{"id":10202,"date":"2024-08-04T13:03:50","date_gmt":"2024-08-04T12:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10202"},"modified":"2024-08-04T13:03:50","modified_gmt":"2024-08-04T12:03:50","slug":"daredevil-villains-34-mr-kline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10202","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #34: Mr Kline"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #84 (February 1972)<\/strong>
\n“Night of the Assassin!”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Gerry Conway<\/strong>
\nArtist: Gene Colan<\/strong>
\nInker: Syd Shores<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Artie Simek<\/strong>
\nColourist: not credited<\/strong>
\nEditor: Stan Lee<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve skipped issues #80-81, which feature the Owl, acting at the behest of Mr Kline. That story also introduces the Black Widow to the cast, which will shortly lead to a radical retooling of the whole series. We’ve also skipped issues #82-83, where Daredevil and the Widow fight android duplicates of the Scorpion and Mr Hyde, built by, you guessed it, Mr Kline.<\/p>\n

That brings us to this issue, where Daredevil finally meets Mr Kline after some six months of build-up. And defeats him in one issue.<\/p>\n

Context, then. At this point, Gerry Conway was writing both Daredevil<\/em> and Iron Man<\/em>. Both titles gave Mr Kline an extended build up over the course of several months, with Kline sending an assortment of seemingly random villains to carry out missions with little or no discernible link between them. In Daredevil<\/em>, he’s also a blackmailer, extorting money from Foggy Nelson for some vague and unspecified mistake. Eventually, after the whole arc is over, we do get an answer to this question: it’s something to do with papers that Crime-Wave prepared when he was working in the DA’s office circa issue #59, and that Foggy signed without reading them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At first, Kline is depicted as an urbane man with a cigarette holder, invariably viewed from behind as he calmly monitors the progress of his many schemes. In issue #81, he turns out to be a robot – not a very interesting looking one, either – and inexplicably starts being called “the Assassin”, despite the fact that he doesn’t do any assassinating. His master plan somehow entails funding the mad scientist who creates the Man-Bull, framing the Black Widow for murder, making Foggy Nelson’s life a misery, and sending a guy called Mikas to fight Iron Man.<\/p>\n

Oh, and there’s a pair of robot time travellers called the Final Sons of Man wandering around. Not in Daredevil <\/em>or Iron Man, <\/em>mind you. They show up in Sub-Mariner<\/em> #42, which is also a Gerry Conway story.<\/p>\n

The Iron Man<\/em> stories never connect with this book at all, and Iron Man doesn’t even show up for the finale. Instead, Iron Man<\/em> #45 has Kline musing about the success of his latest scheme, coupled with a footnote informing readers that Kline died in Daredevil<\/em> #84 and needn’t trouble them further. So, yes, this is a horribly truncated ending to a story that had lasted more than half a year, as someone apparent woke up one day and said: hold on, what is this? Does this make any<\/em> sense? Where is this heading? What? Who approved this? I did? I don’t remember that. I must have been drunk. Cut it short.<\/p>\n

But this is a little unfair to Gerry Conway. At this point, a bit of publishing context is called for. A few months previously, Marvel decided to change the format of their whole line, raising the price from 15 cents to 25 cents, and adding an extra 15 pages of story. This grand idea lasted a single a month, after which Marvel abandoned the format change and changed the price to 20 cents. In the case of Daredevil<\/em> and Iron Man<\/em>, the plan had been to merge the titles – this got as far as being announced in Bullpen Bulletins. So if things had panned out as intended, Conway would have been building both titles towards a common storyline that they could resolve in their new shared book.<\/p>\n

Once the merger was out of the way, though, Mr Kline was no longer required for that purpose. So the whole storyline is abruptly resolved, if you can call it that.<\/p>\n

Mr Kline finally acts directly. He shows up in a Swiss ski lodge where Natasha is holidaying, posing as a Russian defector called Emil Borgdsky. Borgdsky claims to have invented a method to “cure certain forms of blindness”. Natasha immediately summons Matt to Switzerland. When he arrives, Matt quickly figures out that Borgdsky is (1) not human, and (2) Mr Kline. So, at night, Daredevil tracks down Kline to his secret Alpine base where…<\/p>\n

…um, where he finds Kline on a video call with Baal, a super computer from 12,000 years in the future. In Baal’s timeline, humanity has been wiped out. Kline’s job is to alter history to prevent this apocalypse coming to pass, by averting certain key events. For example, by crushing Foggy Nelson’s spirits, Kline has ensured that he will never become Governor of New York, which would have brought about the end of the world in twelve thousand years. Strangely, Baal’s aim is apparently to preserve<\/em> his own existence, and how that works isn’t really explained.<\/p>\n

The original plan, it seems, was to restore Daredevil’s sight. This would (for some reason) lead to him retiring as a superhero, which (for some reason) would stop the annihilation of mankind at some point in the next 12,000 years. But when the villains spot Daredevil, plans change: sod it, just kill him. Well, the plot is being cut short. In the most explicit acknowledgement of what’s going on, Kline actually says “It’s a pity of sorts. Our other plans were so much more aesthetically pleasing…”<\/p>\n

Poor Kline, after all his months of manipulation, winds up just firing laser beams at Daredevil. The Black Widow shows up to join the fight. And then the Final Sons of Man show up out of nowhere. They claim to be from a point even further into the future, and they’re here to stop Kline from altering history, thereby preserving their own timeline. They get rid of Kline in two panels, wave goodbye and “vanish, leaving two confused humans on the snow below”.<\/p>\n

Obviously there are extenuating circumstances in this whole thing, but there are more fundamental problems too. The\u00a0 whole thing is cosmic overreach. At its core, it’s a workable time travel story. Mr Kline has come back in time to change history for the greater good. Is it okay for him to ruin a few innocent lives along the way? That’s presumably meant to be the theme, and thus far it’s workable enough. Plus, since almost anything might have an impact on the timeline thanks to the butterfly effect, you can use him to kickstart all sorts of plots while you’re building him up, before doing somethign big and sweeping with him at the end. And again, that’s basically what Conway is trying to do.<\/p>\n

But twelve thousand years is far too long; it makes it too obvious that there’s no connection at all between Kline’s schemes and his supposed end goal. Maybe, at a push, I can buy that if Foggy Nelson gets into politics then it has knock-on effects on the policy of a major world power. But creating the Man-Bull? Mikos? Having the Black Widow put on trial for murder? The causal link doesn’t have to be clear, but beyond a certain point the whole thing just looks arbitrary. Because it is.<\/p>\n

Besides, weird cosmic stuff is not Daredevil’s register. The concept is better suited to Iron Man<\/em>, and would have been even better suited to Avengers<\/em> or Fantastic Four<\/em>. But Daredevil is hopelessly miscast. As a Daredevil story, this boils down to Matt looking befuddled while some robots fight each other. So even the germ of a good idea within Mr Kline isn’t a good Daredevil<\/em> idea – which is a shame, as Foggy’s blackmail subplot is built up quite well at first.<\/p>\n

The real importance of these issues isn’t the resolution of Mr Kline’s arc, but the introduction of the Black Widow as Daredevil’s new love interest. With the Iron Man <\/em>merger off the table, she’ll be the focus of the next attempt to retool Daredevil<\/em>, as the book relocates to San Francisco.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #84 (February 1972) “Night of the Assassin!” Writer: Gerry Conway Artist: Gene Colan Inker: Syd Shores Letterer: Artie Simek Colourist: not credited Editor: Stan Lee We’ve skipped issues #80-81, which feature the Owl, acting at the behest of Mr Kline. That story also introduces the Black Widow to the cast, which will shortly lead […]<\/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-10202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10202","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=10202"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10271,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10202\/revisions\/10271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}