{"id":11031,"date":"2025-06-29T19:56:35","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T18:56:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11031"},"modified":"2025-06-29T19:57:28","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T18:57:28","slug":"daredevil-villains-54-mr-hyle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11031","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #54: Mr Hyle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #162 (January 1980)<\/strong>
\n“Requiem for a Pug”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Michael Fleisher<\/strong>
\nArtist: Steve Ditko<\/strong>
\nColourist: Petra Goldberg<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Jim Novak<\/strong>
\nEditor: Allen Milgrom<\/strong><\/p>\n

So here’s where we are. Frank Miller is already established as Daredevil<\/em>‘s artist. In just a few issues time, he’ll take over as writer and bring the book back to commercial success and critical acclaim. Daredevil<\/em> will go into the 1980s as the book of the moment.<\/p>\n

But we’ll get back to that. In the meantime, here’s a fill-in issue by Michael Fleisher and Steve Ditko. “Requiem for a Pug” is a melodramatic throwback which re-enacts Daredevil’s origin story and dares to ask: what if the Fixer had been a black guy with a leopard?<\/p>\n

The story opens with Daredevil helping to shut down a “meson-reactor” which is about to explode. In the process, he’s exposed to vast amounts of radiation. Radiation, as we all know, is magic stuff that makes the plot happen. So as Matt makes his way home that night, he collapses in an alley. Then he wakes up the next morning as an amnesiac. Because that’s what radiation poisoning does.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Amnesiac Matt can’t understand why he’s got a cane and dark glasses – as far as he’s concerned, he can “see” just fine – so he gets rid of them. Naturally, he stumbles onto a diamond heist, and being a hero, he instinctively puts a stop to it. The two thieves work for Mr Hyle, who is hanging around in a nearby limousine. Hyle’s entourage include a glamorous girlfriend, a pet leopard called Ramona, and an in-house boxing coach called Puggy. Why is Hyle hanging around with a boxing coach? Because apparently his main thing is promoting boxing matches, and the diamond heist is just some kind of sideline.<\/p>\n

So Hyle and Puggy both decide that this complete stranger who’s just beaten up their diamond theives is clearly pretty good at the whole punching thing. And, as you do, they recruit him as a boxer on the spot. Matt just goes along with this, and nobody seems to ask any awkward questions about who he actually is, or where he lives, or… anything, really. Matt notices that he’s wearing a Daredevil costume under his clothes, but decides to worry about that later. Instead, he just hangs around with his new boxing coach Puggy for literally weeks, bonding with the guy, since Puggy is basically just a nice old boxer who’s got sucked into Hyle’s orbit.<\/p>\n

Matt starts fighting his way through the ranks to earn a title shot. You’d think someone might recognise missing famous lawyer Matt Murdock somewhere along the way, or at least remark on the resemblance, but nope. Matt just remains an amnesiac boxer until it’s time for his title shot. Of course, all this is leading to the obvious final act: Hyle wants Matt to take a dive, just like his father did. Puggy tries to talk Hyle out of it, arguing that Matt is so good that they’d make more money just promoting him legitimately, but Hyle is having none of it. Just like his dad, Matt refuses to take a dive. Hyle tries to kill Matt, just like his dad. But Puggy throws himself in the path of the bullet, Matt instinctively calls him “father”, and his memories come flooding back.<\/p>\n

Of course, Daredevil then has to take down Hyle to end the story, which is why it was so thoughtful of Hyle to bring the leopard. She doesn’t last long, though, as Daredevil grabs the innocent creature by the tail and whacks her head first into the wall. So Hyle himself enter the fight, and his other gimmick is a pair of knives that can shoot their tips across the room. Hyle accidentally hurts the poor leopard, who really is having a bad day of it, and she responds by killing him.<\/p>\n

Daredevil offers some reflections. “Tonight, in a sense, I became Daredevil a seocnd time, because at a crucial moment those dread events of long ago rose up to remind me, as nothing else could have, of who I am – and why the world needs a Daredevil!” It’s that sort of story.<\/p>\n

This issue is, to put it mildly, out of place in the McKenzie\/Miller run. Since Daredevil <\/em>was on a bimonthly schedule at this point, it’s hard to understand why it was running a fill-in issue at all, to be honest. But issue #161 had trailed a guest appearance by the Hulk for the following month, and that story does indeed see print in issue #163, so apparently the book really was just running late.<\/p>\n

Perhaps running the story at this point wasn’t the worst idea in the world. Marvel had paid for it, after all, and it would be a couple of years before Marvel Fanfare<\/em> came along to serve as a dumping ground for unused inventory stories. Waiting to run it during the Miller\/Janson run would not have been any kinder to it.<\/p>\n

As for Hyle, he’s a jazzed up stand-in for the Fixer, with more of a gimmick and able to put up a bit more of a fight. That’s fair enough – the whole point of the story is that he’s inadvertently playing the Fixer’s role and re-enacting Daredevil’s origin story. The leopard is quite endearing – she livens up the otherwise mundane scenes, and she works quite well as shorthand for Hyle’s character. He’s the sort of guy who takes a leopard everywhere in order to make people uncomfortable. Making Hyle himself a vaguely competent fighter feels a bit more forced, but hey, Daredevil can’t just end the story by beating up a leopard.<\/p>\n

Obviously, Hyle never appears again. Then again, maybe that’s not so obvious. With the actual Fixer out of the way, perhaps there could have been a role for a villain who had taken over his spot. Hyle himself could have been retooled for a more contemporary story. The problem isn’t the concept of a modern Fixer; it’s just that he comes from a fill-in that feels like it could have been lying in a drawer since 1970.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #162 (January 1980) “Requiem for a Pug” Writer: Michael Fleisher Artist: Steve Ditko Colourist: Petra Goldberg Letterer: Jim Novak Editor: Allen Milgrom So here’s where we are. Frank Miller is already established as Daredevil‘s artist. In just a few issues time, he’ll take over as writer and bring the book back to commercial success […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11031","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=11031"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11181,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11031\/revisions\/11181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}