Daredevil Villains #77: The Nameless One
DAREDEVIL #243-244 (June & July 1987)
“Don’t Touch Me” / “Touch Me”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: Louis Williams
Inkers: Al Williamson, Danny Bulanadi & Tony DeZuinga
Colourists: Christie Scheele & Paul Becton
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio
(Note: I skipped this post by mistake last time, so it’s appearing out of sequence. For #78, see here.)
After a string of one-off villains, most of whom are mentally ill serial killers, Ann Nocenti goes in a different direction: magic. Specifically, voodoo.
The last time Daredevil did voodoo was in issue #130, cover date February 1976. That’s a story by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown and Klaus Janson, in which a voodoo priest called Brother Zed uses his illusion powers to convince his followers that he has real magical power, and then exploits their belief for his own gain. The basic concept isn’t too bad when taken in isolation, but the story came out at a time when black characters were largely absent from Daredevil, and if your sole representation of black America is to have them decapitating chickens in Central Park, then that’s a problem.
Eleven years have passed, since then, but in terms of the diversity of its cast, less has changed in Daredevil than you might think. The generic bystanders certainly have a lot more variation than they used to. But the book’s most prominent black character is still Turk, a comic relief character, and even he hasn’t appeared in Nocenti’s run. The Hell’s Kitchen supporting cast is small, and consists of Karen Page and a group of street kids called the Fatboys – they aren’t all white, but the ones with developed personalities are. Rotgut and his mother were black, to be fair, although Rotgut himself was an albino. So while things have changed in 11 years, this still stands out as a Story With A Lot Of Black People In It.
Charts – 24 April 2026
At last, a big new release to liberate us from Sam Fender and Olivia Dean.
1. Olivia Rodrigo – “Drop Dead”
This is the lead single from the upcoming album “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love”. It has a fairly substantial margin over “Rein Me In” at number 2, though that comes mostly from first-week physical sales. Without them, “Drop Dead” would still have been number 1 but it would have been a lot closer. It’s her fourth UK number 1 single after “Drivers Licence” (2021), “Good 4 U” (2021) and “Vampire” (2023).
The X-Axis – 22 April 2026
WOLVERINE #19. (Annotations here.) The Adamantine storyline, which has been going since issue #1, seems to be building to some sort of a conclusion. I certainly hope it is, because at this point it’s taxing my patience. When it started, I figured that Saladin Ahmed was doing something about how adamantium was a human imitation of the mythical adamantine, and perhaps some kind of Tower of Babel angle, which felt like it might work. But by this point we’re being told that the Adamantine is “the very idea of the Earth’s metal made alive and aware”, which has some sort of objection to “man’s creation, adamantium, which it calls false metal”. And, erm… what? What does any of that mean, and more importantly, what is any of it about?
What even is “the very idea of the Earth’s metal”? Metal as a naturally occurring phenomenon? Which is… what, ore? Meteorites? But it can’t be that, because the adamantine keeps going on about how it was used to forge weapons in the past – there’s meant to be some angle where this personification of weaponry has discovered from seeing Wolverine that a weapon can be self-animating. So the Adamantine is about war and weapons, then? But that’s not the same thing as metal. If the Adamantine is meant to personify “metal”, why is it so interested specifically in war? Why not farming tools and jewellery? And if it’s okay with metal as forged by humans, what’s its problem with adamantium? If the objection is simply that it’s a man-made metal, what makes adamantium different from steel? It just doesn’t hold together, either in terms of plot logic or in terms of theme. Again, what’s this story supposed to be about?
Wolverine #19 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 7 #19
“Wisdom and War”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
Once again, Martín Cóccolo’s name appears in the credits as “MART N C CCOLO”. This also happened in (at least) issues #14 and #17. Has anyone thought of putting in a call to IT? It feels like the sort of thing that shouldn’t be giving a professional publishing company this much trouble.
COVER: Wolverine fights Hercules. This happened, uh, last issue.
WOLVERINE:
The previous issue ended with Athena intervening in the fight between Wolverine and Hercules. This one opens with her magically calming them both down. Although it was only Hercules who was directly under the Adamantine’s influence in the previous issue, Athena talks as if it had been influencing Wolverine too. (“My magic has banished the Adamantine’s cruel influence long enough for you to remember yourselves… You have let yourselves be used by ancient evil.”) It’s possible that she simply assumes the Adamantine was influencing them both, but more likely she means that the Adamantine manipulating Wolverine by goading him into a fight. He was uncharacteristically berserker for 2026 last issue, so it might be a bit of both.
Housekeeping
Annotations won’t be until Friday at the earliest this week. Just in case you were wondering.
House to Astonish Episode 218
Paul and I are back with more comics waffle for you to gobble up, as we send good wishes to Adam Hughes, chew over Marvel’s layoffs and its wider malaise, and discuss DNX, Challenges of Doom, Clayface: Celebrity Dirt, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Horse’s Marvel reprints and Jughead: Piemageddon. We’ve also got reviews of Fireborn and The Fury of Firestorm, and The Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has aged badly.
The podcast is here, or available via the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Bluesky, or via email.
(And yes, my audio is all wonky – we had to record remotely for the first time in ages, and I didn’t set up my mic right. Sailor V, as they say.)
Charts – 17 April 2026
Apparently Coachella is a thing now, then.
1. Sam Fender & Olivia Dean – “Rein Me In”
Eight weeks, non-consecutive. It’s peaked in terms of sales, but that’s pretty much academic. Because it was still outperforming the market over the last couple of weeks, it has weeks to go before it might be hit by the downweighting rule. Meanwhile, Bella Kay’s “iloveitiloveitiloveit” does go to ACR this week, and that leaves “Rein Me In” with a massive lead over the new number 2 single – which, remarkably, is “Dracula” by Tame Impala in its 18th week on the top 40. The remix with Jenni from Blackpink is the most streamed version, but that’s hardly a simple explanation for why it’s doing so well – it’s not like Blackpink songs typically have this sort of staying power.
11. Justin Bieber featuring Nicki Minaj – “Beauty and a Beat”
15. Justin Bieber – “Daisies”
26. Justin Bieber – “Yukon”
The maximum three tracks for Justin Bieber, essentially because of his performance headlining Coachella. Coachella hasn’t made much of an impact on the UK singles chart in the past, as far as I can recall. But Bieber very rarely performs live, which probably adds to the interest in this.
The X-Axis – 15 April 2026
X-MEN UNITED #2. (Annotations here.) Erm. Right. Well. So… this is certainly a thing, isn’t it?
I liked Exceptional X-Men, but this is a mess. Exceptional‘s strength was always in the character work; a slow pace, a down-to-earth tone and a small cast suited it. X-Men United, with a sprawling cast, a high concept setting and some sort of X-Men Team-up remit, takes all the wrong things from that book. I described the first issue as a misfire which at least had some moments with the Exceptional cast. The closest this issue comes to that is a scene with Kitty and Magneto. The art is okay, to be fair, and does a reasonable job on talky scenes.
Beyond that, it’s pretty much a train wreck. Why can’t it explain the concept of Graymatter Lane? If people are travelling there physically then what’s all this stuff about how if you die in Graymatter Lane then you die in real life? Wouldn’t that be obvious? But if they’re only travelling there psychically, how do they exit to different locations? This is rudimentary and two issues in, the book still hasn’t explained its basic premise intelligibly. It gets worse, though: the resolution of last issue’s cliffhanger is “false peril”, Cyclops feels wildly out of character compared to his home book, and then that plot just goes away. Instead, we move on to a story about Captain America and a supporting player from Truth: Red, White and Black. It’s not exactly obvious why that’s an X-Men story in the first place, though there are some throwaway lines about hoping that Captain America learns something about mutants in the process. But it’s an utterly bizarre choice of story for issue #2, when the book has such a sprawling cast and hasn’t done a proper story with its own setting yet. If the idea is to sell the concept of a team-up book, it certainly doesn’t do that by picking X-23, Melée and Jitter out of a hat and getting them to stand interchangeably next to Captain America. This is going very badly.
Storm: Earth’s Mightiest Mutant #3 annotations
STORM: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST MUTANT #3
“War of the Realms”
Writer: Murewa Ayodele
Artist: Federica Mancin
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Storm steps out of a comic book panel. Nothing quite so explicitly meta actually happens in the book itself but… well, you’ll see.
STORM:
A flashback reveals that during the break between Storm vol 5 #12 and issue #1 of this series, Storm visited assorted afterlife realms in search of the missing Dr Voodoo. (He was captured by Death at the end of Storm #12, and turned into her servant, for reasons we’ll come back to below.) Her alliance with Sugaar seems to have started around this time, with him providing her with access to these realms.
Storm lists the following realms that she’s visited as part of this exercise:
Inglorious X-Force #4 annotations
INGLORIOUS X-FORCE #4
“Death War, part 1”
Writer: Tim Seeley
Artist: Philip Tan
Colour artist: Romulo Fajardo Jr
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: The caption reads “Cable – felled by the Angel of Death, or his mysterious pursuer?” The “mysterious pursuer” is the person obscured behind Archangel’s left wing. Their costume doesn’t really resemble anything in the issue, but the monochrome clothing and the gun suggest it’s probably meant to be Domino. The fight is taking place in a scrapyard and doesn’t have much to do with anything that happens in the issue.
X-FORCE:
Cable. Last issue, X-Force fought the Beyond Corporation and Cable eliminated Boom-Boom as a suspect for murdering Kamala Khan in a future timeline. At the end of the issue, Boom-Boom found Cable slumped unconscious in his chair with some sort of mark on his chest, and Domino standing over him; the story ended with Boom-Boom attacking while Domino attempted to explain herself. (Akihiro helpfully explains that the art was supposed to show Cable “bleeding from a wound in his chest”, which it didn’t really convey.)
