{"id":10314,"date":"2024-10-06T12:26:38","date_gmt":"2024-10-06T11:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10314"},"modified":"2024-10-06T12:26:38","modified_gmt":"2024-10-06T11:26:38","slug":"daredevil-villains-39-ramrod","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10314","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #39: Ramrod"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #103 (September 1973)<\/strong>
\n“…Then Came Ramrod!”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Steve Gerber<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Don Heck<\/strong>
\nInker: Sal Trapani<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Artie Simek<\/strong>
\nColourist: George Roussos<\/strong>
\nEditor: Roy Thomas<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve skipped issue #102: it’s a fill-in by Chris Claremont and Syd Shores, and the villain is Stilt-Man. And now, back to the storyline in progress.<\/p>\n

Daredevil has been working his way through a series of new supervillains, all created as henchmen by a mystery archvillain. Daredevil has already faced the nebulously religion-themed Dark Messiah, and psychedelic oddball Angar the Screamer. Ramrod is the next in the series.<\/p>\n

What is a ramrod, anyway? Good question! Well, it’s a stick for ramming things into a gun barrel. You probably have one at home for your own musket. But in America, it also means a foreman who’s a strict disciplinarian. That’s presumably the sense that Steve Gerber had in mind, since Ramrod’s extremely token origin story has him as an obnoxious foreman on an oil rig. When he gets crushed by an oil drum, he’s taken to the same hospital where Mordecai Jones became the Dark Messiah a few issues back. The same shadowy villain carts him off, gives him superpowers, and tells him to kill Daredevil.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At first, Ramrod seems genuinely shocked at being asked to murder someone. After all, he’s just an annoying manager. He’s not even a criminal, let alone a killer. But he’s threatened with death unless he complies, and soon enough he comes round to the idea. As a petty tyrant, he delights in showing off his new power.<\/p>\n

After all that, it turns out that his first mission isn’t to kill Daredevil after all. Instead, he’s asked to steal back some papers. (Don’t worry too much about the papers – they’re just a macguffin.) Unfortunately for Ramrod, Spider-Man happens to be visiting this month, no doubt because Daredevil<\/em> needed whatever sales help it could get. And so Ramrod takes on Daredevil, Spider-Man and Black Widow at once, with mixed results – he’s powerful enough to do it, but dim enough to keep forgetting that he’s meant to be stealing the papers, not having a fight for the sake of it.<\/p>\n

It turns out that Ramrod’s weak spot is his face, which shouldn’t have taken a genius to work out, given that it’s the one part of his head that isn’t steel plated. But that doesn’t actually play much into the finale. Instead, Ramrod climbs a building, gets taken by surprise, falls off it, and plunges headfirst into the ground. There, he gets ignominiously stuck with his legs waving around in the air. Presumably he gets carted off by SHIELD or someone. Like the Dark Messiah and Angar, he returns as a loyal henchman for the final chapters, only to get beaten again.<\/p>\n

Compared to his predecessors, Ramrod is normal. No religion. No magic. No illusions. No drugs. He’s just a cyborg. He has a metal skeleton. He has the strength of ten men. He has some sort of metal skullplate. And that’s pretty much it. But it’s enough for him to smash through the walls of American houses and tear the place apart while the heroes stand around looking aghast. He’s a kind of budget Juggernaut, toned down to Daredevil’s power level.<\/p>\n

When you look at these newly created villains in the round, the storyline doesn’t make much sense. If you can create a basically useful henchman like Ramrod, why would you bother with the religious maniac or the acid casualty? If you’re into giving people weird psychedelic powers, why are you making a boring old cyborg? Charitably, you could argue that they all get powers based on some aspect of their original personalities, so maybe their creator doesn’t have a choice about what happens to them… but that’s being very charitable. They feel like three disconnected ideas that got tacked on to a wider plot where only Angar really fits.<\/p>\n

But in this context, Ramrod works better than you might expect, simply because of the contrast with the wilder ideas around him. This storyline involves an acrobat who thinks he’s Jesus, a man with LSD powers, and (still to come) a bunch of semi-cosmic concepts on loan from Jim Starlin. And in amongst them all is Ramrod. He hits things. To defeat him, you hit him back. There is no high concept. There are no oddball powers. There is nothing cosmic. There is no big idea. There is only a simple question: what if an asshole became a cyborg?<\/p>\n

Ramrod never appeared in Daredevil<\/em> again after this storyline, but he did make a handful of appearances in other books. Only one of them is truly a Ramrod story, though: Amazing Spider-Man<\/em> #221 (1981), by Denny O’Neill and Alan Kupperberg. In that issue, Ramrod is still a physical threat to Spider-Man, but he’s already well on the way to being a joke character. He’s angry about the failure of his country and western career, and he gets beaten with an electromagnet.<\/p>\n

It’s all downhill from there; his remaining appearances are occasional cameos, usually padding out the numbers at the Bar With No Name. Ramrod is just a very slightly recognisable villain who can fill out a crowd.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to say that he deserved better – he’s just a big strong guy, and outside the context of his original story, that would have seemed uninspired even in 1973. He never even gets a real name. Power inflation has killed off any hopes he might have had of finding a niche; a vanilla cyborg is barely even a gimmick any more. His bland character design, which is basically just a guy with a skullcap, doesn’t help his cause.<\/p>\n

There’s a world where he might have worked. He does have some charisma – in his debut, he’s having a grand old time throwing his weight around. He never gets the chance to be the awful boss that his name implies, because he doesn’t have anyone to give orders to. Maybe there’s a world in which he finds a niche as a colourful lieutenant, or a middle-ranking HYDRA member. But that’s not how he turned out. He’s just a generic henchman, even if he works in context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #103 (September 1973) “…Then Came Ramrod!” Writer: Steve Gerber Penciller: Don Heck Inker: Sal Trapani Letterer: Artie Simek Colourist: George Roussos Editor: Roy Thomas We’ve skipped issue #102: it’s a fill-in by Chris Claremont and Syd Shores, and the villain is Stilt-Man. And now, back to the storyline in progress. Daredevil has been working […]<\/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-10314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10314","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=10314"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10433,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10314\/revisions\/10433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}