Daredevil Villains #69: The Cossack
DAREDEVIL #217 (April 1985)
“The Sight Stealer”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Artist: David Mazzuchelli
Colourist: George Roussos
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Editor: Ralph Macchio
We’ve jumped forward a year since the last entry, so let’s get up to speed.
Issues #206 and #210-214 are the remainder of the Micah Synn storyline. Issue #207 is HYDRA. Issues #208-209 are a fill-in story by guest writers Harlan Ellison and Arthur Byron Cover, and they involve robot assassins sent by the Death-Stalker’s mother. I’m not giving her an entry, because she’s barely in the story. Issue #215 sees Daredevil team up (kind of) with the Two-Gun Kid, Marvel’s western hero who was also a lawyer; Two-Gun’s segments are told in flashback, with Daredevil tying up the loose ends in the present day. The villains are just your standard issue corrupt businessmen, though. And issue #216 was the second Gael story.
William Johnson left as penciller after issue #207. His replacement is David Mazzuchelli, who’ll be with us through to issue #233. This is Mazzuchelli’s first major assignment for Marvel after a few fill-ins, and it’s the only lengthy run he’ll do on a superhero title in his career. Oh, and the book has changed editors once again: as of issue #212, it falls under Ralph Macchio’s office.
Charts – 16 January 2026
We’re starting to get back to something approaching normalcy – which is to say, one big name has released a single.
Two weeks, and streams are up significantly from last week. Which is a bit weird, because all the other Stranger Things tracks fall off a bit last week, and this already had a decently long run in the top 10 two years ago. It’s still number 1 with an asterisk: if it wasn’t subject to downweighting, then “Man I Need” by Olivia Dean would be number one. But not by much, in fairness.
6. Bruno Mars – “I Just Might”
28. Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars – “Die With a Smile”
36. Bruno Mars – “Locked Out of Heaven”
Lead single from his fourth album. It’s the sort of extremely polished retro soul pastiche that you’d expect from, well, the lead single from a Bruno Mars album, but it’s hard to deny that he’s very good at this sort of thing. Maybe if you’re going to be optimistic in 2026, it helps to combine it with nostalgia.
The X-Axis – 14 January 2026
UNCANNY X-MEN #22. (Annotations here.) It’s a weird schedule, this month. You might have thought that the X-books were simply doing a soft relaunch and spreading out the launches of the new titles after “Age of Revelation”. But then you look at next week’s schedule, which has six X-books… and then the week after that seems to have just the one again. Baffling.
Whatever they’re up to, it means that Uncanny X-Men gets a more-or-less clear week for its return to regular stories. Gail Simone returns to the Mutina storyline from issues #17-18, as she shows up at Haven simultaneously threatening everyone with knives and demanding to be allowed to join the team for PR reasons, as if that was somehow a reasonable thing to request. This doubles somewhat as a Nightcrawler spotlight issue, in as much as it also features his first date with Mackenzie, and he’s the one who actually heads her off. But her storyline isn’t really tied to him more than any other regular cast member, although he is at least well placed to be the most open-minded X-Man about the possibility of redeeming her.
Uncanny X-Men #22 annotations
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #22
“No Clean Hands”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: David Marquez
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Mutina cuts through the cover of issue #1. The issue has the “Shadows of Tomorrow” branding, though this story doesn’t really have much to do with anything from “Age of Revelation”.
THE X-MEN:
Nightcrawler. He goes on what seems to be his first date with Mackenzie DeNeer, and shows up for it in a tuxedo. In the near-future “Age of Revelation” timeline, we saw them as a married couple in Last Wolverine #1. While attempting to talk Mutina down, Kurt sings Mackenzie’s praises as having “the kindest heart I’ve ever known”, so he seems serious.
It’s his birthday, and the X-Men and Outliers throw him a surprise party when he gets home (still referring to him as “fuzzy elf”, as Kitty used to back in the 1980s). Naturally, everyone’s very nice about him – Rogue claims that there’s no X-Men team without him, and Ransom claims that he’s everyone’s favourite X-Man.
House to Astonish Episode 216
It’s only 348 sleeps ’til Christmas, so we’re taking the opportunity to look back at the best 2025 had to offer, as we run down our pick of our three favourite comics of last year in the 14th annual Homies awards. Will your favourite make the cut? What did your fellow listeners choose? Find out here, true believer! Or in the comments for the Homies post from the start of December, I guess, for that second question at least. Here is definitely more convenient.
The podcast is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email, or on Bluesky, and here’s hoping you choose to stick around with us for 2026!
Daredevil Villains #68: The Gael
DAREDEVIL #205 (April 1984)
“The Gael”
Writer: Denny O’Neil
Penciller: William Johnson
Inker: Danny Bulanadi
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: George Roussos
Editor: Bob Budiansky
Gather round, children! An American is going to tell us about the IRA! This always goes well!
Daredevil #205 brings in Matt’s new love interest, Glorianna O’Breen. She’ll stick around as a regular until issue #233. But we first meet her as Debbie Nelson’s photographer niece from Ireland, on the run from “terrible danger” back home. Her father Fergus is a member of the IRA – “the anti-government rebels”, as she describes them – but he’s been falsely accused of betraying the organisation, and so he’s sent her to America to keep her safe from retribution.
Soon afterwards, Daredevil stops two IRA men from trying to bundle Glorianna into a van. But of course, the IRA couldn’t possibly be doing anything bad – it turns out that they’re actually trying to keep her safe from the Gael, an IRA hit man who “went bad”. We’ve already seen the Gael in the opening scene: he’s a man in a trenchcoat who kills one of his informants for the hell of it, has a shamrock motif on his gloves, and leaves a paper shamrock on his victim’s forehead as a calling card. You’d think it would blow away. Maybe he makes them with Post-it notes.
The X-Axis – 7 January 2026
So there is a new Infinity comic on Marvel Unlimited – the imaginatively named X-Men Infinity Comic – but it seems to take place in some sort of not-quite-616, not-quite-XTAS limbo, which means that it’s out of our remit here. For those interested, it’s by Steve Orlando and Alan Robinson, and it’s pretty much by the numbers. That just leaves us with…
X-MEN #23. (Annotations here.) “Age of Revelation” was always strongest when viewed as an X-Men storyline rather than as an event, and this is where we pick up on what was going on in the present day. Most of it is along the lines that you could have figured out: future Cyclops tries to kill Revelation, but the plan goes awry because his Beast wound up somewhere else. History quite clearly gets altered in some way, since Revelation doesn’t stay with the X-Men, but whether those changes are for the better, or whether Cyclops has just wound up giving him ideas, remains up in the air. It’s a pretty straightforward issue, but there are some subtleties going on with Hank and Doug’s reactions to all this that add to the interest. And I’m interested to see where we’re going with the subplot about Magneto’s status quo not matching the future characters’ memory – it feels like it may be an attempt to back out of the wider idea of resurrection leading to degeneration, but then again I doubt that was ever really the plan, given that we’re 23 issues into the run and Magneto remains the only character affected.
Charts – 9 January 2026
We’re past Christmas, but we only have a couple of new releases for 2026. What can fill the gap? Well, there’s the season finale of Stranger Things.
Welcome to 1980s week.
1. Djo – “End of Beginning”
This isn’t from the soundtrack of Stranger Things, but it is by one of the cast. It kind of counts as back catalogue itself, though, because it was already a hit last year, and got to number 4 then. He hasn’t had any other top 40 hits, so for now he goes onto the list of pure one-hit wonders. “End of Beginning” has a 5% lead over Taylor Swift at number 2, though again there’s an asterisk: if it wasn’t on ACR, Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need” would be number 1 by a comfortable margin.
There are six back catalogue entries this week, thanks to Stranger Things, and they join the Kate Bush and Tiffany tracks from last week. It’s like early December, but with Now That’s What I Call 80s instead of with Christmas songs. One difference is that, because they’re not Christmas songs, these tracks are eligible for an ACR reset – they come off downweighting if they have a big enough week-on-week climb, so they’re on an equal footing with new releases.
Wolverine #14 annotations
WOLVERINE vol 8 #14
“Silver and Snow”
Writer: Saladin Ahmed
Artist: Martín Cóccolo
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER: Wolverine in a snowbound forest, with an image of Silver Sable in the background.
WOLVERINE:
For some reason he’s only just got around to returning to Canada to mourn the wolf pack from issue #1. He suggests that the need to mourn them only really became clear to him over time, and in particular that it may have been prompted by his reaction to the illusions of his mother in issues #9-11. The whole thing prompts him to reflect that his very need to mourn the animals demonstrates that he was never really like them.
He winds up in a ghost town looking for fuel, and naturally decides to stick around to defend the local mutants from Department H interference – especially once he’s escalated the situation by fighting them off once.
X-Men #23 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #23
“Assassin”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Tony Daniel
Inker: Mark Morales
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: Cyclops attempts to kill Revelation with the Soulsword, while everyone else looks horrified.
This issue is bannered both as an “Age of Revelation” epilogue and as part of “Shadows of Tomorrow”, the tag line being used for the post-AoR books. The “Shadows of Tomorrow” branding doesn’t appear to require any particular impact from AoR, though – it also appears on this week’s issue of Wolverine, which has nothing to do with AoR at all.
It’s a new year and I think we’ll go back to the character-by-character format for these posts, rather than the page-by-page one – which was often rather confusing with double page spreads, and given Amazon’s persistent misnumbering of the pages in the digital editions.
THE X-MEN:
Cyclops. Aside from the recap at the very start of the issue, he spends the whole story possessed by his future self from the Age of Revelation (of whom more below). This story takes place before X-Men: Age of Revelation – Finale, where present day Cyclops returns to his body and wakes up in his cell.
