{"id":10237,"date":"2024-08-18T12:09:03","date_gmt":"2024-08-18T11:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10237"},"modified":"2024-08-18T12:09:03","modified_gmt":"2024-08-18T11:09:03","slug":"daredevil-villains-35-mister-fear-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10237","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #35: Mister Fear III"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #90-91 (August-September 1972)<\/strong>
\n“The Sinister Secret of Project Four!” \/ “Fear is the Key!”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Gerry Conway<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Gene Colan<\/strong>
\nInker: Tom Palmer<\/strong>
\nLetterers: Sam Rosen (#90), Artie Simek (#91)<\/strong>
\nColourist: not credited<\/strong>
\nEditor: Stan Lee (#90), Roy Thomas (#91)<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve skipped five issues with returning villains, so let’s get up to speed.<\/p>\n

Issue #85 is a Gladiator story and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Issue #86 brings back the Ox, but it’s an important issue for other reasons: Matt Murdock and Karen Page briefly reunite, it all goes wrong, and they decide that they were never meant to be together after all. Matt then decides to move to San Francisco and pursue his relationship with the Black Widow which is where the book will stay for a while to come. The existing supporting cast are completely jettisoned. Karen joins the cast of\u00a0Ghost Rider\u00a0<\/em>for a while, but doesn’t return to this book until issue #227. Foggy Nelson won’t appear again until the book returns to New York in issue #108.<\/p>\n

In their place are the Black Widow, her sidekick Ivan Petrovich (who comes with Natasha as a package deal), and a bunch of new Californian characters mostly forgotten by posterity, such as irascible police commissioner Ironguts O’Hara.<\/p>\n

Clearly either Conway or his editors decided that the book wasn’t working and that drastic steps were needed. After all, Daredevil<\/em> had been on the verge of merging with Iron Man<\/em>. So far, Conway has struggled to find a hook on Daredevil himself; moving to San Francisco doesn’t change that, but it does make Daredevil<\/em> into Marvel’s token west coast book, and it means that the Black Widow can be mined for story ideas.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You might expect bold new villains for this new direction. That’s not what happens. For some reason, San Francisco is full of villains that Daredevil has fought before. So issue #87 is Electro. Issue #88 is the Purple Man. And issue #89 is Electro and<\/em> the Purple Man.<\/p>\n

That brings us to the return of Mr Fear – or rather, the debut of a new Mr Fear. The original Mr Fear is dead, and Mr Fear II was Starr Saxon, who is also dead (so far as Daredevil<\/em> is concerned, anyway). We’re now on to Mr Fear III, Matt’s old law school classmate Larry Cranston, who practises law in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

Matt is invited to join Larry’s firm. Larry shows up at Matt and Natasha’s house accompanied by another new supporting character, senior partner Jason Sloan. The story bends over backwards to imply that Sloan is the villain. His aura reminds Matt of the Owl and the Purple Man, and Natasha thinks there’s “something so evil about the way he moves”. This is never explained and never comes up again. Maybe the idea was that Cranston was trying to frame Sloan as Mr Fear – which would fit with his motivation – but it’s not at all clear how that works. (Jason Sloan does eventually turn out to be corrupt, but he’s more easily led and morally weak than actually evil.)<\/p>\n

I’ve listed this as a two-part story, but that’s debatable. Most of issue #90 deals with an ongoing storyline about something the Black Widow did as a Soviet spy. That’s part of the build for the next\u00a0<\/em>villain, so we’ll come back to it next time. Mr Fear’s contribution to that issue is simply to give Daredevil and Black Widow random panic attacks while they try to get on with the main plot.<\/p>\n

He doesn’t show up in costume until issue #91, and so the story is mostly about the fear gimmick, with very little to say about Cranston himself. As we’ve come to expect, Daredevil doesn’t confront Mr Fear until the last six pages. By that point our hero has already figured out that he’s dealing with a new Mr Fear, so he’s brought the antidote. This means that Mr Fear is just a lawyer in a borrowed costume, but he still puts up something of a fight against Daredevil, which the story tries to justify on the grounds that Daredevil hasn’t had much sleep lately.<\/p>\n

Once unmasked, Cranston explains his origin. By sheer coincidence, he happened to be passing when Starr Saxon murdered the original Mr Fear, and the dying villain revealed where he kept his spare costume. Cranston’s tossed-off motivation is to get revenge on star lawyers like Matt Murdock and Jason Sloan – he thinks that they get all the credit while he does the hard work. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this in theory, but it’s a token motivation in practice, and it hasn’t got much to do with the fear gimmick.<\/p>\n

Finally, Cranston meets a pathetic end. Having been caught on the roof of his office, he manages to break free and declares that he’ll be back for revenge. He plans to fly to safety with his jetpack. So he leaps over the side of the building. And then he remembers that he took off the jetpack three pages earlier, and plummets to his death. It’s Wile E Coyote level stuff.<\/p>\n

Or at least, the clear implication is that Cranston dies. The story is weirdly vague about it, yet it’s hard to see how he could be anything else, or how Daredevil could have failed to notice the absence of a body. We’re told that Daredevil embarks on “long hours of aimless wandering” to digest what’s just happened. And the Official Handbook<\/em> certainly thought he was dead.<\/p>\n

Despite all that, more than twenty years later, Cranston resurfaced alive and well in Over The Edge<\/em> #1. According to that story, he somehow escapes and builds a new life as a law professor at Columbia University. This led to him being reintroduced as a recurring villain in the #360s. Presumably someone just liked the fear gimmick and decided to use the Mr Fear who was already around. The gimmick is perfectly fine – it’s the Scarecrow, after all – but Cranston himself doesn’t bring anything new to it.<\/p>\n

From the look of it, Gerry Conway saw Mr Fear as just another old villain who could fill time while he built up his Black Widow story, the main focus of his San Francisco issues. We’ll see next time how that worked out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #90-91 (August-September 1972) “The Sinister Secret of Project Four!” \/ “Fear is the Key!” Writer: Gerry Conway Penciller: Gene Colan Inker: Tom Palmer Letterers: Sam Rosen (#90), Artie Simek (#91) Colourist: not credited Editor: Stan Lee (#90), Roy Thomas (#91) We’ve skipped five issues with returning villains, so let’s get up to speed. Issue […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10237","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=10237"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10305,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10237\/revisions\/10305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}