{"id":10459,"date":"2025-01-19T12:55:16","date_gmt":"2025-01-19T12:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10459"},"modified":"2025-01-19T12:55:16","modified_gmt":"2025-01-19T12:55:16","slug":"daredevil-villains-44-el-jaguar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10459","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #44: El Jaguar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #120 (April 1975)<\/strong>
\n“…And a HYDRA New Year!”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Tony Isabella<\/strong>
\nArtist: Bob Brown<\/strong>
\nInker: Vince Colletta<\/strong>
\nColourist: Petra Goldberg<\/strong>
\nLeterer: Ray Holloway<\/strong>
\nEditor: Len Wein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Aside from the Crusher issue that we covered last time, Tony Isabella’s short run on Daredevil<\/em> consists of a HYDRA storyline. These few issues are certainly not enough to make HYDRA into Daredevil\u00a0<\/em>villains. But if Isabella had stuck around longer, they might well have wound up as a true import to his rogue’s gallery. Isabella’s big project here is to retool HYDRA for the seventies, and Daredevil<\/em> happens to be the book he’s writing so here they are.<\/p>\n

HYDRA had debuted a decade earlier in “Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD” (at that point, a feature in Strange Tales<\/em>). They were a terrorist organisation led by Fury’s arch enemy Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, who had started life as a Nazi villain in Sgt Fury<\/em> #5. In other words, as originally conceived, they were continuity Nazis. If not outright neo-Nazis, they were at least an example of the “escaped Nazi leader resurfaces in South America with a private army” trope.<\/p>\n

But Strucker had been killed in Strange Tales<\/em> #158, back in 1967. HYDRA had continued to appear, but my impression is that without their frontman, they’d drifted into mere generic super-terrorists.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Isabella’s approach is to dump the last remnants of the Nazi angle and just make HYDRA into a large criminal organisation. There’s an assortment of minor bad guys as the middle management, and a Supreme Hydra running the whole show. This version of HYDRA doesn’t stand for anything beyond a “cause of global domination”. They’re generic world conquerors in the Cobra mould, and if anything more than that was in Isabella’s mind, then it’s not apparent on the page. In lieu of an actual theme, they have an organogram.<\/p>\n

The HYDRA ranks are mainly filled out with minor existing characters. The Fixer and Mentallo are there. So is the Sub-Mariner<\/em> villain Commander Kraken. The least explicable inclusion is the Man-Killer, who at this point was a man-hating militant ultra-feminist. While this iteration of the character was excruciatingly of its time, she did at least have a clear philosophy and agenda, neither of which fits with taking a job in the generic, male-dominated HYDRA. But here she is anyway.<\/p>\n

A few new characters are introduced too. One is Blackwing, and we’ll come to him next time. Another is Jackhammer, who gets so little to do that there’s no point devoting a post to him – he won’t appear again until 1990, when he shows up in Captain America<\/em>. And then there’s El Jaguar.<\/p>\n

El Jaguar is the leader of the HYDRA commando squad, and he does get a prominent individual role in his debut issue.Foggy Nelson is being invited to join SHIELD’s new oversight board, and El Jaguar’s squad are sent to kidnap him. It’s New Year’s Eve, and Foggy’s guests include Matt and Natasha, back for one last run in the book. Yes, I know the issue is cover dated April, but that’s how far out of synch the cover dates were with the publishing schedule in those days.<\/p>\n

Natasha hasn’t forgiven Foggy for that time when he was blackmailed into prosecuting her for murder. She also spends issue fretting about whether being in love with Matt is compatible with being a “liberated lady”, in a storyline with gender politics that are painfully unsubtle even for the time.<\/p>\n

None of this matters in the slightest to El Jaguar, who is only here for the fight scene. He and his crew crash in through the window, there’s a fight with Daredevil and the Black Widow, and Foggy is saved from abduction. The henchmen are captured, but El Jaguar puts in a relatively impressive showing before escaping.<\/p>\n

For all the prominence he’s given, El Jaguar is a very generic character. As you might have guessed, he peppers his dialogue with words of Spanish, such as “Caramba!” He wears leopardskin trousers, he’s bare chested, and he’s wearing a jaguar-head necklace. He has pointy ears and odd-looking eyes, and seems to have mildly superhuman strength, at the level which might pose a problem for the likes of Daredevil but wouldn’t have Spider-Man breaking a sweat.<\/p>\n

The most ill-advised aspect of his design is his gloves. Clearly the idea was that he would have brutal, slashing claws. If you squint, you can see an echo of Sabretooth, who won’t debut until 1977. But you’ll have to squint a lot, because El Jaguar’s big furry gloves look like novelty handwarmers.<\/p>\n

Nor does he have the personality of a vicious killer. In fact, to the extent that he has a personality at all beyond “villain”, his signature trait is to be unusually concerned about the wellbeing of his men. Even though the rest of his squad are disposable greenshirts, El Jaguar doesn’t treat them that way. In fact, he gets genuinely protective when Daredevil is beating them up.<\/p>\n

In the logic of Isabella’s HYDRA, that might perhaps have led somewhere. El Jaguar could have been the HYDRA divisional leader who treated his men well – the token noble warrior within HYDRA. Or he could have switched sides at some point. Or he could have built a power base of loyal nobodies within the HYDRA, which is probably the most interesting option. But none of these quite fit with him as a vicious claws guy.<\/p>\n

El Jaguar appears throughout Isabella’s brief run, providing a recognisable baddie for Daredevil and the Black Widow to fight on their way to bigger things. But nobody seems to have found him very inspiring. After this storyline, he makes only one further appearance: he’s one of the nobodies in the Bar With No Name that get gunned down by Scourge in Captain America<\/em> #319.<\/p>\n

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with El Jaguar – you could have developed him into a passable lieutenant if you really wanted. But his hook isn’t strong enough to make you try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #120 (April 1975) “…And a HYDRA New Year!” Writer: Tony Isabella Artist: Bob Brown Inker: Vince Colletta Colourist: Petra Goldberg Leterer: Ray Holloway Editor: Len Wein Aside from the Crusher issue that we covered last time, Tony Isabella’s short run on Daredevil consists of a HYDRA storyline. These few issues are certainly not enough […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10459","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=10459"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10722,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10459\/revisions\/10722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}