{"id":10698,"date":"2025-02-09T11:27:48","date_gmt":"2025-02-09T11:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10698"},"modified":"2025-02-09T14:11:06","modified_gmt":"2025-02-09T14:11:06","slug":"daredevil-villains-46-copperhead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10698","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #46: Copperhead"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #124-125 (August & September 1975)<\/strong>
\n“In the Coils of the Copperhead” \/ “Vengeance is the Copperhead”<\/strong>
\nWriters: Len Wein (#124 part 1) & Marv Wolfman (#124 part 2 & #125)<\/strong>
\nPencillers: Gene Colan (#124) and Bob Brown (#125)<\/strong>
\nInker: Klaus Janson<\/strong>
\nColourists: Michelle Wolfman (#124) and Klaus Janson (#125)<\/strong>
\nLetterers: Joe Rosen (#124) and John Costanza (#125)<\/strong>
\nEditor: Len Wein<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tony Isabella lasted only five issues on Daredevil <\/em>before editor Len Wein removed him from the series. The next issue, issue #124, opens with the Black Widow departing – again, but this time it will finally stick. The narrator certainly seems to be taking the opportunity to put the boot in. “Good-bye”, he declares. “There is no sadder, more bittersweet word in all the languages of man… Good-bye: The word is truly tragic when those who say it really don’t want to say it at all.”<\/p>\n

Issue #124 has a truly odd writing credit – instead of the usual plotter\/scripter distinction, it credits editor Len Wein with writing the first half<\/em> of the issue himself, with the rest being credited to Marv Wolfman. It all looks a bit shambolic and last minute. Nonetheless, this is the start of Marv Wolfman’s run, which will see us through to issue #143 before he leaves in mid-storyline.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some parallels could be drawn with Steve Gerber’s run. They’re both big name writers, but their Daredevil<\/em> runs aren’t in the top tier of their work, nor are they regarded as top tier Daredevil.<\/em> But both of them leave the book in a better place than they found it. For Wolfman, this will mean getting Foggy out of the DA’s office and putting him back with Matt – this time as crusading lawyers for the underclass, even if they’ve descended as an act of charity in order to do it. Wolfman won’t get quite to the point of tying the book to Hell’s Kitchen, but he does move the series decisively in that direction.<\/p>\n

If the credits on issue #124 are to be taken literally, though, Wolfman starts off his run by picking up a Len Wein story in progress.<\/p>\n

The Copperhead is an urban vigilante who shows up in New York alleys in a suit, trenchcoat and fedora, wearing a golden mask with a blank expression. He hisses all his S’s and goes around summarily executing petty criminals by shooting them with darts tipped with snake venom: “Any crime against the people isss a capital offenssse!” He also has a non-lethal dart gun for use in dealing with inconvenient policemen. His trade mark is to leave two copperhead pennies on the eyes of his victims.<\/p>\n

So far, so generic. But in fact, that’s the point: the Copperhead is a 1930s pulp character. No doubt one reason for doing this story was that Marvel happened to be relaunching their Doc Savage<\/em> series that very same month, and he was an authentic pulp character. The Copperhead is not authentic – he’s invented from whole cloth in this issue. But he’s explicitly an intruder from the pre-superhero pulp genre.<\/p>\n

In the Marvel Universe, the Copperhead was the star of a monthly 30s pulp series about millionaire playboy Richard Crandell, who was disfigured in an acid attack, and became a masked vigilante in a suit of copper armour. But the fictional Copperhead didn’t go in for shooting purse snatchers, so the new, “real” Copperhead is apparently some sort of lunatic cosplayer.<\/p>\n

The story then takes a turn which is a little surprising for Marvel in 1975. With no other leads, Daredevil tracks down Walter Kranz, the original author of the Copperhead stories. To Daredevil’s surprise, despite the enduring popularity of his work-for-hire character, Kranz lives in crushing poverty in a crumbling tenement. Or at least, he did, until his murder the previous week.<\/p>\n

Eventually Daredevil stumbles upon the Copperhead by blind luck, and has to stop him from killing some muggers. Daredevil is a bit of an idiot in this fight, acting surprised when he punches a metal mask and it hurts his hand. But the Copperhead takes very badly to someone fighting back against him. He decides that Daredevil is clearly in league with villains, and also qualifies for summary execution. A contrived cliffhanger involves the Copperhead punching Daredevil out, then shooting him at point blank range and leaving him for dead. But wait, Daredevil has managed to block the darts with his billy club without Copperhead noticing! The art tries its utmost to make this stunt work, but can’t pull it off.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Copperhead murders publisher Milton Wexler, who made his fortune from the original Copperhead stories. Then, he shows up at the door of publisher Martin Foster, who has brought the stories back into print. It turns out that the Copperhead has been demanding money from all these people for getting rich off “his” identity.<\/p>\n

The Copperhead turns out to be Lawrence Chesney, whose father was the artist’s model for the covers of the Copperhead pulps. Mr Chesney Sr was also mad, or so we’re offhandedly told – he believed that he was <\/em>the Copperhead, and somehow convinced his son too. Lawrence is trying to avenge what he regards as the exploitation of his father’s name. With the mystery resolved, the Copperhead then obligingly dies by getting struck by lightning – because going out in a storm while wearing a suit of copper armour is not a very smart thing to do.<\/p>\n

And that’s pretty much it for the Copperhead. A second Copperhead showed up in Human Fly<\/em> in 1978, and once again got himself killed thanks to his own armour – he fell into a river and drowned because copper isn’t just a lightning rod, it’s also heavy. More bizarrely, the original Copperhead returned from the dead in the 2000 miniseries Daredevil\/Spider-Man <\/em>by Paul Jenkins and Phil Winslade, as an undead wraith trying to claim Spider-Man’s soul. It’s a baffling use of the character, which has seemingly nothing to do with the original concept, whether visually, conceptually or in terms of personality. But he’s still alive at the end of that story, so he’s out there somewhere.<\/p>\n

His debut is a strange story. Even though it stresses that the Copperhead’s creator died in work-for-hire ruin, it feels more like a parody of creator rights disputes than a shot across anyone’s bow. But killing him off at the end of the story seems like a waste. There’s a vague hint of Rorschach about this guy, even if it’s mostly visual. The design works, at least until he takes the trenchcoat off for the final fight, at which point he’s a budget Iron Man.<\/p>\n

Yes, he’s a limited character when he’s killing any minor criminal that he comes across. But if you made him a bit more long-term in his thinking, the core idea of a lunatic vigilante who thinks he’s a pulp hero might have worked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #124-125 (August & September 1975) “In the Coils of the Copperhead” \/ “Vengeance is the Copperhead” Writers: Len Wein (#124 part 1) & Marv Wolfman (#124 part 2 & #125) Pencillers: Gene Colan (#124) and Bob Brown (#125) Inker: Klaus Janson Colourists: Michelle Wolfman (#124) and Klaus Janson (#125) Letterers: Joe Rosen (#124) and […]<\/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-10698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10698","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=10698"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10782,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10698\/revisions\/10782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}