DAREDEVIL #60 (January 1970)
“Showdown at Sea!”
Writer: Roy Thomas
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Syd Shores
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
Editor: Stan Lee

At his core, Crime-Wave ought to work. He’s built up over three issues of sub-plot as the top criminal menace in New York. He’s talked about as an unprecedented threat to the rule of law. Intimidation of witnesses and jurors is apparently a big thing. He’s a kingpin of organised crime and a natural opponent for Foggy as DA and Matt as his assistant. He’s not just a street-level threat but a systemic one. It’s precisely the sort of thing that works for Daredevil in later years.

But Crime-Wave doesn’t work, and never returns.

Issue #60 is where Daredevil finally meets him. But his on-panel debut is in issue #59, where Willie Lincoln meets him and escapes alive. That issue rather sums up the problems with Crime-Wave. It opens with Crime-Wave’s thugs demanding protection money from a corner shop. True, the whole point is that Crime-Wave is a systemic background threat, and the shopkeeper does refuse to testify, but it’s still fairly underwhelming stuff for an archenemy.

We then learn that Willie Lincoln has managed to locate Crime-Wave. Willie has achieved this feat by the simple expedient of going to the bar where he first heard of Crime-Wave, and accidentally stumbling through an unlocked door marked “KEEP OUT”. Immediately through that door is a chute that leads him straight to the underground lair of Crime-Wave. A bunch of armed gunmen surround the man himself, who is dressed in the traditional Silver Age villain colours of green and purple, wears a hood, and sits behind a snazzy red desk. Incredibly, Crime-Wave decides that Lincoln – who is dressed in a perfectly respectable looking suit – is a “harmless beggar”, and sends him on his way.

How does this headquarters work, exactly? There’s a set of regular stairs in the background, but is the chute a normal means of access? It doesn’t seem to serve any other function. On a normal day, do the henchmen arrive for work by coming down a slide clutching their guns and shouting “Wheee!” while the theme to The Banana Splits plays in the background? This is one of Crime-Wave’s problems – the premise wants to be played grim and gritty, but the reality is a man with a gangster chute who thinks Stunt-Master might make a good assassin.

Now, until the Comics Code was revised in 1971, it didn’t exactly lend itself to any version of “grim and gritty”. Drug dealing is not a thing. “Crime shall never be presented in such a way as … to promote distrust of the forces of law and order”, so you can vaguely hint at Crime-Wave infiltrating the authorities or paying off judges but you can’t show it. I’ve pointed out before that 1960s Daredevil often toys with the sort of crime story shown in issue #1 only to back off from it – perhaps another reason for that is the simple difficulty of doing that version of Daredevil under the constraints of the Comics Code as it stood at the time. After all, it was designed to strangle the crime genre.

Still, none of that stopped the Kingpin from being introduced successfully in 1967. Crime-Wave is a  similar idea, but his more explicit supervillain trappings cut against his gimmick. And thanks to Amazing Spider-Man, Crime-Wave is a new arrival in an already crowded field. The point of distinction here isn’t so much Crime-Wave himself; it’s Daredevil, whose role in the legal establishment means that he comes at this trope from a different angle. In theory. If you can actually commit to the corruption angle.

In issue #60, Daredevil actually catches up with Crime-Wave, and we get to see him commit an actual crime. He’s running a casino ship in international waters. Of course, because it’s in international waters, that’s not a crime in itself, and the customers are genuine New Yorkers. The crime is fraud: Crime-Wave has rigged the roulette wheels.

But wait, because all this is apparently just a means to an end. Crime-Wave’s plan is to lure in Foggy’s fiancée Debbie Harris, rig the games to get her into debt, and then use that to get leverage over her. The story is ambiguous about whether this whole ship is there solely for Debbie, or whether she’s just his latest target – the latter would make more sense, so let’s go with that. At this point, Debbie has just broken off her engagement with Foggy out of nowhere, because she’s belatedly decided that being associated with an ex-convict is bad for his political career. It’s a bit late for this plot development, since he won the election months ago, but that’s the idea. Debbie has been fed information that links the ship with Crime-Wave, and she’s hoping to bring him down in order to make herself an eligible partner again.

Debbie and Foggy are seemingly reconciled at the end of the story, and Foggy mentions her again in a couple of issues time as if she was still around. However, she doesn’t appear again until issue #108, so apparently a retrospective decision was taken that this issue’s break-up should stick. By this point Matt and Karen are firmly a couple, and Debbie’s original function of prising Foggy out of the romantic triangle is spent; Foggy’s new role is to be Matt’s friend and boss, and Debbie isn’t really needed any more.

Anyway, Crime-Wave’s plan fails completely. Daredevil doesn’t just beat up the whole gang, he steers the boat back into US waters, where it gets raided by the police. Crime-Wave himself doesn’t put up much of a fight, and he’s unmasked as Foggy’s assistant Hollis. Oh, sorry, have we not mentioned him before?

Yes, it’s the same problem we had with the Masked Marauder, in an even more extreme form. The villain’s identity is supposed to be a dramatic reveal, but there aren’t any candidates. So Crime-Wave turns out to be a bland-looking guy who had a single line of dialogue 12 pages earlier, and who doesn’t even get a full name. True, his one line of dialogue did have him trying to undermine Foggy and Debbie’s relationship, but it’s still not much of a reveal.

Logically, the idea seems to be that Crime-Wave was always one step ahead of the authorities, because he had compromised the DA’s office. But we never see anything specific along those lines – perhaps because it could only be hinted at for Code reasons, but still. The haziness of Crime-Wave’s actual villainy, the tell-don’t-show quality of his threat, the underwhelming reveal of his true identity and the sporadic mismatched elements of Silver Age wackiness make him a failed execution of a basically sound archetype.