{"id":10306,"date":"2024-09-08T11:53:35","date_gmt":"2024-09-08T10:53:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10306"},"modified":"2024-09-08T11:53:35","modified_gmt":"2024-09-08T10:53:35","slug":"daredevil-villains-37-the-dark-messiah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10306","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #37: The Dark Messiah"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #97-98 (March-April 1973)<\/strong>
\n“He Who Saves” \/ “Let There Be – Death!”<\/strong>
\nPlotter: Gerry Conway<\/strong>
\nScripter: Steve Gerber<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Gene Colan<\/strong>
\nInker: Ernie Chua<\/strong>
\nLetterers: John Costanza (#97), Shelly Leferman (#98)<\/strong>
\nColourists: not credited (#97), George Roussos (#98)<\/strong>
\nEditor: Roy Thomas<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve skipped issues #95-96, which are a rematch with the Man-Bull. That brings us to the final Gerry Conway story, which is also the first Steve Gerber story. Although he’s only the scripter, these issues kick off a storyline that runs through to issue #107, and so they’re more a part of Gerber’s run than Conway’s. Spoiler: it’s another of those arcs where Daredevil takes on a series of lesser villains before facing the final boss at the end.<\/p>\n

Steve Gerber was still fairly new to Marvel at this point. His first comics were cover dated December 1972. But they included Adventure into Fear<\/em> #11, the start of his Man-Thing run. Later in 1973, he debuts Howard the Duck. So some of his signature work is happening at the same time as his Daredevil<\/em> run. In comparison, Daredevil<\/em> is a minor entry in his bibliography. He plays this book fairly straight, at least while it remains set in San Francisco. Things change when the book moves back to New York, but we won’t get to that for a while. At this stage, there’s a bit of weirdness, but for the most part Gerber’s Daredevil<\/em> remains within normal parameters for 70s Marvel. This is Steve Gerber showing that he can also be a safe pair of hands.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This may not be what people look for in a Steve Gerber comic, but he has good ideas about how to make Daredevil\u00a0<\/em>work. Stan Lee and Roy Thomas both thought Daredevil<\/em> was about Matt and Karen Page; Gerry Conway built heavily around Matt’s relationship with the Black Widow. Steve Gerber is far less interested in Matt’s love life, and much more idea-driven. His Daredevil is less angst-ridden and more philosophical. For him, this is a book about an establishment hero with one foot in the counterculture – it’s set in early 70s San Francisco, after all. Eventually, this leads Gerber to see the tension in Daredevil being both a lawyer and a vigilante, something that his predecessors have glossed over as a problem, if they even recognised it as a contradiction at all. Gerber is the first Daredevil writer to see it as a potential theme.<\/p>\n

All this lies in the future. It’s worth mentioning, though, in order to provide some reassurance about where we’re going in the coming instalments. Because issues #95-96 are not a good start.<\/p>\n

The book opens with street acrobat Mordecai Jones entertaining bystanders. He gets distracted by a dog, and cracks his head on the pavement. What little we see of Mordecai before his accident presents him as a simple man who enjoys performing – the narrator talks about his “uncomplicated mind”.<\/p>\n

Daredevil takes care of Mordecai until the ambulance shows up. It’s immediately obvious that something has changed in the scripting. It’s not just that Gerber’s narrator is a lot less baroque than Conway’s. The ambulance crew give Daredevil a telling off for moving the boy – not because he might have a neck injury, but because of “union rules”. We’re into a phase of seventies cynicism now, with Daredevil positioned as more of a bruised idealist in a dispiritingly irrational world.<\/p>\n

Mordecai is taken to hospital and left in a corner. The narrator explains that all the medical staff are far too busy completing very important paperwork to actually treat the patients. In this case, that really does seem to be what Colan has drawn and presumably it’s what Conway asked for in his plot. A shadowy villain wheels Mordecai away in plain sight and straps him into some Kirbytech which gives him superpowers. Well, I say Kirbytech – it’s actually fairly ordinary looking stuff. There’s a cassette player involved. But given the way this storyline turns out, apparently it’s Kirbytech.<\/p>\n

Later in the issue, Mordecai reappears with golden skin (think Adam Warlock), a black costume, and a weird black aura . He introduces himself as “Mordecai Jones, the Dark Messiah”, and says things like this:<\/p>\n

“Stand ye back, o crowd, or I shalt stride on thee as easily as I might ‘pon water. For holiness resides within this forceful frame! And where I walk, choirs of angels shall sing hymns of it everafter!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The story couldn’t be much more emphatic in positioning him as as a Christ figure. “To my kingdom I come”, he says, “and my will shall be done.” He breaks all San Francisco’s criminals out of jail and declares himself their new leader. He claims to have risen from the dead and to have the power to kill by sight alone. And he calls Daredevil “my friend” without any apparent irony. Quite reasonably, Daredevil decides that the Dark Messiah is just a lunatic. But this insight doesn’t help much, because the Messiah comprehensively outpowers him.<\/p>\n

The Dark Messiah takes his followers to Golden Gate Park, which he then seals in an energy dome. Daredevil manages to get in anyway, which the Messiah declares to be blasphemy. Then he brings out his Disciples of Doom, who are called Josiah, Macabee and Uriah. Apparently, he’s given super powers to three more random criminals, who also believe that he is the messiah. After a fight, Mordecai apparently decides he doesn’t want to turn Golden Gate Park into a holy land after all, and just leaves. .<\/p>\n

The obligatory rematch ends with the Disciples being knocked unconscious and turning back into normal humans. Just in case any readers were still trying to make sense of the plot, Daredevil tells us all not to bother: “As usual, any resemblance between what just occurred and logic is purely coincidental!” But Mordecai is confident that everything that’s happening is contributing to his plans. Somehow. Whatever those plans are. It’s never clear.<\/p>\n

Daredevil raises the objection that real messiahs don’t use henchmen and don’t fire eye beams, which is true, but again doesn’t seem to affect the story much. Eventually, Daredevil recognises the Dark Messiah as the acrobat from the start of the story, and reminds him of his true identity. Mordecai then has some sort of crisis of identity and vanishes in an explosion. And that’s it.<\/p>\n

The wider storyline is about who created the Dark Messiah and why. We will eventually get an answer to that, but it’s not one that explains very much about these two issues. We certainly find out who gave Mordecai his powers, and in a very general sense we do find out why he wanted to create some secondary villains. But quite why he thought it was a good idea to create a lunatic who thought he was Jesus, or what the Dark Messiah was trying to achieve in these two issues, or why the Dark Messiah is willing to follow his creator’s instructions, all remain entirely obscure. The other villains created as part of this arc seem to get powers that are somehow linked to their personalities, which might suggest that their creator doesn’t have control over what powers they get – but even that pattern doesn’t fit Mordecai, who was an acrobat, not a street preacher.<\/p>\n

He’ll show up again in the climax of this storyline, when the big bad throws all of his underlings at San Francisco for a second time, but his role in that story is little more than a cameo. This two-parter only really works if you’re prepared to accept that the Dark Messiah doesn’t need a motivation or a coherent agenda. He’s just a raving lunatic. But that’s not very saisfying. All the religious references might lead you to expect some sort of story about religion or cult leadership, say. But there’s none of that.<\/p>\n

The Dark Messiah never appears again after this storyline, and it’s very obvious why not. If you’re feeling charitable, his story never gets around to making whatever point about religion his creators had in mind. But it feels more like his religious trappings are there to disguise the fact that the story isn’t about anything at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #97-98 (March-April 1973) “He Who Saves” \/ “Let There Be – Death!” Plotter: Gerry Conway Scripter: Steve Gerber Penciller: Gene Colan Inker: Ernie Chua Letterers: John Costanza (#97), Shelly Leferman (#98) Colourists: not credited (#97), George Roussos (#98) Editor: Roy Thomas We’ve skipped issues #95-96, which are a rematch with the Man-Bull. That brings […]<\/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-10306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10306","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=10306"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10362,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10306\/revisions\/10362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}