{"id":10317,"date":"2024-10-20T12:16:21","date_gmt":"2024-10-20T11:16:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10317"},"modified":"2024-10-20T12:16:21","modified_gmt":"2024-10-20T11:16:21","slug":"daredevil-villains-40-kerwin-j-broderick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10317","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #40: Kerwin J Broderick"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #104-107 (October 1973 to January 1974)<\/strong>
\n“Prey of the Hunter!” \/ “Menace From the Moons of Saturn!” \/ “Life Be Not Proud!” \/ “Blind Man’s Bluff!”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Steve Gerber<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Don Heck (#104-106), Jim Starlin (#105 Titan sequence), Bob Brown (#107)<\/strong>
\nInker: Sal Trapani (#104, #106), Don Perlin (#105), Sal Buscema (#107)<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Charlotte Jetter (#104, #107), June Braverman (#105), Shelly Leferman (#106)<\/strong>
\nColourist: Petra Goldberg (#104, #107), Janice Cohen (#105), George Roussos (#106)<\/strong>
\nEditor: Roy Thomas<\/strong><\/p>\n

Throughout Steve Gerber’s run, a mysterious shadowy figure has been giving super powers to oddballs like Angar and the Dark Messiah. Now, it’s time for Daredevil to meet this arch villain. It’s Kerwin J Broderick, the senior partner of the law firm of Broderick, Sloan and Murdock.<\/p>\n

Until now, Broderick hasn’t been seen on panel, but Gerber has been building him up in a subplot. Matt is hired to defend a group of kids who are charged with robbery, and Jason Sloan keeps telling Matt that Broderick wants him to enter a guilty plea. The expectation seems to be that Matt Murdock, of all people, won’t merely persuade his clients to plead guilty, but will actually ignore their instructions. It’s a strange arc, since Gerber seems to think that this sort of thing would be classed as “slightly questionable” rather than “completely beyond the pale”, meaning that Matt reacts to it as simply a troublesome work problem.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

By the way, you might remember that before Matt Murdock joined the firm, its other partner was Larry Cranston, who turned out to be Mr Fear. So Jason Sloan was in business with two supervillains. This is a complete coincidence. The stories are totally unrelated. Jason just has terribly bad luck in choosing his partners.<\/p>\n

In issue #104, Matt and Natasha finally meet Broderick when they go to a drinks reception at his mansion. Broderick sends one last hireling after them – for some reason, instead of creating a new villain, he imports Kraven the Hunter from Amazing Spider-Man<\/em>. Kraven defeats Daredevil, chucks him off a cliff at the bottom of Broderick’s garden, and disappears from the plot, his role fulfilled<\/p>\n

Daredevil lands safely in the water, and there he stumbles upon an elaborate underground labyrinth full of cosmic stuff. This is where he stumbles upon Broderick’s partner, the shadowy woman who we saw alongside him in Ramrod’s origin flashback. This is Moondragon (or rather, “Moon Dragon”), a character who will go on to much bigger things.<\/p>\n

Moon Dragon had appeared once before, in Iron Man<\/em> #54. In that story, written by Mike Friedrich, she’s a random evil scientist who goes by “Madame MacEvil”. She mostly seems interested in science experiments and in trying to capture Iron Man and the Sub-Mariner. This storyline completely retools her, and issue #105 gives her a four-page origin flashback drawn by Jim Starlin. Apparently, these were pages that Starlin had produced for Iron Man<\/em> #57 (on which Gerber was going to be the co-writer) before Stan Lee removed him from the book. So basically, Gerber is shoehorning the unused pages into his Daredevil<\/em> plot. And that’s why Moon Dragon was tied to a mystery character who had been in Iron Man<\/em> a few months previously, something which feels utterly random if you don’t know the context.<\/p>\n

This flashback ties Moon Dragon into Starlin’s Thanos mythology. She was raised in an enlightened monastery on Titan and developed her mind and body to their peak, only to flee to Earth after Thanos conquered the planet. She’s an enlightened human from an enlightened culture, in an exceptionally seventies fashion: “Unhampered by the lunacy you call ‘education’ – grades, exams, awards – my mind grew to full flower.” Ostensibly, the monastery practised an alien religion, but they’re blatantly Buddhist monks. They have shaved heads. There’s a statute of Buddha, even if he’s called “Kaluba”.<\/p>\n

Moon Dragon has come to Earth because she’s convinced that Thanos is making moves against the planet. She’s become convinced that San Francisco is full of Thanos thralls, and she’s allied herself with Kerwin J Broderick because he’s a respectable establishment figure and must therefore be trustworthy. In theory, that’s the theme of Broderick’s character: he’s a crimelord who exists within the establishment and gets away with it because everyone trusts him so much. Officially he has no codename, but the narrator follows Angar’s lead and calls him “the Man” – in scare quotes. As San Francisco’s only superheroes, Daredevil and the Black Widow are doing too much damage to his operations. That’s why he’s been creating supervillains to take them down.<\/p>\n

The only reason why Moon Dragon is on board with this plot is that Broderick has convinced her that Daredevil is working for Thanos. Once she actually meets him, she figures out the truth almost immediately. And that’s why I’m not classing Moon Dragon as a Daredevil villain: in plot terms, she’s more of a dupe. The trouble is that by giving her this role in the plot, Gerber undercuts her origin story. She’s a superior, enlightened human who’s so stupid that she got talking into giving superpowers to Angar and Ramrod, all in order to fight Thanos, who isn’t in the storyline at all. Sure, she falls for Broderick’s social position, but isn’t that precisely the sort of thing that enlightened people are meant to see through?<\/p>\n

Once Moon Dragon switches sides, we’re left with Broderick as our sole villain. He’s unbothered by her betrayal, because she’s already served her purpose. He re-activates his\u00a0 henchmen from the previous arcs so that they can cause trouble again, and then unveils Terrex, a life-force-controlling green humanoid thing. Terrex is a doomsday robot from Titan that Moon Dragon brought with her.<\/p>\n

Even though Broderick has apparently been a normal, under-the-radar crimelord for years, exposure to all this cosmic stuff has made him to raise his aspirations. He’s now completely insane, and he wants to be the monarch of San Francisco, “Kerwin the First, King of the Golden Gate!” To that end, he merges himself with Terrex, and becomes a giant green guy who can make things live or die.<\/p>\n

This is all rather similar to Damon Dran. They’re both rich lunatics with access to technology; they both use those resources to turn themselves into super powered giants who march on San Francisco. But Gerber’s version has a bit more going on, thanks in part to the subplot threads with the other henchmen, with Angar in particular going off the rails and pursuing his own shambolic agenda. And Jason Sloan gets to redeem himself somewhat by showing up to confront Broderick\/Terrex.<\/p>\n

Broderick is defeated through the combined efforts of Daredevil, the Black Widow, Moon Dragon,\u00a0 Captain Marvel (who shows up in the last chapter) and Angar. The actual mechanics of that defeat involve a lot of 70s cosmic woo. Terrex is “a being of pure life”, you see. It follows that he can be defeated by “un-life”. Un-life is not death, which is merely the absence of life – un-life is the opposite of life. Unfortunately, there isn’t any un-life to hand, due to it being indescribable and unobtainable. So in the absence of proper un-life, the solution is to combine Moon Dragon and Angar’s powers in order to make Broderick think<\/em> that he’s being destroyed by un-life. What that means in practice is a bizarre sequence of Terrex breaking an egg full of black goop over his own head. For some reason this turns Broderick back into a human, and kills him.<\/p>\n

Broderick’s core concept is a corrupt pillar of the establishment, who was prompted to raise his game by Daredevil, and who fluked his way into the resources of Moon Dragon. That’s the part of the story that wants to make something of Angar finally taking down the Man, and even Jason Sloan standing up to the mentor he’s never questioned. But the story needs a bigger climax and so Broderick randomly becomes a lunatic who wants to be a giant green king. And on top of that, the whole thing gets tied in to a bunch of Captain Marvel concepts that don’t really fit with Broderick.<\/p>\n

Moon Dragon hangs around to the start of the next issue, in which Gerber seems to be setting her up as a romantic rival to the Black Widow. In practice she gets written out almost immediately, and shunted over to Captain Marvel<\/em> and Avengers<\/em>. As for Daredevil<\/em> lurches back to New York in the following issue. Broderick, despite his lengthy build-up, winds up overshadowed by a detour into the mythology of Thanos, who isn’t even here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #104-107 (October 1973 to January 1974) “Prey of the Hunter!” \/ “Menace From the Moons of Saturn!” \/ “Life Be Not Proud!” \/ “Blind Man’s Bluff!” Writer: Steve Gerber Penciller: Don Heck (#104-106), Jim Starlin (#105 Titan sequence), Bob Brown (#107) Inker: Sal Trapani (#104, #106), Don Perlin (#105), Sal Buscema (#107) Letterer: Charlotte […]<\/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-10317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10317","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=10317"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10478,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10317\/revisions\/10478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}