Rucka told his story through the eyes of the police detective that was on the case at the time, and it’s a really great part of his run.
As for the Bengal, I remember getting this issue as a kid and liked the character. Great costume design, as noted.
Presumably at this point, Willie and Bengal (like the Punisher) are now tied to the floating Sincong War rather than the stuck-in-one-era Vietnam War.
Was Magneto retconnned into Sin Cong death camps? It seems like an incredibly insensitive thing to do, but at this stage Magneto would have to have been at least 80 years old when he first fought the X-Men, if he was also a prisoner in Auschwitz. I know he was turned into a baby and reincarnated a few times, but none of that happened before the events of X-Men #1.
It’s not something I personally care about, but the whole reason for the Sin Cong rubbish was because it does bother some people. Yet I don’t know of any retcon that addresses it.
No, it is considered too insensitive to ruin Magneto’s back-story in that way. The Sin Cong War nonsense only applies to the Korean and Vietnam War.
Marvel is still going by the deaging business explaining why Magneto is close to the same age as Xavier today. They just don’t mention the fact that Magneto would now have been a very elderly man when he fought the X-Men in the Silver Age. Although, that could be the explanation for why he got beat by a bunch of teenagers. It doesn’t explain why he’s wait for over sixty years to make his move following World War II though.
As the sliding timeline continues to widen, eventually it will reach the point where Magneto would have been dead before Xavier started the X-Men.
I don’t know what Marvel can do. There’s no event in history that gives Magneto the sympathetic background of the Holocaust. We’ve seen a Magneto without the tragic backstory with Millar’s Ultimate-version of Magneto, and he wasn’t exactly the multifaceted character of Chris Claremont. One could never see that Magneto becoming the now beloved anti-hero of modern-day Magneto.
Magneto has magical powers that can do whatever the plot requires, and comes from a franchise that already has a bunch of other slow-aging characters. Sooner or later they’ll just start saying he magnetically reverses the polarity of his neutron flow to keep himself young and healthy.
It’s harder to think of excuses for characters like the Punisher who are supposed to be normal-ish humans.
I know it just puts the problem further down the line, but Punisher being sent to Iraq in the early-2000s as a young man works as well as the Vietnam War. I’m sure the United States will get involved in another quagmire war that will destabilize the very nature of the country once again in the not-too-distant future which will enable Frank’s origin to be updated once more. That’s something you can always depend on.
Heinrich Zero invented Compound X which slowed his aging and that of his son Helmut. We can just say that he was worried about side effects so he tested it on prisoners in the camps and two of them were Magneto and Magda.
Marvel’s “sliding timeline” is the dumbest idea in modern comic books. They don’t need a Crisis on Infinite Earths, they just need to stop pretending dates mean anything in monthly comic books. The Peter Parker of 2026 obviously isnt quite the same as the Peter Parker of 1965, we don’t need to explicitly explain every single detail, we just need to accept that time moves on and not every single event will always make sense forever and ever and ever.
Sorry if I come off as negative, I still love comic books and the community here in the comment section is one of the most intelligent places anywhere on the internet.
I’m just saying either have a timeline where characters age or don’t. Threading that needle is pointless and impossible
Punisher has died, resurrected, been an angel AND a Frankenstein. I think keeping him tied to the Vietnam War is still reasonably acceptable.
Ben-I’m not bothered by it. I can read a Stan Lee Amazing Spider-Man comic set in the 1960s and not care that Peter Parker is still around in 2026 as a 30-year old doing the same Spider-Man things (well, the fact that he is doing the exact same type of things in 2026 he was doing in the 1980s has put me off the character, but that’s a separate issue). I know that there are a lot of comic book readers (and creators, kind of sadly) who are bothered by not having every tiny, minuscule discrepancy addressed. They need an explanation as to how Frank Castle could have been in the Vietnam War and still be fighting crime while in his 30s today.
Personally, it bothers me more that we’re supposed to ignore topical references in older comics. I love how intertwined the Marvel Universe was with the Vietnam War in the early-1970s as it gives those comics a very vintage atmosphere, I don’t care about the Sin Cong War. It wasn’t Richard Nixon who was president in those 1970s comics, it was Barack Obama. That Christmas-themed issue of that comic couldn’t have taken place at Christmas, as otherwise, there’d have been four Christmases in that one year of Marvel time. I’d rather read what is on the page and not care that Peter Parker is too young to have celebrated so many Christmases rather than pretend that the Marvel US was celebrating Saturnalia or “Christmas in October” or whatever because it couldn’t possibly have been Christmas yet again on Marvel Earth when the Marvel Age of Heroes only started in the 2010s.
“I’m sure the United States will get involved in another quagmire war that will destabilize the very nature of the country once again in the not-too-distant future”
You say that like we’re not literally in one right now. :p
Magneto’s problem is similar to the one DC has with the JSA and their kids. You can invent various magical reasons why the original JSA are still young-ish and active, but it’s much harder to explain why they all waited five decades after WW2 to start having children. It was already pushing things when Infinity Inc launched in the mid ‘80s that the children of WW2 vets were in their late teens/early 20s, but you could squint and accept it. But now, forty years later? No way.
DC’s solution basically seems to be ignoring it, which also seems to be the approach to Magneto’s ties to WW2. (I seem to remember the animated series changed his WW2 backstory to some unnamed conflict where another country invaded his, but obviously that loses a ton of the pathos generated by him being an actual Holocaust survivor.)
We age, comic book universes don’t. Sometimes you just have to accept the “just a comic book” of it all.
Speaking of Daredevil, Roger McKenzie has passed away.
As others have noted, comic book timelines are extremely hand-wavy. Especially origins rooted in real world events. It’s like introducing David Colton as the post 9/11 Captain America, even though we’re already 25 years out from that event and Steve Rogers’s unfreezing gets pushed forward more and more, and yet he met Colton and…
Love or hate the Sin-Cong War and its explanation, but at least a nebulously explained long-lived war in Southeast Asia gives Marvel something to ground characters otherwise tied to Vietnam, Korea, etc. It’s no weirder than “supervillains hid an entire city for decades” or “Sivana froze the entire Marvel Family in a plot device bubble” or “a shadow demon exploded and gave everyone involved extra-slow aging.”
Heck, DC did that Generations thing which explained how certain characters and their supporting casts aged slower than the rest of the world just to explain Superman and Batman’s longevity on a parallel world.
I mean, why do some characters age and others don’t? Because comics. So Magneto will always be tied to WW2 no matter what explanation is needed, Punisher is rooted in whatever war makes sense, Nick Fury had the Infinity Formula, the Fantastic Four kicked off the modern age whenever that logically started, and Peter Parker has celebrated 60 Christmases in the past 15 years.
Oh, and politicians come and go with regularity. Especially U.S. Presidents and NYC mayors.
Sometimes, you just accept it doesn’t make sense, and then a reboot/crisis/retcon comes along to make it make even less sense.
Meanwhile… I remember the Bengal from the New Warriors story, but very few of those other appearances, but it was nice to see he got a happier treatment in Avengers Initiative.
@Micheal: “The pilot of the chopper was Rhodey but that never comes to anything.”
And, paradoxically, this was never even brought up, even when Rhodey was one of his superiors at Camp Hammond during *Avengers: The Initiative*
@Midnighter- By the time of Avengers:Initiative, Bengal was depicted as old enough to have a child. I guess the writers didn’t want to bring up that Rhodey met the Bengal when the Bengal was a kid because it would make Rhodey look too old.
With the sliding timescale who was the president who got outed as head of the Secret Empire and shot himself? Bush? Obama?
I agree we’re well past the point that the sliding timescale can make any sense, but I think the obvious solution is just not to mention any of this stuff. Not to try and fix it, or explain it, just straight up ignore it. Because the only other solution is to have stories with an actual end and you know the needs of the corporate IP machine won’t let that happen.
Obama. We’ll be getting close to it happening during Trump’s first administration soon though.
The Marvel Universe is considered to have started after the W. Bush years now. I think Marvel considers the Marvel Universe started 16 years ago from today.
@Dave White- The president who headed the Secret Empire was retconned into a generic “high ranking government official” in Avengers Forever.
I like that for the purely practical reasons of actors and contracts, the cinematic universe has imposed a more real timeline on the setting, and perhaps realised Claremont’s dream of characters retiring and getting replaced. Iron Man died and was replaced by Ironheart, but we know the original isn’t coming back (well, unless Dr Doom has a secret identity). Captain America is Sam now. Hulk works in a lab somewhere. Black Widow is Yelena. And so-on.
@Michael: That retcon of the Secret Empire’s Englehart-era leader was first established in the 1980s Marvel Handbooks.
@Si: Of course, Doomsday is Marvel Studios bringing back as many old actors as they can, including Chris Evans as Steve Rogers, all while likely pivoting away from the legacy characters to the X-Men. As with comics fans, movie fans (and studios) don’t seem to want to let go of the stuff that first drew them in.
With the sliding timescale who was the president who got outed as head of the Secret Empire and shot himself? Bush? Obama?
I agree we’re well past the point that the sliding timescale can make any sense, but I think the obvious solution is just not to mention any of this stuff. Not to try and fix it, or explain it, just straight up ignore it. Because the only other solution is to have stories with an actual end and you know the needs of the corporate IP machine won’t let that happen.”
This is how I see it. The only thing that matters is that the Secret Empire story was a 70s story about Nixon and Watergate. That’s the story the writer wanted to tell. That’s what really matters and there’s no need to get too worked up about how much that works in the context of a shared univese over 50 years later.
It’ll all wash out in the end.
[…] O’Brien’s census of the villains of Daredevilcontinues, for House to Astonish, as the Bengal’s awkward debut doesn’t preclude further appearances throughout the Marvel […]
I think it’s really only Marvel that has this kind of existential problem with the timescale because part of the premise of ’60s Marvel was that the events of the comics were happening more or less in real time, and interconnected with each other.
So in the classic stories not only does Peter Parker finish high school, go to university, and have a series of increasingly serious girlfriends, this happens alongside the other characters going through life events at a similar rate: i.e. the Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic date, then getting married, have a child, etc. It doesn’t line up perfectly, but that sense of biographical progression is built into the storyworld, and is also foundational to many classic Silver Age stories.
For about five years from about 1962-1967 this is how the Marvel comics universe works, they don’t continue aging the characters any further in any consistent way. So it all gets quite weird, because the characters are built for soap opera stories about growing up and going through major life changes (in contrast to DC or Fawcett characters).
The Silver Age X-Men follow a similar progression of starting as students and ending as graduates with their own costumes and identities by the end of the silver age – this is essentially reset with the ’70s reboot, but then ‘school’ setting works really awkwardly with characters who are meant to be grown-ups, which is really more of an evergreen superteam premise. But that idea of a school is built into the book’s DNAthey return to the school scenario with Kitty Pryde recruited to be a ‘student’ – although now living in a mansion alongside a bunch of scantily clad adults? Those comics are a lot of fun, but the set-up is bizarre if you think about it for too long.