{"id":10169,"date":"2024-07-14T12:03:39","date_gmt":"2024-07-14T11:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10169"},"modified":"2024-07-14T12:03:39","modified_gmt":"2024-07-14T11:03:39","slug":"daredevil-villains-31-the-committee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10169","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #31: The Committee"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #74 (March 1971)<\/strong>
\n“In the Country of the Blind!”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Gerry Conway<\/strong>
\nArtist: Gene Colan<\/strong>
\nInker: Syd Shores<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Sam Rosen<\/strong>
\nColourist: not credited<\/strong>
\nEditor: Stan Lee<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve skipped issue #73, which is a crossover with Iron Man. <\/em>The villains are Zodiac and Spymaster, but they’re not getting an entry because it’s not a Daredevil story. It’s an Iron Man <\/em>story, and there’s absolutely no reason for Daredevil to be in it, other than (presumably) a vague hope of boosting sales. Daredevil’s contribution is to join in some fight scenes and to stand around listening patiently to pages of exposition about the origin of the Zodiac Key. Two issues in, Conway has yet to write anything for Daredevil <\/em>which isn’t a complete dud.<\/p>\n

Issue #74 is better, though it’s still not exactly good. It’s the second of Conway’s two stories about blindness. We open with Daredevil fighting some random thugs, getting clocked over the head, and miraculously regaining his sight. But alas, it was all a dream. This takes up a quarter of the book, because Daredevil<\/em>‘s eccentric pacing decisions are unaffected by the change of writer. We still have languid opening scenes, and a desperate rush to finish the plot at the end.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The plot finally starts on page 6, when Foggy shows up at Matt’s door. On his way over, he has suddenly and inexplicably gone blind.<\/p>\n

Since this is a Gerry Conway script from 1971, Foggy’s reaction is overwrought. “I suddenly realised how you must have felt all these years – so helpless – so alone!” But let’s put that in context. This is a story where Matt Murdock literally can’t answer the door without saying things like “soul-searching’s not going to get that doorbell answered, and unanswered doorbells have a habit of haunting your conscience with burning questions”. If we’re taking that as a baseline, perhaps Foggy is actually being remarkably restrained.<\/p>\n

Out on the streets, Matt and Foggy find that other New Yorkers are also suddenly losing their sight. Proving that he really is a man without fear, Matt hails a cab, and takes Foggy to visit his opthalmologist. But other than confirming that it’s a physical thing, the eye expert has no explanation.<\/p>\n

Finally, Matt heads out as Daredevil. Right away, he stumbles upon a group of thieves raiding a jewellery store. This group is the Committee, who seem to be a bunch of street-level criminals led by a big bald guy called Smasher. Smasher refers to himself in the third person, and it’s hard to figure out quite what Conway was trying to convey with him. Sometimes he has Hulk-like dialogue (“Smasher hit you hard – hard so fat mouth rattle!”) which suggests he’s meant to be mentally impaired somehow. But at other times he talks normally except for the third person thing. And he’s clearly the leader of the Committee. You suspect Conway himself wasn’t quite sure what he was going for.<\/p>\n

The rest of the Committee consists of eccentrically and flamboyantly dressed weirdos who don’t seem like any sort of threat. Somehow of other, one of them – he’s called George, but it’s never clear which of the group is George – has come up with a chemical that can blind all of New York by contaminating the water supply. Their plan is blind the whole city and loot some shops while nobody can stop them. That’s it. That’s the whole plan.<\/p>\n

At first, the “Committee” name seems random – there’s nothing businesslike about these guys. It seems to be linked to an underdeveloped angle where Smasher has ideas above his station about how professional the gang is. That idea does make it to the page in a few points. When the gang ask how much money they’re each going to get, Smasher replies that he’s nominating himself as Committee Treasurer, and he’ll “keep all the dough in escrow”. There’s a joke I wasn’t expecting.<\/p>\n

Individually, the Committee are just a bunch of guys. But thanks to Smasher’s brute strength and the gang’s weight of numbers, they actually win their first fight with Daredevil. That leads to the real point of the story, in which Daredevil teams up with a bunch of blind New Yorkers, since the blindness is now city wide, and they’re the only people who are unfazed by it. By this point, it seems, Conway had figured out that Daredevil isn’t functionally blind, so if you want to do stories about blindness, you’ll need some regular blind people. Of course, the other conclusion you might draw is that Daredevil doesn’t really lend himself to stories about blindness as well as you might think. And indeed, Conway doesn’t come back to the theme after this issue.<\/p>\n

There are some sketchy attempts to show us the diverse range of blind people in New York, which is well and good, and strengthens the point of the story. Still, ultimately it’s a rather moralistic story about how the blind deserve more appreciation.<\/p>\n

Given that context, the Committee don’t really have to be strong villains. They’re just there to drive the plot and provide a bit of entertainment value; the story is about the city-wide blindness gimmick, not about them. Even so, they feel like a missed opportunity. There’s something in the way Smasher tries to straddle being a thug and a mastermind at the same time – and the fact that his gang seem to accept him in the role. The joke about the Committee being delusionally “professional” had way more mileage in it. Gene Colan gives them fun, memorable designs – they’re ludicrously dressed for low-level criminals, and all the better for it.<\/p>\n

The Committee could actually have worked as recurring comedy nuisance villains. They probably shouldn’t have been given such an effective scheme in their one issue – or at least they shouldn’t have been credited with inventing the blinding chemical themselves. It would have suited their gimmick better if they’d just stumbled upon it, or if they’d been given it by another villain who wanted to cause a bit of chaose. Then their angle would have been that they were a bunch of low-tier losers who had blundered into being a genuine city-wide threat, yet lacked the ambition or imagination to do anything with it beyond robbing a jewellery store. Smasher was never going to be a big name, but he could have been a good recurring joke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #74 (March 1971) “In the Country of the Blind!” Writer: Gerry Conway Artist: Gene Colan Inker: Syd Shores Letterer: Sam Rosen Colourist: not credited Editor: Stan Lee We’ve skipped issue #73, which is a crossover with Iron Man. The villains are Zodiac and Spymaster, but they’re not getting an entry because it’s not a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10169"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10226,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10169\/revisions\/10226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}