{"id":10309,"date":"2024-09-22T10:56:10","date_gmt":"2024-09-22T09:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10309"},"modified":"2024-09-22T11:15:56","modified_gmt":"2024-09-22T10:15:56","slug":"daredevil-villains-38-angar-the-screamer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10309","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #38: Angar the Screamer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #100-101 (June-July 1973)<\/strong>
\n“Mind Storm!” \/ “Vengeance in the Sky with Diamonds!”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Steve Gerber<\/strong>
\nPencillers: Gene Colan (layouts #100) & Rich Buckler (#101)<\/strong>
\nInkers: John Tartaglione (finishes #100) & Frank Giacoia (#101)<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Artie Simek<\/strong>
\nColourists: Stan Goldberg (#100), George Roussos (#101)<\/strong>
\nEditor: Roy Thomas<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve skipped issue #99, which doesn’t have a villain. Instead, it has Daredevil and Hawkeye literally fighting over the Black Widow as part of a loose crossover with Avengers<\/em>. Natasha is so unimpressed by this display of 1970s machismo that she sticks around in Avengers<\/em> for an extra month and skips Daredevil<\/em> #100 entirely, despite being billed as co-star on the cover. So, in her absence, Daredevil has an anniversary issue all on his own.<\/p>\n

In trying to find an approach to the book that works, Steve Gerber’s first thought is to play up the location. If this is Marvel’s only comic set in San Francisco, then surely it’s got to be about the counterculture, right? And so issue #100 guest stars Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone<\/em>, who spends a good chunk of the book interviewing our hero. Daredevil endorses\u00a0Rolling Stone\u00a0<\/em>as a quality publication, but “didn’t think the counter-culture was interested in anybody who works with the police.” Wenner assures him otherwise: “Of course they’re interested! You work with the cops, but you’re fair! You want the system to work justly, up-front – and even people who oppose the system can respect that!”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You get the idea. Still, product placement aside, Gerber’s instinct is sound. All Daredevil’s previous writers have focussed on his love life, which, after all, was the driving engine of the book that Stan Lee created. Steve Gerber is more interested in the idea of Daredevil as a character who’s a believer in teh system but open minded about the counterculture. This will ultimately lead to the idea that Daredevil<\/em> is a book about a character with a foot in both worlds, both lawyer and vigilante, and it’ll work better when Foggy Nelson is brought back to serve as an establishment foil. For now, without Foggy, Matt has to be the establishment representative, and so he often comes across as a centrist dad.<\/p>\n

The Rolling Stone <\/em>interview is cut short when Daredevil and Wenner suddenly have a shared hallucination. Since it’s an anniversary issue, this scene is principally an excuse for a parade of old Daredevil villains to make cameo appearances. The result is hardly a testament to the quality of the books’s rogues’ gallery: the pickings are so slim that Gerber resorts to giving Dr Doom a prominent role, because at least you’ve heard of him.<\/p>\n

It turns out that similar incidents have been happening across San Francisco for the last couple of days, each time preceded by a terrifying scream. This is Angar the Screamer, in his original incarnation – a man in sixties hippie garb with the superhuman power to give people LSD trips by yelling at them.<\/p>\n

And let’s be clear: That is not a gloss on the story. It’s not even a case of the drugs angle being implied so blatantly that nobody could miss it – although, yes, the story is called “Vengeance in the Sky with Diamonds”, and the hallucination sequences echo psychedelic posters. But there’s no implication here at all: Daredevil tells us, very directly, in dialogue, that Angar is a drug reference. “His power goes beyond hypnosis,” Daredevil explains. “He’s like a living LSD factory. If he can sustain the effect – well, who knows? He could ‘freak out’ the world!”<\/p>\n

You might be wondering how on earth this got past the Comics Code. By 1973, the Code allowed drug references as long as they were negative. And Angar’s illusions are<\/em> presented as disorienting and nightmarish. There are maybe a couple of points where some San Franciscans seem slightly less bothered about it than you might expect, but even the Rolling Stone <\/em>characters seem to agree that at a bare minimum it’s an enormous nuisance. So far as we see, Angar only gives people bad trips. Any subversion here lies in taking a Code revisal that was presumably intended to allow instructive tales about heroin addiction and plots where Batman beat up drug smugglers, and using it to introduce an expressly psychedelic villain. But the story complies with the letter of the Code, and you could at least argue with a straight face that it complies with the spirit too.<\/p>\n

Angar is easily the most dated-looking character in the 1980s editions of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, <\/em>with his facial hair, headband, waistcoat and medallion. But even when he was created, he was meant to look out of date. Angar is an acid casualty who hasn’t come to terms with the end of the sixties – he looks nothing like the Rolling<\/em> Stone<\/em> staff who are presented as the contemporary counterculture. He was a peace-and-love flower child who saw the dream crushed by reactionary crackdowns. He hates the Man for destroying the dream, but hates his fellow hippies too for giving up on it. Really, he hates everyone, and yet he’s convinced himself that he’s the last bastion of a philosophy of love.<\/p>\n

Angar got his powers from the same mystery man who created the Dark Messiah a couple of issues previously; we establish here that he’s a rich guy, and Angar literally calls him “the Man”. It’s at least strongly implied that whatever procedure he went through didn’t help his sanity. Angar’s instincts are to run wild and cause chaos with his new power. He talks about the world being at his feet, though it’s never entirely clear what he’s planning to do – holding the world to ransom doesn’t really seem to fit with his overall personality. At any rate, his shadowy mentor turns out to have an electrode implant that can keep Angar under control, and so Angar reluctantly agrees to stick to his actual mission of targetting Daredevil and the Black Widow.<\/p>\n

This leads to a bizarre fight scene between Angar and the heroes in a psychedelic landscape, during which Angar protests that he doesn’t want to be there and wants to build a world of love. Eventually, Angar backs down when the Black Widow threatens to shoot him in the head at point blank range.<\/p>\n

Angar shows up again for the climax of this storyline, as Daredevil finally reaches the Man himself. By this point, Angar seems to be completely out of his mind. But he does finally get to side with the heroes and defeat the Man, thanks to Moondragon telepathically channelling his powers into a targetted hallucination of unspeakable existential horror. Or, if you prefer, some black stuff coming out of an egg. Angar is supposed to have exhausted his powers for good at the end of the arc, but that’s a passing line of dialogue. Later writers apparently just didn’t notice it, or figured that readers would have forgotten it. Really, it completes Angar’s arc: he betrays his sixties dreams precisely because he clings on to them so obsessively, but ultimately switches sides to do something that actually helps.<\/p>\n

Despite this, Angar went on to make a fair number of appearances over the years, as a minor villain with an unusual power that became less drug-themed over time. A connection with Screaming Mimi justified a few more appearances once she moved into Thunderbolts<\/em>. He even has a Marvel Cinematic Universe version, though with defanged powers that cause catatonia. But Angar has largely wound up as a low level petty criminal, losing most of the garbled dreams that makes him distinctive in his early appearances. Gerber’s Angar isn’t a bank robber. He has bigger dreams than that. Incoherent dreams, to be sure, but bigger ones.<\/p>\n

Even so, Angar is lucky to have stuck around as long as he did. He’s a character locked to the time of his creation – tied to the sixties, and intentionally behind the times from the start. He’s a very difficult character to adapt to the sliding timeline because there’s no obvious modern equivalent of the demise of flower power. A disillusioned Occupy Wall Street activist is just not the same character. And shorn of his context, Angar was inevitably going to become a blander gimmick villain as the decades went by.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #100-101 (June-July 1973) “Mind Storm!” \/ “Vengeance in the Sky with Diamonds!” Writer: Steve Gerber Pencillers: Gene Colan (layouts #100) & Rich Buckler (#101) Inkers: John Tartaglione (finishes #100) & Frank Giacoia (#101) Letterer: Artie Simek Colourists: Stan Goldberg (#100), George Roussos (#101) Editor: Roy Thomas We’ve skipped issue #99, which doesn’t have 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-10309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10309","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=10309"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10395,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10309\/revisions\/10395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}