{"id":10571,"date":"2025-02-02T17:47:06","date_gmt":"2025-02-02T17:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10571"},"modified":"2025-02-02T17:47:06","modified_gmt":"2025-02-02T17:47:06","slug":"daredevil-villains-45-blackwing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10571","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #45: Blackwing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #122-123 (June & July 1975)<\/strong>
\n“HYDRA-and-Seek” \/ “Holocaust in the Halls of HYDRA”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Tony Isabella<\/strong>
\nArtist: Bob Brown<\/strong>
\nInker: Vince Colletta<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Karen Mantlo<\/strong>
\nColourists: Janice Cohen (#122) and George Roussos (#123)<\/strong>
\nEditor: Len Wein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Blackwing is a bat-themed villain. That might seem like a bold move in the world of superhero comics, where the bat motif is very much taken. Of course, you can always do “what if Batman, but a villain”. But for the Marvel Universe, that character is Nighthawk, and he exists already.<\/p>\n

Yet Blackwing genuinely is distinct from Batman. For all that Batman loves his bat motif, you see, he draws the line at actual bats. Even in the days when Bat-Hound and Bat-Mite seemed like a good idea, DC drew the line at Bat-Bat. This is the gap in the market which Blackwing seeks to fill: a bat-themed villain with actual bats.<\/p>\n

For our purposes, I’m treating these two issues as Blackwing’s spotlight story. But his debut was in issue #118 – a fill-in story by Gerry Conway and Don Heck entitled “Circus Spelled Sideways Is Death”. This magnificent title is all the better for its irrelevance: the story features neither death nor sideways orientation. It does, however, feature a circus.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Because Blackwing is first introduced to us as the newest member of the Circus of Crime. He’s not a natural fit. The Circus of Crime’s schtick is that they’re genuine circus performers who do a bit of robbery on the side – gymnasts, a human cannonball, a strongman, a clown, a python charmer, and so forth. Now, maybe it’s an American thing, but I don’t recall “bat trainer” being a classic circus act. Yet there he is, complete with a masked costume that makes him look far more like a conventional supervillain than any other member of the group.<\/p>\n

Somehow, the Circus of Crime have been allowed to do a televised charity show in Shea Stadium, despite making no attempt whatsoever to conceal their identities. At this point, it seems, the Marvel Universe authorities still have remarkable faith in the power of rehabilitation. The Circus’ plan is for the Ringmaster to use his hat to hypnotise all the New Yorkers watching at home on TV. Blackwing’s trained bats will then head out across the city to visit the TV viewers, collect their valuables, and bring them back to the stadium… on live TV. It’s tremendously silly. The narrator says there are “droves” of bats. Don Heck looks at the size of his paycheck and the proximity of his deadline, and decides that about nine should do it.<\/p>\n

Other than that, Blackwing contributes very little to the story. Daredevil defeats the Circus. Blackwing escapes off panel, with a bit of dialogue about how maybe he’ll return as a bigger threat. Perhaps they were setting him up for the next writer. Perhaps it was just a way of covering for his disappearing act in the art. Either way, Tony Isabella does indeed bring Blackwing back in his HYDRA storyline, as one of the group’s new section commanders. His remit is “air action”.<\/p>\n

By the time he shows up, in issue #122, the story is already in full swing: HYDRA have kidnapped Foggy Nelson, and Daredevil and the Black Widow are searching for him. A lead points them to Blackwing’s warehouse, and Daredevil promptly decides that the Black Widow can’t possibly be allowed to fight Blackwing, who’s just “too dangerous”. Quite how Daredevil comes to that view is hard to fathom: all that we know about Blackwing thus far is that he’s got some glorified carrier pigeons and he’s good at running away. However, Isabella wanted to build up the new villain – plus, he had a clumsy subplot about Daredevil being an overprotective chauvinist – and so Blackwing is suddenly a terrifying danger.<\/p>\n

Blackwing’s warehouse HQ is in fact near Shea Stadium, where the Circus were appearing in issue #118 – the token explanation is that he joined the Cirus in order to keep them away from HYDRA’s operations. He’s presented as the main lieutenant of the new Supreme Hydra, a role that largely involves listening to exposition. It turns out that Foggy is just bait; the real plan is to lure Nick Fury and SHIELD to the warehouse and then blow it up, killing the lot of them.<\/p>\n

But Daredevil and the Black Widow show up first. While she heads off to deal with El Jaguar, Daredevil squares off with Blackwing. At first, Isabella makes a reasonable case for Blackwing as a Daredevil villain. His bats are upgraded to a mutant breed, strong enough to lift Daredevil off the ground. I mean, it takes several of them, but they come in a flock, so that’s hardly a problem. More subtly, the sheer number of bats means that they function as chaff and screw up Daredevil’s radar. And Blackwing himself can now fly. This all looks like a well-pitched challenge for Daredevil.<\/p>\n

Then Isabella overplays his hand. Blackwing wheels out a giant vampire bat the size of a helicopter. Bob Brown draws a nice bat, to give him his due. But it’s still a giant bat. What’s more, since they’re still in a normal-size warehouse, there’s no space for the bat to do anything impressive. And then Daredevil just punches the thing in the heart and it drops dead. Blackwing is quite upset about that. “Cretin! You shall pay for that! He was the product of years of research and breeding and you destroyed him!” Well, make him more resilient next time.<\/p>\n

Despite the megabat proving a dud, our heroes do get captured. The new Supreme Hydra turns out to be Silvermane, a crimelord from Amazing Spider-Man. <\/em>In his previous appearance, he’d been de-aged to infancy. But, we’re told, it just wore off. And once he was back to normal, a couple of passing HYDRA agents recruited him to be the new Supreme Hydra. As for Blackwing, he’s Silvermane’s son.<\/p>\n

And then we abruptly race to a conclusion, because Tony Isabella has been fired and he has to get the arc wrapped up before he leaves. HYDRA are defeated, Blackwing and Silvermane escape, and that’s pretty much it.<\/p>\n

Blackwing never returns to\u00a0Daredevil<\/em>, and makes only a scattered few appearances in other books. He didn’t appear again until 1991-92, when Mark Gruenwald used him as a regular in Captain America<\/em>, mainly hanging around with the Red Skull’s Skeleton Crew. In 1999, he showed up in Thunderbolts<\/em> as a member of the Masters of Evil, but that was the massive version of the team that included bozos like Icemaster. Later that year, he made a couple of appearances as Joey Silvermane in New Warriors<\/em>. His only appearance in the 21st century is as one of a bunch of random Z-list villains in Ziggy Pig & Silly Seal Infinity Comic<\/em> #8.<\/p>\n

For a brief moment, Blackwing seems like he might have a viable gimmick. The flock of powered-up bats kind of works, until Isabella pushes his luck too far. But neither Don Heck nor Bob Brown seems to be up for actually depicting a large number of bats, and maybe they’re just prohibitively difficult to draw, at least as a standard feature of a villain’s arsenal.<\/p>\n

But Blackwing has a more fundamental problem than that: he has a gimmick, but no personality. He’s just a standard big talk villain, and he’s loyal to his dad. That’s all he has to offer.<\/p>\n

The biggest problem with Isabella’s version of HYDRA is that they don’t stand for anything; they’re just an organisation that wants to take over the world for no particular reason. Isabella inadvertently hammers that fact home by having HYDRA headhunt a random mobster as their new leader, for no apparent reason beyond the fact that he had some relevant managerial experience and he wasn’t doing anything else. The problem is compounded by throwing in characters like Man-Killer who did<\/em> stand for something before, but are now just blended into the mulch.<\/p>\n

Blackwing is part of that mess – a bat gimmick that doesn’t quite land, without much else to underpin it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #122-123 (June & July 1975) “HYDRA-and-Seek” \/ “Holocaust in the Halls of HYDRA” Writer: Tony Isabella Artist: Bob Brown Inker: Vince Colletta Letterer: Karen Mantlo Colourists: Janice Cohen (#122) and George Roussos (#123) Editor: Len Wein Blackwing is a bat-themed villain. That might seem like a bold move in the world of superhero comics, […]<\/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-10571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10571","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=10571"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10760,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10571\/revisions\/10760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}