{"id":11026,"date":"2025-05-25T12:13:20","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T11:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11026"},"modified":"2025-05-25T12:13:20","modified_gmt":"2025-05-25T11:13:20","slug":"daredevil-villains-53-eric-slaughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11026","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #53: Eric Slaughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #159 and #161 (July & November 1979)<\/strong>
\n“Marked for Murder!” \/ “To Dare the Devil”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Roger McKenzie<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Frank Miller<\/strong>
\nInker: Klaus Janson<\/strong>
\nColourist: Glynis Wein<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Jim Novak (#159) and Diana Albers (#161)<\/strong>
\nEditors: Mary Jo Duffy & Al Milgrom<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I explained last time, Roger McKenzie’s run largely rested on existing villains. There are only two candidates for inclusion in this feature, and even they both debut playing second fiddle to more established bad guys. The new Ani-Men were henchmen of Death-Stalker, and Eric Slaughter is hired by Bullseye.<\/p>\n

But their stories are also the earliest issues to be drawn by Frank Miller. And Slaughter has a better claim to inclusion than the Ani-Men, since he makes several repeat appearances over the next few years. Most notably, he’s the villain in issue #168, the debut of Elektra. He’s not exactly the focal point of that story either, mind you, but he does enough to justify us looking at him.<\/p>\n

Slaughter’s debut story is simple. Bullseye hires him to kill Daredevil. The story is rather vague about Slaughter’s actual role in the underworld. He’s an elderly man who has a gang of thugs working for him, and who it seems are expected to do the actual killing. Daredevil has heard of Slaughter, but “thought he’d retired years ago”. Still, there’s no suggestion here that Slaughter has to round up some men in order to take on this contract. So apparently he’s some sort of gang leader who’s managed to avoid Matt’s notice. Frank Miller isn’t much clearer on this point, to be honest. Issue #181 describes Slaughter as running a “freelance assassination operation”, but in issue #168 he’s providing bodyguards. Either way, the operation can’t be particularly elite, because Turk holds down a job there, and he’s a comic relief moron.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Slaughter duly sets about fulfilling Bullseye’s contract. His approach isn’t hugely inventive. Matt and Foggy are known to be in contact with Daredevil, so Slaughter sends a couple of heavies round to threaten them, and to demand that Daredevil show up at Pier 42 at midnight. According to the script, Slaughter “couldn’t have chosen a lonelier or more foreboding locale” than Pier 42. From the look of the art, it seems to be on a main road. Daredevil duly shows up and decides to scout the location before charging in, which gives Frank Miller the chance to draw a montage of Daredevil picking up on tiny details among the waiting gunmen. At this point, Miller’s art still has one foot firmly in the Marvel house style of the period, maybe a little heavier on the atmospherics, but more inventive storytelling is starting to creep in.<\/p>\n

While Daredevil is doing this, he reflects on Slaughter’s motives for going after him. It’s briefly presented as some sort of mystery, but Daredevil quickly comes to the unremarkable conclusion that gun-for-hire Eric Slaughter has been hired by someone. After that, we get six pages of Daredevil beating up Slaughter’s goons, in a sequence where the plot might well have read “They fight”. Fortunately, Frank Miller is drawing the fight, and so it’s good action with a particularly striking underwater sequence. Daredevil wins, but just as one of the henchmen is about to reveal who hired them, Bullseye kills the guy from the shadows. And that’s basically it. The idea is that Bullseye never expected Slaughter’s men to actually win, but just wanted a chance to watch Daredevil in action.<\/p>\n

Slaughter himself barely appears in issue #159, and he isn’t in issue #160 at all. That issue involves Bullseye taking the Black Widow hostage in order to lure Daredevil into a fight. But in issue #161, Bullseye is working with Slaughter and his crew again. Since the rescue has to be visually exciting, the final showdown with Bullseye takes place at Coney Island, and Miller gives us an elaborate double page spread of fighting on the Coney Island Cyclone. Slaughter stays on the margins of this issue too, but he’s played a little differently. In issue #159, he was effectively a dupe. But in issue #161, Bullseye comes up with an elaborate Silver Age scheme involving roller coasters and the like, only to have a crisis of confidence and suffer a mental breakdown when he’s defeated. (Once Miller took over as writer, he retconned this breakdown into an early symptom of a brain tumour.)<\/p>\n

This all means that in issue #161, Slaughter’s role is different. This time, he’s the calm professional taking Bullseye’s money while rolling his eyes at the absurdity of it all. In the event, Slaughter turns on Bullseye and refuses to kill Daredevil, supposedly because “Daredevil has earned my respect” – is this a common get-out clause for hitmen? But also, and more plausibly, Slaughter has realised that Bullseye is a complete lunatic and doesn’t trust him to pay. Daredevil carts Bullseye off to the cops, and Slaughter lets him go.<\/p>\n

So the story leaves Slaughter positioned as a competent gangland figure of some sort, which is basically how Miller will play him going forward. The angle of him coming out of retirement, which seemed at first to be his hook, is quietly dropped. He’s simply another mob boss, though a particularly unflappable one. But there are a couple of reasons why he keeps coming back after this point. One is simply that he’s a recognisable gangland figure and the book could use one of them for plot purposes. Another is that his gang includes Turk – since Turk is going to stick around as a running joke, his boss has to play a role too.<\/p>\n

By issue #168, this has become Slaughter’s established role. That issue is built around the debut of Elektra, and about a third of its page count is devoted to her origin flashback. The story sees petty thief Alarich Wallenquist hire Slaughter to protect him from Elektra. Slaughter comes across as calmly professional, and retains his trait of seeming wryly amused by the antics of more flamboyant characters. His goons are there to be beaten up by Daredevil and Elektra, but Slaughter himself is allowed to see through some of Elektra’s trickery. He emerges from that story with his dignity intact.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, though, Slaughter is just a generic mob boss. Daredevil<\/em> needs one of those, but once Miller takes over as writer, he’ll bring in the Kingpin. Once the Kingpin is established in that role, there’s less need for Slaughter. He makes some scattered further appearances an underboss trying to navigate life under the Kingpin, but ultimately the Kingpin proved to be the more compelling version.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #159 and #161 (July & November 1979) “Marked for Murder!” \/ “To Dare the Devil” Writer: Roger McKenzie Penciller: Frank Miller Inker: Klaus Janson Colourist: Glynis Wein Letterer: Jim Novak (#159) and Diana Albers (#161) Editors: Mary Jo Duffy & Al Milgrom As I explained last time, Roger McKenzie’s run largely rested on existing […]<\/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-11026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11026","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=11026"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11096,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11026\/revisions\/11096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}