{"id":10747,"date":"2025-04-06T11:34:11","date_gmt":"2025-04-06T10:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10747"},"modified":"2025-04-06T11:34:11","modified_gmt":"2025-04-06T10:34:11","slug":"daredevil-villains-49-mind-wave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10747","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #49: Mind-Wave"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #133 (May 1976)<\/strong>
\n“Mind-Wave and his Fearsome Think-Tank!”<\/strong>
\nWriter, editor: Marv Wolfman<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Bob Brown<\/strong>
\nInker: Jim Mooney<\/strong>
\nColourist: Michele Wolfman<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Ray Holloway<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because we’re only looking at the Daredevil <\/em>stories that introduce new villains, we’re going to get a very distorted view of Marv Wolfman’s run. He was on the series for nearly 20 issues, but he didn’t create that many new villains in that time. There are four new villains in his run, plus another one in an annual. The standout is obviously Bullseye, who we covered last time round. But there’s a gulf of quality between him and the others. For example, here we have “Mind-Wave and his Fearsome Think Tank!”<\/p>\n

Mind-Wave is a man in a garish green and yellow costume who can read minds. He pilots a giant futuristic tank. The tank has satellite dishes all over it. Mind-Wave himself mans a gun, and two henchmen have their own little plexi-glass bubbles at the front. It looks like something from the GI Joe toy line, or maybe even Masters of the Universe. The narrator calls it a “clanking, titanium-steel destructoid”. Mind-Wave’s basic plan is to use the tank to create a distraction so that his henchmen can commit bank robberies.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This ridiculous conraption is called the Think-Tank – although aside from the pun, it has nothing to do with the mind-reading gimmick. Mind-Wave isn’t solely reliant on his big toy tank, though. Thanks to his powers, which might be something to do with a hi-tech helmet, Mind-Wave can sense what Daredevil is going to do before he does it. And he seems to have enough hand-to-hand combat ability to take advantage.<\/p>\n

But in fact, Mind-Wave isn’t really a Daredevil villain at all. Because this is a team-up story, and Mind-Wave is really the arch-enemy of this issue’s guest star – Uri Geller.<\/p>\n

Uri Geller made his name in the 1970s by claiming to have been given psychic powers by extraterrestrials. He would show up on talk shows to display his mind-reading, his ability to stop and start clocks, and his spoon-bending. There was a lot of spoon-bending. All of this, of course, was routine stage magic stuff, but Geller was adamant that he was for real, and he was widely believed.<\/p>\n

On the letters page, Marv Wolfman tells readers that he’d met Geller, who had been able to copy a drawing without seeing it, and was therefore definitely a genuine and for real psychic. In a later interview<\/a>, Wolfman claimed that he actually wound up writing this story because Marvel had already made a deal with Geller. Nobody else wanted anything to do with it, and as editor-in-chief, he had to take one for the team. He says he never believed Geller was legitimate, but he could hardly say so in the circumstances.<\/p>\n

Whatever the truth about how this issue came about, it’s a notorious embarassment. It would be bad in any series, but it’s a particularly bad fit with Wolfman’s Daredevil<\/em>. A major storyline at this point involves mysterious fake news bulletins spreading misinformation, starting with the sabotage of Foggy Nelson’s re-election campaign, and then moving on to bizarre conspiracy theories such as the survival of the Kennedy brothers, and the entire Vietnam War being a hoax. The Jester eventually turns out to be behind all this, and the intended moral is the dangers of gullibility. It is, shall we say, rather at odds with a story about Uri Geller, genuine psychic.<\/p>\n

But even without that context, the story doesn’t work. Uri Geller doesn’t make sense in the Marvel Universe, in any title, period. He built his career by leaning on the mundanity of what he was doing. Everyone knew that basic mind reading tricks were a staple of stage magic, but Geller was convincing (to some people) because he kept everything on a small scale and stripped away conventional performance trappings. It was the modesty of his abilities that made them plausible. If he’d been vanishing the Statue of Liberty, it wouldn’t have worked.<\/p>\n

So what do you do with him in the Marvel Universe? Professor X already exists. And the crimes that can be thwarted by deforming cutlery are few and far between. Wolfman’s solution is to give the Marvel Universe Geller Marvel Universe superpowers, and so for the purposes of this book, Uri Geller can bend steel bars with the power of his mind from the other side of the street. That solves one problem, but at the cost of creating another, by straying wildly from the real Geller.<\/p>\n

Poor old Mind-Wave doesn’t exist to be a character. He’s there to be an evil “ESPer” so that Uri Geller has an opposite number to defeat. That, and the pun in his tank, is basically all there is to him. And even the pun was later re-used, to better effect, with Mentallo.<\/p>\n

Mind-Wave never appeared in Daredevil<\/em> again. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that his next appearance was in Captain America<\/em> #319, as one of the nobodies in the Bar With No Name who got gunned down by Scourge – there’s a lot of failed Daredevil villains in that issue.<\/p>\n

In 2009, Mind-Wave appeared in Rick Remender’s Punisher <\/em>run, as one of a horde of Z-list villains sent by the Hood to take on Frank Castle, with predictably fatal results. Mind-Wave’s role in that arc is to be the Z-lister of the Z-listers – the guy who feels justifiably out of his depth even compared to the other Scourge victims. And it’s hard to argue with that, even though this issue would like us to believe that Mind-Wave had been a successful European supervillain in the past.<\/p>\n

Marv Wolfman surely never intended this bozo to be a recurring character. Most likely, he just didn’t want to waste a good idea on the Uri Geller issue – and he certainly didn’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #133 (May 1976) “Mind-Wave and his Fearsome Think-Tank!” Writer, editor: Marv Wolfman Penciller: Bob Brown Inker: Jim Mooney Colourist: Michele Wolfman Letterer: Ray Holloway Because we’re only looking at the Daredevil stories that introduce new villains, we’re going to get a very distorted view of Marv Wolfman’s run. He was on the series for […]<\/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-10747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10747","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=10747"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10961,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10747\/revisions\/10961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}