Daredevil Villains #12: The Masked Marauder
DAREDEVIL #16-17 (May & June 1966)
“Enter… Spider-Man” / “None Are So Blind”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: John Romita
Inker: Frank Giacoia
Letterers: Artie Simek (#16) & Sam Rosen (#17)
Colourist: not credited
Sixteen issues into the series, Daredevil has had a steady stream of bad guys. But only the Ox has appeared more than once. That changes here, as this two-parter introduces Daredevil’s first recurring enemy. He’s the main villain through to issue #27 – and after that, he never appears in the series again. Meet the Masked Marauder, a villain exactly as generic as he sounds.
When we first meet the Masked Marauder, he’s already an established supervillain. He wears a purple jumpsuit and a green cape, the standard colours of Silver Age villainy in the Marvel Universe. He has a gang of thugs who do all the hard work for him. They wear purple too. He is, as advertised, Masked. If we’re being honest about it, though, he doesn’t do much Marauding. He’s a high-tech master planner, who creates elaborate devices and conceals them in trucks. But the Masked Planner didn’t have the same ring to it.
In this story, the Masked Marauder’s unspectacular nature isn’t such a problem. The real focus is Spider-Man. He and Daredevil don’t get on, they fight, they team up – you know the drill. It’s Spider-Man that the kids want to see, and it’s Spider-Man that they get.
As the story begins, Spider-Man has just foiled the Masked Marauder’s attempt to rob the World Motors Building. Clearly this can’t be allowed to continue, so the Marauder comes up with a plan. He’ll keep both Spider-Man and Daredevil occupied while he commits crimes, by tricking them into fighting one another. And how is he going to do this? By dressing his thugs in Daredevil costumes, and sending them out to pick a fight with Spider-Man. When one of the underlings points out that he doesn’t fancy fighting Spider-Man single handedly, the Marauder reprimands the poor guy with his secret weapon: the Opti-Blast. The Opti-Blast is a ray that shoots from the titular Mask. It causes temporary blindness. You can probably see where this is going.
To give the Marauder his due, his fake Daredevil plan actually works. That leaves him free to return to the World Motors Center and steal the plans for – brace yourself, now – “the most powerful auto engine ever devised”. He does at least have the decency to steal it using an absurdly elaborate hydraulic elevator, but come on. It’s a car engine. Stan tries his best to build it up, to be sure. It’s “the greatest new engine discovery of the decade”. It’s a threat to national security because you could use it “for weapons of war”. But it’s still a car engine.
I’m not sure why Stan went for something so mundane, since it’s not really important to the plot. It’s never made clear what the Marauder intends to do with the engine plans. He specifically says he’s not going to sell them, and talks about a master plan, but we never find out what it was. Maybe something fell by the wayside.
Still, the theft of the “vital XB-390 engine” is front page news, and now Spider-Man and Daredevil each suspect that the other is working for the Marauder. Daredevil finds out that the Marauder didn’t steal the formula for the fuel, and leaks this information to J Jonah Jameson, in the hope that the Marauder will go back to the World Motors Center a third time. Remarkably, not only does Jonah run this story but he buys airtime to announce it on TV. And the Marauder does indeed decide to rob the building again: “They’ll never expect us to dare attack the same building so soon again! And that is why we will succeed!”
This time, the Marauder and his men return to the World Motors Center in a giant blimp, which the guards decide must be legit because it says WORLD MOTORS on the side. Spider-Man fights the bad guys first, and nearly has the fight won when the Marauder blinds him. Naturally, Daredevil is completely unfazed by the beam and easily beats up the Marauder before shooting the blimp. Somehow or other, the Marauder manages to slip away in the confusion, beat up a guard, steal his uniform, and escape. The art makes a big deal of not showing us his face.
The story ends by giving the Marauder a reason to come back, as he stumbles upon Foggy Nelson and Karen Page. Spider-Man has accused Foggy of being Daredevil, and Foggy is running with it to impress Karen. We’ll come back to this subplot next time, when it’s the centre of the story. What matters for the moment is that the Marauder overhears their conversation and concludes that Foggy is the man he wants to kill. And that’s the end of the Masked Marauder’s debut.
In that story, the Marauder does exactly what he needs to do – he drives the plot forward, and he doesn’t overshadow Spider-Man. Thoughtfully, he has a signature weapon which is uniquely useless against Daredevil, so that Daredevil can bring something to the table even though Spider-Man is vastly more powerful. And that’s all he needed to do. Linking him to the Foggy/Karen comedy subplot is a little strange, but heck, he was passing.
Given how often he turns up over the next year, though, Stan Lee does seem to have been quite excited by the Masked Marauder for a while. That’s despite the fact that he has no back story, no real gimmick, and no apparent motivations. There’s supposed to be a mystery about his true identity, but it doesn’t work, because Daredevil only has two supporting characters at this point – Foggy Nelson and Karen Page – and both of them are ruled out of contention from the word go. Eventually, the Masked Marauder turns out to be Frank Farnum, the manager of Nelson & Murdock’s office building. He’s not gone undercover to spy on Daredevil or anything like that. It’s just a coincidence.
What does the Masked Marauder bring to the table? A baseline level of competent villainy. He builds hi-tech gadgets, and they work. His plans are over elaborate, but they mostly work. He steals stuff, and it’s not very exciting stuff, but you can see why he’d want it. He’s competent.
And he does have some personality. He’s hugely self-important. He’s desperate for respect. He’s a control freak. He repeatedly proclaims his genius and the tremendous importance of everyone following his plans to the letter. Apparently there’s a later story which interprets him as having obsessive compulsive personality disorder, and that would fit with how Stan writes him. The best Masked Marauder stories are the ones where he tries to enlist Gladiator as a henchman only to be stuck with the big lug as an self-proclaimed, wholly unwanted equal partner. Their odd-couple dynamic has something going for it, and it’s as close as the Marauder ever gets to working.
But there’s no real concept to him, and it’s hard to understand why Stan used him so much over the coming year before coming to his senses and moving on, other than a shortage of other ideas. The Masked Marauder really is the generic supervillain.
Marvel already had Dr. Octopus go by the name “Master Planner” for that one story-arc. He might have cited the Masked Marauder for gimmick infringement if he used the name “Masked Planner”.
It’s incredibly subtle on Lee’s part to only plaster that giant Spider-Man logo on the cover without any huge blurb about Spider-Man guest-starring in the comic.
I best remember the Masked Marauder from the Iron Man story, where I first came across him. I read this story in the Essential Daredevil book, but I don’t remember this story.
Maybe the Masked Marauder was involved in illegal hotrod races for money. His master plan was to use this experimental motor to make sure he wins all his races and can get rich.
The Masked Marauder was revived by Mike Friedrich in his Iron Man return of the 1970s, where he was played as a gadgeteer who fancied himself a criminal counterpart to Tony Stark.
And he fights Iron Man again in his next appearance in, of all places, the final issues of Werewolf by Night. (Those issues were a failed attempt to retool the horror book as a conventional superhero genre title.)
If he weren’t so generic, you could almost imagine the Masked Marauder having the same kind of rivalry with Tony as the Wizard developed with Reed Richards.
After that, he popped up a couple more times thanks to his other gimmick: his Tri-Man android, which usually combined the abilities of three living beings — other crooks in its first outing against Daredevil, then animals when the Marauder shows up to fight the Werewolf.
And, of course, he’s the villain of the first story in which Frank Miller draws Daredevil, over in Spectacular Spider-Man (1976 series) #26-27. He’s in more Spectacular stories than that, still trying to run the Maggia, but those are the only issues anyone cares about.
After that, he vanished, and gets trotted out mostly to be used as cannon fodder, only to pop up again as a face in the crowd.
The Masked Marauder is like a lot of other failed Silver Age baddies, in that fans-turned-creators used him sporadically in the Bronze Age in tribute to the earlier Marvel stories they once read, but then the demand for stronger storytelling in later decades causes them to fade away or be played as absurd footnotes.
How generic is the Masked Marauder? He’s so generic that his Spider-Ham counterpart doesn’t even have an animal pun name — he’s just the Masked Marauder as well.
Is he a raccoon? The name wouldn’t work as a pun, but a masked marauder should be a raccoon.
@ Chris V
I’m more concerned with what Rocket would be in Spider-Ham’s universe. A human?
I love this story. Spider-Man dangling Foggy Nelson out the window? Phenomenal.
As for the Masked Marauder himself, to me his main significance is being the first in a long line of people to fall to his death just after finding out who Daredevil really is (sort of).
The best thing about these reviews is the snark and shade Paul throws out at Stan’s plots and ideas.
Probably the inferior “Spidey goes blind while teaming up with Daredevil” story arcs.
This reminds me of how much of Silver Age X-Men was spent building up Factor Three as the team’s ultimate archvillains, and the group’s never been brought back since then.
Any other ’60s Marvel characters have recurring enemies pushed as huge deals who’ve been almost completely forgotten?
Some have apparently died (often more than once). Egghead, for one. Porcupine, too.
Prince Byrrah, Namor’s cousin seems to have been forgotten. Plant-Man hasn’t been seen in a long while, I think. Jester used to be perceived as a main Daredevil villain, but Paul will get to him in due time. Besides, he is apparently in far more evidence than I assumed.
How long has it been since we saw each of the core members of the Frightful Four – Wizard, Sandman and Trapster? And Annihilus?
@yrzhe: The Silver Age X-Men have another pf these: Lucifer, who is built up hugely as the guy who cost Xavier his legs, but is used exactly once more on the title.
Then he gets a completely different gimmick and powerset to fight other heroes in some fairly random “villain of the month” tales, and is eventually reported killed off-panel in an issue of West Coast Avengers.
I think he was brought back in some miniseries somewhere, but he’s really been forgotten outside of a few very comprehensive reviews of Xavier’s backstory.
To me, the Masked Marauder is from a very early Bugs Bunny cartoon.
@LuisDantas: Plantman was a core Thunderbolts member in the late 90s and early 2000s, at lest. He didn’t drop off the map completely until more recent years.
Sandman gets fairly regular use in the Spider-Man titles. He was featured prominently in the Brand New Day era and in Slott’s stories, where he’s one of the Sinister Six, and I’m pretty sure he was in one of the Sinister Sixes in Spencer’s big final storyline.
The Wizard hasn’t turned up much in the last four or five years, but he ws getting semi-regular use before then, showing up in Mark Waid’s 2017 Avengers run. among other places. Ditto for the Trapster, though he’s played for laughs these days; he was in some 2017 issues of Gwenpool.
Lucifer was brought back in the Astonishing X-Men Annual #1. It was during the period where Professor X was referring to himself as “X” and in Fantomex’ body. I’m not sure why they bothered to bring Lucifer back for the story, as it didn’t really fit with Lucifer’s previous appearances. Although, I guess one could argue the same about Lucifer’s non-X-Men appearances in the 1970s as well.
It was the story about Lucifer planning to create a hivemind with all of humanity, eliminating hate and violence. Lucifer may, or may not, have died at the end of that story (he was supposed to be dead for over 30 years before that annual).
It was also one of the stories which seemed to be setting up for Hickman’s use of Xavier.
Sandman was indeed part of the endgame for Spencer’s run on Amazing Spider-Man starting in 2021 and he was there for a bit. And before that, he had a dedicated character spotlight two-parter in Zdarsky’s Spider-Man, and he was part of Duggan’s Infinity Wars. Not a character who gets dropped for very long.
Annihilus had a whole crossover with him as a focal character in 2020, Annihilation – Scourge, which was a Nova/FF/Silver Surfer/Beta Ray Bill crossover with Alpha and Omega books on either side. And was in Waid’s Avengers about two years before that. His blessing and his curse is that he finally got a defining story – the original Annihilation – which also made him unusable as a villain of the week.
I’d argue that Iron Man has its worst when it comes to 60s villains who didn’t have staying power. Mandarin’s stuck around, and the rest have either been killed off, replaced, or forgotten. The Goodwin/Colan powerup of the character in the late 60s left most of his villains just fundamentally being no match for Iron Man anymore – Whiplash being the prime example.
Up until 1995 Factor Three appeared almost as much as the Sinister Six
I would add Gerry Conway’s Mr. Kline in the pages of Iron Man/Daredevil and Mike Friedrich’s Black Lama from Iron Man (“war of the super-villains”, anyone?) in the same catergory as the Mutant Master. There’s some obviously rational reasons for why no one has attempted to bring up these storylines again after the end of easy access to LSD in the ‘70s.
Of course, “Factor Three” stopped being in any way relevant after the late-1980s (even not taking into consideration that the entire plot was a ruse by an alien blob to manipulate mutants into triggering a nuclear war…perhaps unintentionally influencing Moira), considering their very name was meant to signify that mutants would represent a third position between Capitalism/liberalism and Communism.
Paul, Wikipedia claims that Masked Marauder suffers from OCPD, not OCD. Please don’t confuse the two. In real life, people who have been diagnosed with OCD but not OCPD HATE to be confused with people with OCPD. OCD used to be considered an anxiety disorder, before being put in its own category. OCPD is a PERSONALITY disorder.
(Some readers have claimed the Riddler fits more into OCPD than OCD, although the reality is he doesn’t neatly fit into either category.It’s possible to have both but that doesn’t really fit the Riddler either.)
One of the Masked Marauder’s problems is that his main power is to blind people and that’s useless against Daredevil. A villain who’s immune to the hero’s main power is an interesting challenge. A hero who’s immune to the villain’s main power doesn’t work because heroes need challenges.
Stan apparently tried to make the Marauder into Daredevil’s Green Goblin- mysterious identity, lots of appearances at first. Regarding the mystery of the Masked Marauder’s identity, it’s worth noting that when the Green Goblin was first introduced, neither Norman nor Harry Osborn had been introduced. The difference is that Harry was built up first as a student feuding with Peter and then in the issue where the Goblin’s identity was revealed, it was suggested Peter and Harry might become friends and in the issues following the reveal of the Goblin’s identity, Peter and Harry became best friends. So the Green Goblin became remembered as the father of Peter’s best friend. The Masked Maruader- he’s some dude who managed Matt’s and Foggy’s office building for a few months.
The Riddler would most likely best fit NPD-overt with some types of co-morbidity (perhaps something on the autism spectrum for one), perhaps co-morbid with OCPD traits.
Wizard doesn’t really belong in the same category as losers like the Masked Marauder. He’s considered the Fantastic Four’s third foe. after Doom and Galactus. His “son” Bentley was adopted by the Fantastic Four. He recently appeared in Slott’s Fantastic Four trying to regain custody of Bentley and before that appeared in the Outlawed arc in Power Pack. He’s currently slated to appear in a Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch series by Steve Orlando reimagined as an actual wizard. (I believe after this Orlando will write a Robin series where Damian is reimagined as an actual robin.)
As for Sandman, yeah, he’s still appearing regularly after the end of Spencer’s run. He showed up in issue 6 of Wells’ run and made an appearance in Iron Man saving Rhodey’s life for the Kingpin in order to get Tony into the Kingpin’s debt.
As for the Trapster, the only appearance he’s had in the last five years has been the Ziggy Pig and Sally Seal online comic. Really, his problem has to do with the Syndicate. Ever since 2019. the Syndicate have been a major part of Spider-Man’s world, appearing in crossovers like Sinister War and Gang War. The problem is. all of them except White Rabbit are knockoffs of male villains. This isn’t a problem for Janice, since Abe has been Mach Whatever since 1997. But it is a problem for the others. The two biggest ones are Trapstr, who has basically the same gimmick as Trapster without the embarrassing Paste Pot Pete former alias and almost the same name, and Electro, since Francine has the same name, costume and powers as Max. So Trapster’s problem is that he’s been overshadowed by Trapstr. Who knows how they’ll deal with the two Electros.
@Luis- Byrrah was also killed off by Bob Harras when he was writing Namor. Jester I would say also qualifies as almost totally forgotten. He’s been retired, replaced, the replacement was killed, he was returned to villainy and still hardly appears.
Of course, Annihilus, Trapster. Wizard and Sandman have all been major parts of the Marvel Universe since the 1960s- they don’t belong in the same category as someone like Masked Marauder who had fewer than two dozen appearances.
Egghead always struck me as a DC villain who walked in the wrong door.
@si: You could sy that about lot of the Ant-Man/Giant-Man and the Wasp baddies: the Black Knight and his goofy theme weapons, the original Porcupine, and so forth.
Heck, the Human Top and the Magician almost feel like watered-down lifts of specific Flash villains, though the Human Top at least developed into Whirlwind. And one-off baddie Trago, the man with the hypno-trumpet, is basically the Pied Piper or the Fiddler.
Chris V said: Is he a raccoon? The name wouldn’t work as a pun, but a masked marauder should be a raccoon.
Sadly, the Spider-Ham Masked Marauder is a duck, and doesn’t seem to have taken anything besides the name from the Daredevil villain. In stead, he’s a throwaway villain who accidentally causes the Hulk-Bunny’s origin story.
More at the following link: Quincy Quakers (Earth-8311)
Amazingly, Trago isn’t a one-off any more. He came back in Ewing’s “Antiversary” story
“Prince Byrrah, Namor’s cousin seems to have been forgotten.”
Read Bill Everett’s 60s Submariner issues recently and found it fun how he ignored continuity with other Silver Age Atlanteans and just gave Byrrah the giant Golden Age fisheyes anyway.
@Allan M- Madame Masque is also an exception to the rule that early Iron Man villains got forgotten- she’s currently the Big Bad of the Gang War crossover. Although she does seem to have drifted into tormenting young women who remind her of herself in some day- like Kate Bishop and Janice Lincoln- instead of tormenting Tony.
@Dave White: Well, now I gotta pick up that series and the Wasp anniversary series. Was Ewing’s Nick Fury one-shot any good?
@James Moar: I think Eveertt’s designs for the Atlanteans — and his slimmer design for Namor, as opposed to Kirby’s muscly version — are better than the standardized John Buscema character models that have become the Marvel default. And I generally really like John Buscema’s art!
I think Marvel’s Atlantis should seem a bit alien, a bit different, and Namor’s heritage should make him not quite fit in in either Atlantis or the surface world.
@Miçhael: Yeah. There seems to have been a shift around 2105 to 2017, where a lot of Marvel’s longtime B-tier and C-tier baddies sort of dropped off the map, are just background filler in big panels, or get played for jokes. (The Krakoan era X-books, with their cast of thousands, have been something of an outlier here.)
I think it’s the tendency to try to inflate every story into an event that centers on heroes that draw on a small number of big-name, fan-favorite threats, coupled with the whole Pleasant Hill/Army of Evil thing completing the genericization of these villains into interchangeable “face in the crowd” types that started back in Bendis’s I>New Avengers stories.
Regarding Iron Man villains, I think the big issue there is the Micheline/Layton runs, which used many of the less-powerful or single-gimmick villains as, effectively, Bond henchmen for the mastermind threats they preferred.
And then, in between, Denny O’Neil didn’t really care about the fights with supervillains, and Mark Gruenwald was essentially picking unusual and not–particularly-memorable baddies — or creating them — for O’Neil to write into perfunctory fight scenes.
The result was that these guys were played as bumbling goons, and that gradually led to later writers seeing them as disposable jokes.
Much the same thing seems to have happened with Thor’s less powerful Silver Age foes, such as the Cobra, the Grey Gargoyle, and the Wrecker. Most of them hung on for a while fighting less-powerful heroes, but by the 2000s, they stopped being used much at all, and when they were used, they had no consistent characterization or gimmick.
As to Madame Masque, I like the Matt Fraction change in her character in terms of contemporary storytelling, since it plays on elements of her origin and backstory and gives her a nice thematic niche: the older woman who made the wrong choices, and now resents the young people getting to make better ones.
But wow, is she just not the character who existed before Michelinie and Layton revised her. (Those guys again!)
But it probably is the reason Madame Masque is still being used at all, and it did get her away from Bendis’s really awful concept for the character.
There’s also Tyrannus- Stan apparently intended him to be the Hulk’s archenemy but he was too similar to the Mole Man, so Leader became the Hulk’s archenemy. He’s only had a couple of brief cameos since Incredible Hulks in 2011.
I’ve liked all of Al’s Pym-verse corner of the MU lately, the 2 minis and Avengers Inc.
Whatever happened to the Sandman becoming a hero? Is that long forgotten and never to return?
Omar> Much the same thing seems to have happened with Thor’s less powerful Silver Age foes, such as the Cobra, the Grey Gargoyle, and the Wrecker. Most of them hung on for a while fighting less-powerful heroes, but by the 2000s, they stopped being used much at all, and when they were used, they had no consistent characterization or gimmick.
Funnily enough, Grey Gargoyle just showed up as the cliffhanger in the first issue of Nicieza’s new Cable series.
(And Wrecker has never really stopped showing up, but very much as cannon fodder)
I think the Wrecking Crew are the perfect 616 Jobber to the Stars villains to put someone new over. I guess Dr Light did that in DC, before Identity Crisis at least.
When I was in grad school, i wrote an rpg campaign where the Wrecking Crew were hired out to do the job in staged super fights to put over the government sanctioned hero teams.
@Taibak: The Howard Mackie/John Byrne Sopider-Man stuff of the late 1990s tried to soft-reboot the franchise and had Sandman revert to his Silver Age level of villainy, claiming he’d been faking his heroism all along as part of some nebulous scheme.
There was enough pushback on this from fans that Marvel later showed the Wizard had brainwashed the Sandman into returning to crime, but aside from an occasional flashback, nothin much came of it.
Eventually, there was a Zeb Wells story in Peter Parker: Spider-Man wherein the Sandman’s good and evil sides split apart into separate bodies, and the “good” side seemingly crumbled away.
After that, pretty much no one mentions the brainwashing element again, but later writers have given the Sandman sympathetic qualities, so he’s not just a ruthless criminal as Mackie and Byrne seemed to envision him.
Checking the reference, it is indeed mean to be OCPD, so I’ll fix that.