{"id":10273,"date":"2024-08-25T11:51:37","date_gmt":"2024-08-25T10:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10273"},"modified":"2024-08-25T11:51:37","modified_gmt":"2024-08-25T10:51:37","slug":"daredevil-villains-36-damon-dran-the-indestructible-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10273","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #36: Damon Dran, the Indestructible Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #92-94 (October-December 1972)<\/strong>
\n“On the Eve of the Talon!” \/ “A Power Corrupt!” \/ “He Can Crush the World!”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Gerry Conway<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Gene Colan<\/strong>
\nInker: Tom Palmer<\/strong>
\nLetterer: John Costanza<\/strong>
\nColourist: not credited<\/strong>
\nEditor: Roy Thomas<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve called these issues Daredevil<\/em> #92-94, but you might have noticed that the cover logo quite clearly says Daredevil and the Black Widow<\/em>. That starts with issue #92 and continues through to issue #106. During that time, editorial footnotes call the book “DD\/BW”.<\/p>\n

But according to Marvel, these title of this comic is was still Daredevil <\/em>during this period. And they have a point. It’s not just a question of checking the copyright warning. The cover design of the time had the title in text just above the cover box, and that still just said Daredevil<\/em>. The Stan Lee Presents captions on the splash pages still just said Daredevil<\/em>. And for the most part, despite her equal billing on the cover, the book continued to treat Daredevil as the star and the Black Widow as a supporting character, albeit a prominent one.<\/p>\n

The exception is the Project Four storyline, which culminates in these issues. But it’s a major exception. Gerry Conway introduced the subplot back in issue #87, as soon as the book relocated to San Francisco, and it’s been building ever since. In previous issues, we’ve learned that on her very first mission as a Soviet spy, the Black Widow and freelancer Danny French were sent to steal something from the mysterious Project Four. Project Four turned out to be a bunch of scientists working on a mysterious and allegedly powerful artefact. It’s a weird energy globe thing, and it’s the macguffin for the whole arc. Danny French has had it all this time, but he’s never figured out how to use it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There’s a whole strand in here which doesn’t really concern us, about whether Danny French is a friend or an enemy. He seems to be intended as a loveable rogue character, or perhaps he just believes that he is. He’s also genuinely a bit of a creep, and he has sexist elements that were intended to give Black Widow something to push against in the early 1970s and make him thoroughly unlikeable in the 2020s. You could argue that he’s a villain of sorts. But he’s certainly not the antagonist, so we won’t be focussing on him.<\/p>\n

Instead, the villain of this arc is Damon Dran. Over the course of the story, he becomes Damon Dran, the Indestructible Man. Perhaps Marvel could license him out to Viz<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Damon Dran is an insane and paranoid billionaire. It turns out that he funded Project Four in the first place, and he’s spent years trying to recover his lovely globe. At first, he’s a fairly standard wealthy criminal mastermind. He has plenty of henchmen and scientists working for him, and a lot of equipment, but Dran himself is just a middle aged guy in a suit. Gene Colan gives him a demented charisma, with frilled collars and an enthusiastic, supercilious grin.<\/p>\n

Dran’s motivation is sketched out in narrative captions rather than being properly set up in the story. But the underlying idea is quite solid. He’s a rich guy who’s used to being able to buy his way out of the problems that everyone else has to deal with. But no amount of money can buy him out of the risk of nuclear war. Or can it? Dran could have deployed his vast resources to help prevent nuclear war from happening. Instead, he created Project Four, to give himself superpowers, so that he would survive a nuclear war. And that’s what the globe is for.<\/p>\n

The nuclear war framing is very 1970s. But the modern real-world equivalent would be an insane, paranoid billionaire who feared climate change but, instead of doing anything about it, devoted his resources to terraforming Mars. So the concept has aged rather well, all told.<\/p>\n

Issue #92 mostly consists of Dran trying to extract the globe’s location from the captive Black Widow and Danny French. There’s a detour in here where he sends a henchman called the Blue Talon to fight Daredevil. The Talon gets the cover slot of issue #92, but I’m not devoting a post to him, because he’s just a generic martial arts guy with a deeply unfortunate skin tone who fights Daredevil for a few pages and never shows up again. Dran is the main focus, even in that issue.<\/p>\n

In due course, Dran gets his globe, and his scientists start to power him up. Issue #93 features a fight between Daredevil and a battlesuited Dran, which ends with Dran’s mansion exploding. But in issue #94, it turns out that thanks to the globe, Dran has become an ever-growing, indestructible giant. Having already achieved personal invulnerability, Dran decides that in order to be especially<\/em> safe, he needs to rule the world, and so he marches on San Francisco. While it’s a somewhat bizarre raising of stakes, it fits with his motivation.<\/p>\n

Gene Colan only does layouts on the Indestructible Man chapter, with Tom Palmer finishing the art. Conventional supervillain designs were never Colan’s strong point. But his Indestructible Man works well – not so much for the costume, which is routine, but for the fact that he still has a hazy, increasingly stylised version of Dran’s balding, ordinary head. It’s a weird midpoint between mundane and cosmic which not only sells the threat, but also suggests Dran losing touch with reality as he turns into a plodding giant.<\/p>\n

Much of the final issue consists of the military shooting at the Indestructible Man – to no effect whatsoever, because he’s indestructible. It’s a little bit like the first Juggernaut story, pushing the Indestructible Man as an unstoppable force. In X-Men<\/em>, of course, the solution was that the Juggernaut was vulnerable to telepathy. The Indestructible Man could hardly turn out to be vulnerable to radar, so the solution in Daredevil<\/em> is that he still needs the Project Four globe to hover around him and provide him with power. And while he may be invulnerable, the globe isn’t. And so a story published in 1972 culminates in the heroes winning a boss fight by shooting the otherwise indestructible villain in his little red weak spot.<\/p>\n

The other aspect of the story is that the Black Widow and Danny French both feel terribly guilty about having botched their Project Four mission and thus allowed all this to happen. Needless to say, it’s Danny who atones for his sins by dying heroically to bring down Dran.<\/p>\n

The story strongly implies that Dran dies after his defeat. “Within short moments,” the narrator says, “Damon Dran is consumed by the energy he sought to control, and those who watch … are forced, toward the end, to turn grimly away.” But the art doesn’t show any of that. In 1983, George Perez brought Dran back as a Black Widow villain in Marvel Fanfare<\/em>, and just declared that he’d survived with horrific scarring. He’s made a handful of appearances since then – he’s in a Captain America story in 1994, a Black Widow<\/em> story in 2014, and the Black Widow & Hawkeye<\/em> miniseries from earlier this year. He’s never returned to Daredevil<\/em>. To the extent that he’s used at all, it’s as a Black Widow villain.<\/p>\n

And you can see why. Although his concept is sound enough, it’s also easy to recycle for a more modern character. Damon Dran was never really a Daredevil villain – he was a Black Widow villain who happened to debut in Daredevil<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #92-94 (October-December 1972) “On the Eve of the Talon!” \/ “A Power Corrupt!” \/ “He Can Crush the World!” Writer: Gerry Conway Penciller: Gene Colan Inker: Tom Palmer Letterer: John Costanza Colourist: not credited Editor: Roy Thomas I’ve called these issues Daredevil #92-94, but you might have noticed that the cover logo quite clearly […]<\/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-10273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10273","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=10273"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10327,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10273\/revisions\/10327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}