{"id":11284,"date":"2025-08-31T13:42:35","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T12:42:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11284"},"modified":"2025-08-31T16:23:46","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T15:23:46","slug":"daredevil-villains-58-ladykiller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11284","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #58: Ladykiller"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #173 (August 1981)<\/strong>
\n“Ladykiller”<\/strong>
\nWriter, breakdown art: Frank Miller<\/strong>
\nFinished art: Klaus Janson<\/strong>
\nColourist: Glynis Wein<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Rosen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Denny O’Neil<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our last two entries kicked off Frank Miller’s writer\/artist run in style, with Elektra and the Kingpin. Up next will be the Hand. And in the middle… there’s this guy. When people talk about the highs of the Frank Miller run, they’re not thinking of this issue. It hasn’t aged so well.<\/p>\n

Miller actually intended “Ladykiller” to be the name of the story. The character himself is only referred to as Michael Reese, when he\u2019s named at all. The name \u201cLadykiller\u201d only gets used in-universe in Amazing Spider-Man<\/em> #219, where Daredevil mentions this story in passing for no particular reason. It\u2019s an odd story to reference purely for a bit of Marvel Universe world-building, because Michael Reese is a sex offender, and this is a story about rape. Now, this is still a Code-approved comic from 1981, and so it can\u2019t say in terms that it\u2019s a story about rape, but it’s less than subtle in getting that point across.<\/p>\n

As subject matter, this can go badly in superhero comics. It can easily come across as exploitative. It can also simply feel like a clumsy attempt to be adult, clashing horribly with the traditional superhero tropes in a way that ends up drawing attention to all the residual elements still unchanged from children\u2019s comics past. And that’s pretty much what happens here.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Technically, we first encounter Michael Reese beating up a man, but that\u2019s only so that Reese can get to the guy’s female companion. Reese is a hefty chap in a BDSM harness who slaps her around while saying things like “Bad girl” and “Have to punish you.” I have my doubts about how much of a grasp on BDSM Miller actually had – the character\u2019s behaviour positions him as an abusive dominant, but the costume makes him look more a gimp. Anyway, Daredevil drives him away, and the police quickly arrest the wrong man: Melvin Potter, the Gladiator.<\/p>\n

We last saw Melvin in issue #166. In that story, he had become obsessed with his social worker Betsy Beatty, and was insanely convinced that she was in love with him. In an attempt to impress her, he abducted her and a group of children, and threatened to murder the kids with buzzsaws. That story clearly presents Gladiator as mentally ill, but ends on the questionable note of having Betsy treating him as a childlike and vulnerable man who just needs love and understanding. Insofar as it was suggesting that the violently mentally ill require medical treatment rather than punishment, there\u2019s nothing wrong with this. But the book will go on to make Melvin and Betsy an actual couple. Objectively, this is deeply ill-advised on Betsy\u2019s part – indeed, somewhere between unprofessional and downright suicidal – but once the book has committed itself to the idea that Gladiator is a sympathetic figure, story logic dictates that it must be a Good Thing that he finds love.<\/p>\n

So: Melvin Potter is wrongly arrested for Reese\u2019s attack. Why? Because the two of them look identical. There\u2019s no reason for this – it\u2019s just a remarkable coincidence.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not all. Matt is defending Melvin, and so he goes to meet the client, and takes Becky Blake with him. You might remember that she was introduced back in issue #155 as a wheelchair-bound lawyer and potential new love interest for Matt. By this point the romance angle has been shelved. Nothing else has come along to replace it, so her role is pretty much to listen to Matt and Foggy\u2019s exposition if no one more important is around to do so.<\/p>\n

This, however, is her spotlight issue. She takes one look at Melvin and faints. Later, after some very persistent questioning from Matt, she explains. When she was a student at Harvard three years ago, she was attacked by Reese. In trying to defend herself, she managed to tear his mask off, and since Melvin and Reese look identical, she takes them to be the same man. Reese\u2019s attack caused permanent injuries, hence the wheelchair. Now, technically, what Becky actually describes in dialogue is just a violent assault, but it’s perfectly obvious what Miller is getting at: “It was so humiliating… I knew I was helpless… it was up to him, whether I lived or died…” Becky says that the whole thing was too traumatic for her to go through it again by reporting it to the police.<\/p>\n

With his signature empathy, Matt\u2019s response is to yell at her for not going to the police, and to blame her for the attacker still being at large. To be fair, the whole point of the story is for Matt to gain more empathy for Becky, so Miller isn\u2019t presenting this as a correct<\/em> position, but at the very least he\u2019s presenting it as a reasonable starting point for the book\u2019s hero, and that hasn\u2019t aged well.<\/p>\n

Reese attacks Betsy, but gets run off. Betsy is able to advance the plot by offering some thoughts on Reese: as a social worker, she\u2019s very familiar with “his kind”, who “usually … only hurt themselves”, and she points Daredevil in the direction of “several local hangouts”. This leads to a frankly excruciating scene in which Daredevil tracks down Reese in a BDSM bar, only to get beaten up and humiliated by Reese and his BDSM mates. This allows Matt to have an epiphany and understand how helpless Becky felt, before fighting back to defeat Reese.<\/p>\n

You can see what Miller is going for, but there\u2019s an obvious problem in terms of the ground rules of the book. Daredevil spends a lot of time at this point going into underworld bars and beating up all the professional criminals singlehandedly. It\u2019s a regular trope of the book and it has to be suspended for this story so that Daredevil can be on the verge of defeat to a bunch of complete amateurs. It can\u2019t just be weight of numbers – the thugs in bars always <\/em>have weight of numbers on their sides. Hell, the Hand will have weight of numbers on their side when they show up, and it won\u2019t do them much good either. The Kingpin needs to change his recruitment strategy. Get rid of Turk, place more adverts in the classified columns of\u00a0Ball Gag Enthusiast<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Once Reese is captured, Melvin is exonerated. Matt persuades Becky to testify against Reese – but this time, instead of presenting it as a matter of duty, he sells it to her as something she needs to do in order to take back control for herself. So you can see what Miller was going for.<\/p>\n

But the clash between the subject matter and the superhero tropes is an unholy mess. An attempt to make us empathise with the trauma of rape victims sits in a plot with two wildly improbable coincidences and a cartoon gimp. And it tries to combine all this with a B-plot about the sympathetic Gladiator and his need for compassion and understanding. Miller seems to think that the difference lies in the fact that Reese is just a violent sadist, while Gladiator is fundamentally driven by a need to be loved. It\u2019s true that Gladiator has a motivation that\u2019s easier to empathise with, but that\u2019s simply because he has <\/em>a motivation. There\u2019s no particular reason to think that Reese is any less troubled than Melvin, since the story isn\u2019t interested in why he\u2019s doing this – the BDSM gear seems to be regarded as a sufficient explanation in itself (despite Betsy telling us that people like him are mostly harmless). For another, the last time we saw Gladiator, he was threatening to kill children with a buzzsaw. We\u2019re expected to look past that because his<\/em> arc is running on the rules of children\u2019s fiction.<\/p>\n

That may be the fundamental problem with this issue. It comes close to being a Very Special Issue, and clearly wants to say something serious – but it combines that with too many elements that are simply silly, without being fully aware that it’s doing so. The passage of time has done it no favours, but it was a weird misfire to start with.<\/p>\n

As for Reese himself, it\u2019s fairly obvious why he doesn\u2019t come back – even if you think this particular story works, it\u2019s still a fundamentally difficult thing to do within the constraints of the Code, especially when you can do sadism as a subtext for serial killers without cranking up the sexual angle to this extent. If Becky had developed into a major character then no doubt somebody would have done something with Reese at some point, simply because of his importance to her back story, but without that, there\u2019s no need for him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #173 (August 1981) “Ladykiller” Writer, breakdown art: Frank Miller Finished art: Klaus Janson Colourist: Glynis Wein Letterer: Joe Rosen Editor: Denny O’Neil Our last two entries kicked off Frank Miller’s writer\/artist run in style, with Elektra and the Kingpin. Up next will be the Hand. And in the middle… there’s this guy. When people […]<\/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-11284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11284","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=11284"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11361,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11284\/revisions\/11361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}