{"id":10942,"date":"2025-05-04T20:21:32","date_gmt":"2025-05-04T19:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10942"},"modified":"2025-05-04T20:21:32","modified_gmt":"2025-05-04T19:21:32","slug":"daredevil-villains-52-the-ani-men-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10942","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #52: The Ani-Men II"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #157-158 (March-May 1979)<\/strong>
\n“The Ungrateful Dead” \/ “A Grave Mistake”<\/strong>
\nWriters: Roger McKenzie (#157-158) with Mary Jo Duffy (#157)<\/strong>
\nPencillers: Gene Colan (#157) and Frank Miller (#158)<\/strong>
\nInker: Klaus Janson<\/strong>
\nColourist: Glynis Wein (#157) and George Roussos (#158)<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Rosen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Al Milgrom<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second iteration of the Ani-Men only just about merit inclusion in this feature. They’re supporting players in the a Death-Stalker story, and a retread of an idea from the 1960s. But they scrape their way in because the second part is the debut of Frank Miller on art – and because there are only two real candidates for inclusion the whole Roger McKenzie run.<\/p>\n

McKenzie takes over with issue #151, and his run offers the Purple Man (#151 and #154), Death-Stalker (#152 and #155-158), Mr Hyde and the Cobra (#153), Bullseye (#159-161) and guest villain Dr Octopus (#165-166). Issue #162 is a fill-in. Issue #163 has no villain – the Hulk guest stars to serve as the antagonist. And issue #164 is mostly a recap of Daredevil’s origin story. And that’s it. That’s the whole run. Bear in mind that the book is bimonthly at this point, so that’s two years of mostly retread villains.<\/p>\n

This run does introduce Ben Urich, a genuinely major character who debuts in issue #153. He spends this run figuring out Daredevil’s dual identity and then deciding to keep it secret anyway. The run also introduces Becky Blake, a wheelchair-using lawyer, who promptly disappears into the background.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Roger McKenzie’s run inevitably suffers by comparison with the immediately following run by Frank Miller as writer\/artist. That run is a landmark of early 1980s comics and would put anything in its shadow. But McKenzie’s run isn’t that great compared with what came before it, either. It’s never especially bad, but it’s highly formulaic. It could also have stood to pick up the pace: even though the Purple Man story had been running for ages by the time he took over the book, it still drones on for another year. Things improve once Miller settles in as artist, since the simple plots at least left plenty of space for Miller to do his thing. But you can see why Miller thought he could do better.<\/p>\n

Let’s talk about the Ani-Men issues, though. They tie up the mystery of Death-Stalker, the (literally) shadowy villain that Steve Gerber introduced in issue #113. Some hints had previously been dropped about Death-Stalker wanting revenge on Daredevil, and it seems that Wolfman already had in mind that Death-Stalker would be the Exterminator, who had fought Daredevil back in issues #39-41 and seemingly died when some Kirbytech exploded. The main purpose of this story is to confirm who Death-Stalker is, and then write him out.<\/p>\n

To be honest, it’s not obvious why he was written out. He’d worked well enough to make repeated appearances, and it’s not like the Daredevil rogues’ gallery of 1979 had many better options.<\/p>\n

By issue #157, Daredevil has already been fighting the Death-Stalker. The Black Widow is back again, trying to shoulder aside Heather Glenn and reclaim her position in the supporting cast. This leads to Matt and the now-quite-extensive supporting cast (Foggy, Debbie, Heather, Becky and Natasha) gathering at Matt’s office so that Heather and Natasha can squabble over him. The resulting social awkwardness is interrupted by the new Ani-Men bursting through the window, and declaring that they’ve come for Matt Murdock.<\/p>\n

They look the same as ever: animal costumes, enormous headphones and little boxes on their chests. In the original Ani-Men story, this technology played into a gimmick where they were being remote-controlled by their boss with clunky sixties technology. Their boss, the Organizer, intended them more to be fake villains that his political party could “defeat” – so there was an element of them being intentionally a bit sub-par. That aspect had faded away by the time they became the Exterminator’s henchmen. By 1978, the Ani-Men are simply oddball gimmick villains and their dated equipment is just a costume feature.<\/p>\n

Why bring them back here? Well, as part of his bid for revenge, Death-Stalker wants to re-enact the time he fought Daredevil as the Exterminator. It turns out that the explosion didn’t kill him, but left him stuck out of phase with reality. Since the Exterminator had the Ani-Men as henchmen in the original story, Death-Stalker needs them for his amateur dramatics. But the Ani-Men had only just been killed off over in Iron Man<\/em>, and so we end up with this: a group of random thugs wearing the Ani-Men costumes in order to plug the gap.<\/p>\n

The new Ani-Men are more aggressive than their predecessors, no doubt in part because standards had changed since the 60s. In issue #157, Gene Colan has them battering Natasha. But issue #158 sees Frank Miller take over the story in progress. He plays it safe on his first issue – it’s much busier and more contained than Colan, but doesn’t push the boundaries. Marvel already knew what they had with Miller – the credits correctly proclaim him a “truly great new artist” who “will explode upon the Marvel scene like a bombshell” – but this first issue isn’t the best example of his inventiveness. Also, it features Death-Stalker and the Ani-Men, all of whom were a better fit for Colan’s more traditional melodramatics.<\/p>\n

The Ani-Men abduct Matt, who can’t fight back without giving away his secret identity. The new Bird-Man gets caught, but the other Ani-Men abandon him so that they can split the money two ways instead of three. Matt tries to persuade the remaining duo that Death-Stalker will betray them, but they don’t believe him. And we wind up at a graveyard for Death-Stalker’s show. There’s an open grave and a gravestone with Matt’s name on it. (“Matthew Michael Murdock – may he burn in hell”.) Death-Stalker recounts his origin story, then casually murders the Ani-Men while they’re busy counting their money. And that was the Ani-Men. Thanks for coming.<\/p>\n

The rest of the issue features a seven-page fight scene between Daredevil and Death-Stalker, ending when Death-Stalker turns solid in order to attack Daredevil, only to get stuck halfway through a gravestone and die.<\/p>\n

Ape-Man and Cat-Man, of course, stay dead. The new Bird-Man gets out of the story alive, but he doesn’t appear again until 1986, when he’s among the horde of Z-listers killed by Scourge in Captain America<\/em> #319. He was also among the dead Z-listers raised from the dead in Rick Remender’s\u00a0Punisher<\/em> in 2009. But the new Ani-Men only exist as characters because McKenzie wanted to do a callback to the Exterminator story, and the originals were dead – there’s nothing more to them than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #157-158 (March-May 1979) “The Ungrateful Dead” \/ “A Grave Mistake” Writers: Roger McKenzie (#157-158) with Mary Jo Duffy (#157) Pencillers: Gene Colan (#157) and Frank Miller (#158) Inker: Klaus Janson Colourist: Glynis Wein (#157) and George Roussos (#158) Letterer: Joe Rosen Editor: Al Milgrom The second iteration of the Ani-Men only just about merit […]<\/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-10942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10942","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=10942"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11042,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10942\/revisions\/11042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}