Daredevil Villains #89: The Crippler
DAREDEVIL ANNUAL #7 (1991)
“The Von Strucker Gambit, part 1: Crippling Death”
Writer, colourist: Gregory Wright
Penciller: Ron Garney
Inker: Doug Hazlewood
Editor: Ralph Macchio
Yes, two Annuals in a row. This is just how the timeline works out – in publishing terms, this issue came out in the second month of DG Chichester’s run, so we’ll be getting to him next time.
In the meantime, we’re looking at another Annual by Gregory Wright. Once again, this is part of a crossover. In this case, it’s “The Von Strucker Gambit”, which ran through the 1991 annuals for Daredevil, Punisher and Captain America. Those three titles feel like they ought to mesh reasonably well, but it’s another crossover where the individual annuals are designed to stand alone, so that the heroes never team up, and the chapters merely gesture in the direction of an overarching plot.
That overarching plot is rudimentary to the point of being token. Hydra has mutated three people. At the start of the story, the trio escape and go their separate ways. Baron Strucker, who’s running Hydra at this point, sends three henchmen to get them back. Nick Fury enlists our heroes to get to them first. So it’s really three separate stories in which Hero X and Henchman Y fight over Mutate Z, while Mutate Z tries to pursue their personal agenda. The twist, such as it is, is that Strucker actually wanted the escapees to get away and fight some superheroes, so that he could gather some data. But other than Strucker himself, nobody in the Daredevil chapter knows about that, so it has no effect at all on the issue as a standalone story. “The Von Strucker Gambit” is really nothing more than a grudging gesture in the direction of being a crossover.
There are two characters that I could have chosen from this issue. One is the escapee, Sathan. She’s a “feline life-energy vampire”. She seems to be from Hell’s Kitchen, and she’s very unhappy about a series of arson attacks that are blatantly the work of a landlord who’s trying to clear the way for redevelopment. Although she’s billed as a “vampire”, she can also raise the dead and get them to fight on her behalf as zombies. So her plan is basically to send a bunch of charred zombies to avenge themselves against the landlord. It’s more vigilante territory than villainy.
Apparently there were some heavy handed attempts by Hell’s Kitchen landlords to clear out their tenants in the 1980s, though not quite to the point of burning the buildings down, and so this is a perfectly reasonable starting point for a Daredevil story. In fact, if they’d just gone with that as a free standing story and eliminated all the Hydra material, it would have been a better issue. Instead, it gets overshadowed by the Hydra storyline and by the introduction of a new character who has nothing much to do with corrupt landlords.
That other character, and the one we’re running with, is the Hydra agent who’s sent after Sathan. He starts off going by “Striklan”, but halfway through the story, he starts calling himself the Crippler. Unlike Sathan, he does go on to appear in further stories, and he’s working for Hydra, so we’ll go with him as this issue’s villain.
In theory, the Crippler is meant to be tracking down Sathan. His investigation gets off to a good start by cornering the hired arsonist, but the Crippler’s idea of interrogation is to torture the guy in an alleyway, declare that the fires “got me hot”, and extinguish a cigarette on his own arm. At this point he seems to be motivated more by the enjoyment of tormenting other characters than by actually pursuing his mission, and goes off on a frolic of his own to attract Daredevil’s attention – by barbecuing the arsonist on a rooftop. He then sends Daredevil after Sathan, the plan (such as it is) apparently being to use Daredevil as a distraction so that he can capture Sathan himself.
The high concept here is that the Crippler is a sadomasochist, but he’s a Code-approved sadomascohist, which means that he enjoys both inflicting pain on other people and being punched in the face. Strucker isn’t remotely pleased with the Crippler’s self-appointed side quests, and demands that he get back to the main plot. But it turns out that the Crippler only signed up for Hydra so that he got to hurt people, and isn’t particularly impressed by Strucker’s attempts to turn it into a neo-Nazi organisation. He’s a non-ideological sadist. The ending sees Sathan captured by the authorities; Strucker then tries to kill both Sathan and the Crippler with remote detonators, but the Crippler cuts out his implant before it can blow up, and escapes to go his own way.
In a back-up strip, also written by Wright, we find that that the Crippler has set himself up as a vigilante. An origin flashback explains that he was kicked out of the army and the police for excessive violence before signing up for Hydra because he wanted to “belong with” someone. This, apparently, is his post-Hydra motivation: to “find a place where I belong.” For some reason he also seems to have developed a sense of morality, telling a defeated rapist that “it is fun, but it ain’t right. You can’t go thrusting your needs on those that don’t deserve it.” This doesn’t seem to have stopped him signing up for Hydra, and it’s not really clear what’s happened to change his views.
A series of vox pops show that most New Yorkers find the guy unnerving. Bizarrely, Daredevil’s comment is that “I do not approve of him, but he deserves the chance to be heard.” Heard about what?
Gregory Wright really liked this character. The Crippler returns in a back-up strip in the next year’s annual, where he torments the Wildboys. Then he joins the cast of Wright’s Silver Sable and the Wild Pack, where he was one of the title characters. That series is mostly missing from Unlimited, so I can’t really judge how he developed there. He’s made scattered appearances since, as an increasingly generic mercenary in Silver Sable’s orbit, whenever someone thinks it’s worth giving the Wild Pack members names. He seems to have been finally killed off in the recent Venom War: Lethal Protectors miniseries.
Before the character was redirected to Silver Sable, Wright’s original concept seems to have been to set him up within Daredevil‘s milieu as a BDSM-themed Punisher – a sex offender who channels his urges towards policing other sex offenders. As presented on page, it’s a dubiously simplistic understanding of sadomasochism, based entirely on the literal infliction of pain irrespective of sexual context. The confines of a Code-approved book already make this a very difficult gimmick, and it’s played very one-dimensionally, without really hinting at any hidden depths to the guy. It’s just about possible to imagine this concept working if you played it much darker, or if you went for Garth Ennis-style comedy. But when he’s just the latest urban vigilante on the block, he’s bizarre.
It’s quite a journey to go from a neo nazi terror group lead by a Captain America first, to a nazi hunting mercenary group featuring a former Bucky. He really is non ideological
Crippler: I want to belong to something … something that doesn’t care how much pain I inflict as part of the job.
Strucker: I don’t care how much pain you inflict as part of the job. I do however, care if you’re inflicting pain instead of doing the job.
Crippler: YOU’RE NOT MY DAD!
The plot of the Von Strucker Gambit never made much sense. If Strucker and Cassandra Romulus were the only people who knew about the true purpose of the plot, they had no way of making sure that Captain America, Daredevil and Punisher would get involved.
The one of the escapees who was the most appearances is Cassandra Romulus. She was previously seen in the Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD series, she’s Strucker’s lover and she has feral powers. She vanishes after 1993. It’s a good thing that nobody brought her back as a descendant of Romulus.
Anything to avoid the Chichester issues. Sure, they’re not great, but they’re better than these Annuals.
You know it’s the early-‘90s now, as there’s an attempt to make a poorly-conceived BDSM-themed version of the Punisher catch on as the next popular character. “He’s so extreme, he makes the Punisher look like just another Captain America, man.” I’m not sure how Garth Ennis or Warren Ellis missed the chance to bring the Crippler back as a joke character.
I agree with Chris V here — it’s very easy to imagine this guy being a target of the Ellis/Deodato-era Thunderbolts, for instance.
Silver Sable & The Wild Pack ran for 35 issues from 1992-1995. It was easily the longest success Sable ever had as a spinoff franchise. It likely helped earn her her first animated appearance in Spider-Man’s show a few years later. It also took part in quite a few crossovers. I think only a dozen issues of it have been reprinted, which is why their MU availibility is shakey.
Crippler’s development there was…iffy. The gist of the book was that Sable was an anti-heroine, someone who took jobs for money, and her Wild Pack were even wilder. They included Sandman, a reformed villain, and Doug Powell, an ex-KKK bodyguard and racist (!) who decided to reform (or at least find a boss who paid better). The gist with Crippler was that he was maybe a proto-MAGA type, a truly American fascist. He was obsessed with law enforcement, enjoyed torturing “the guilty,” which he often defined as anyone who got in the way during missions or even random homeless people, enjoyed smoking at all times, hated “natural smells” like a jungle, and continued to take pleasure in physical beatings (both dealing and receiving). He often mocked Powell, mostly for his “Southern gentleman” facade, and also disliked Sandman. His primary weapon was a flame-thrower, though he used other weapons. He tended to escalate missions and was among the hot-heads of the team, as opposed to Battlestar. His expertise with HYDRA came in handy, and at one point he was captured and tortured by HYDRA for his trespasses against them. And yeah, even this “development” ended when that title did, and after that he more or less only appeared in by-the-numbers Wild Pack appearances as “white guy with distinctive buzz cut.”
So on the one hand, Crippler betrayed HYDRA (who were founded by European facists) and disliked a Southern racist (who was belatedly and awkwardly “trying” to reform). On the other, he was something of a hodgepodge of someone who was obsessed with 1980s style cop shows and S&M magazines. A chain smoking, sexually repressed, law-and-order obsessed fascist. In 1995 he was extreme. Today he’d be a 4 term Senator and FoxNews darling, especially because he could truthfully say, “I hate Nazis and Klansmen” while usually acting just as loathesome in his own ways.
And he got on a children’s cartoon once.
The ‘90s were a different time. Fascists were considered an out-dated concept, a tiny minority trying to hold on to the past while almost everyone else seemed to have moved on. Conservative commentators tried to foist Hitler off as a “far Left-Wing revolutionary”. The most prominent overt neo-Nazis in popular media considered themselves Satanists, listened to Black metal, and wanted to burn down churches…a far cry from what anyone thought of as authentic fascists. Surely they’d have ended up among the first victims of a “Night of the Long Knives” by traditional Nazis. It was a situation that allowed Grant Morrison to write a skinhead neo-Nazi as a punchline who wasn’t really such a terrible fellow when you got beyond his stupidly antiquated racial views in Skrull Kill Krew. Little did Morrison realize where the future would move back then.
It took me a long time to appreciate Mike Mignola’s art, but now I love that cover.
>Bizarrely, Daredevil’s comment is that “I do not approve of him, but he deserves the chance to be heard.”
One thing I’ve gleaned from this column is that Matt Murdock has consistently bizarre political hot takes. It makes me feel like it should be an explicit part of his modern characterization that his heart is in the right place but he’s so hyper-focused on his own drama that when asked to comment on current events he sounds like one of those New York Times focus group panelists who exists to drive everyone insane.
Perhaps the Crippler example could also be seen in reverse.
If you could throw a rock and hit a guy like this in a Marvel comic, in the 90s of all times…
@AMRG: From what I can tell, most of the Silver Sable and the Wild Pack issues available on MU are the ones that were digitized for inclusion in Epic Collections and Complete Collections of other series that crossed over into the title. It’s pretty much all issues from stuff like “Dead Man’s Hand” and, uh, “No Love for Money.”
That second one was a storyline that had various Marvel anti-heroes battling the very, very phallic Greek fertility god Priapus. Yes, the one for whom “priapism” is named. And his plot involved some kind of mystical entity called the Carnal Serpent.
I remember the Sable series bringing in a team of super-powered operatives called the Intruders to team up with Sandman about halfway in to its run. That sub-team featured a superhuman muscleman named for the minor Marvel 1940s character the Fin and some human-tiger hybrid dude who was apparently named “Man-Eater” according to the Marvel Database. And later there was someone there named Lightbright, apparently? And she dated Battlestar?
So the Silver Sable book wound up featuring a storyline with the extremely NSFW Greek god Priapus, employing the BDSM-lite Crippler, and having an operative named Man-Eater who was part of a team called the Intruders. Plus the series continued Sable’s weird relationship with her ex-husband, the Foreigner, in which they try to murder each other as a form of flirting.
The whole thing feels like some kind of practical joke on the Comics Code Authority that went too far.
Whoops! Misremembered. The Sable book wasn’t part of “Dead Man’s Hand,” but it did get tie-ins to <Infinity War and “Siege of Darkness.”
The cover looks like an early Mike Mignola.
I always liked Mignola’s art but a lot of the time I saw him on Big Two stuff I felt he was miscast. You don’t have Mignola draw colorful superhero teams any more than you have Mike Wieringo draw The Punisher, y’know?
His style does work here.
Yeah, Mignola works best on somewhat off-kilter or horror-tinged material. His art on the first Rocket Raccoon miniseries was a great fit, for example, and he was the perfect choice for the Doctor Strange & Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment graphic novel. And he drew the Epic Comics adaptations of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser!