{"id":11286,"date":"2025-09-14T12:06:23","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T11:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11286"},"modified":"2025-09-14T12:08:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T11:08:22","slug":"daredevil-villains-59-the-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11286","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #59: The Hand"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #174-176 (September to November 1981)<\/strong>
\n“The Assassination of Matt Murdock” \/ “Gantlet” (sic) \/ “Hunters”<\/strong>
\nWriter, penciller: Frank Miller<\/strong>
\nFinisher: Klaus Janson<\/strong>
\nColourists: Glynis Wein & Klaus Janson (#174), Christie Scheele & Bob Sharen (#175), Glynis Wein (#176)<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Rosen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Denny O’Neil<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve already had Elektra and the Kingpin, and now we complete the trinity of enduring creations from Frank Miller’s Daredevil<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Ah, the ninja! Historically, an expert in stealth, spycraft and infiltration. Over time, a part of Japanese folklore, with quasi-magical abilities. And in the Marvel Universe, a bunch of anonymous guys in bright red who attack in large groups and die. Or at least, that’s how they come across if you first encounter them in later stories. They’re the ultimate redshirts.<\/p>\n

But what about their first incarnation? After all, recurring villains tend to rack up a string of defeats over the years – that’s the nature of the beast. Surely it was different when they started? Right?<\/p>\n

The Hand make their debut in issue #174, when they assassinate one of Elektra’s targets before she reaches him. The narrator tells us that they’re “the same order of master assassins that taught her the many ways of murder before she broke training to operate on her own.” We’re told that the Hand want to kill Elektra because she left. But that’s not why they’re here – instead, the Hand have been hired to kill Matt Murdock.<\/p>\n

Four anonymous ninjas do indeed attack Matt in his apartment. You might think that this was overkill when dealing with a blind lawyer – the random target in the prologue was taken out by a single ninja with a crossbow – but it sets the tone for the Hand right from the off. Why bother with stealth when you can just chuck expendable swordsmen at the problem? Now, these particular ninjas don’t know that Matt is Daredevil, and so they have an excuse for being taken by surprise when he fights back. And Matt duly beats them, almost singlehandedly – Elektra helps him out with the last one. In the aftermath, we learn that the ninjas always commit suicide and into gas when they’re defeated.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Later in the issue, the Hand have another go at killing Matt, but Elektra stops them. They do at least manage to chuck a bomb through Matt’s office window – not exactly a classic ninja weapon, but the explosion somehow causes Matt to lose his radar sense for a bit. And the issue builds to a fight scene where Daredevil thinks that he and Gladiator are fighting off a horde of Ninja, when in fact Elektra is helping him out unnoticed. And they win.<\/p>\n

So the rank and file Hand may look great, but they’re slotted as cannon fodder right from the word go. The end of the issue sees the introduction of a Hand jonin – a smug guy in a suit, apparently not so caught up in the cult aspects as the dissolving bozos – and his giant magically-powered ninja, Kirigi. Now, Kirigi is presented as the one Hand ninja you really need to take seriously – but he doesn’t have a personality either. As a character, he’s basically a boss fight.<\/p>\n

In issue #175, Kirigi is despatched to kill Elektra. Meanwhile, the Hand rank and file try to kill Foggy Nelson… and get beaten up by Matt in a comedy sequence. This leads to Elektra and Daredevil both finding their way to the Hand’s base for an extended fight scene. During this, the jonin implies that his real issue with Elektra is that she refused to sleep with him; this creep is a bit at odds with the Hand’s general cult vibe, and Miller’s later Hand stories will tend to use priest figures in a similar role. And in issue #176, Daredevil is mostly preoccupied with the story about losing his powers, leaving Elektra to deal with Kirigi.<\/p>\n

The individual Hand members are an anonymous bunch – conspicuously so. They remain masked, there’s little to tell them apart, and they never stick around to talk once captured. Sure, they’re henchmen, but the book has plenty of recognisable low-rent thugs – not just Turk, but recurring characters like Pike who hang around with him. The Hand, by comparison, are literally interchangeable; their identities are subsumed into the Hand.<\/p>\n

We’re not given much reason to take the individual Hand members seriously. Sure, you wouldn’t want to meet them in a dark alley. But they’re completely out of their league against Matt and Elektra – who didn’t even finish her training! The idea might be that Elektra was a prodigy who ran into sexism (all the Hand members we see appear to be men), but even so, she’s vastly better than them. What are they teaching these guys?<\/p>\n

Doing ninjas in 1981 was not a great inventive leap. There was a ninja craze going on at the time.<\/a> There’s a lot of exoticism and mysticism going on with the Hand. But in plot terms, their function is to be a threat from Elektra’s past, and to give her and Daredevil a reason to team up. Why did they stick around beyond that?<\/p>\n

It took a while for the Hand to become a standard feature of the Marvel Universe. Like Elektra, other creators seem to have treated them as Miller signature characters best left to him. They show up in the 1982 Wolverine<\/em> miniseries, but that’s another Miller story. They’re in\u00a0Elektra: Assassin<\/em>. But they don’t turn up in another Marvel Universe title until\u00a0X-Men<\/em> started using them in 1989 – after which, they were a little less tied to Elektra’s specific story, and a little more available for generic ninja duty.<\/p>\n

They do have something going on beyond the bare fact of being ninjas. They’ve got the death cult thing, which becomes more obvious in later stories where the rank and file are laying down their lives to bring more important Hand members back from the dead. Miller hints at a whole mythology with these guys, and sets up Stick and his group as the Hand’s opposite number, but largely leaves the details to our imagination. Is it a genuine religious order? Do the guys in charge actually believe any of it, or are they just sniggering at the cannon fodder? The Hand’s magical abilities are significant – they can raise the dead. But at the same time, they’re low-level, in the sense that they’re not going to make much difference in a fight.<\/p>\n

So there’s a degree of mystery to the Hand, at least when they first debut. Time hasn’t been especially kind to them in that regard. We now have a demon for them to worship, we have stories about their inner workings, and ultimately I’m not sure any of it was an improvement on just leaving it vague, as a part of Elektra’s hinted past. They’ve become a Hydra-style agglomeration of factions, some of them mystic cults, some just guys with swords. In all that time, they’ve achieved very little.<\/p>\n

And yet their cachet remains. Maybe it’s association with a classic run, maybe it’s the strength of a simple yet memorable design, and maybe it’s simply that they’re flexible enough that the Marvel Universe doesn’t need any more ninjas. The Hand look the part so much that they don’t need to actually back it up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #174-176 (September to November 1981) “The Assassination of Matt Murdock” \/ “Gantlet” (sic) \/ “Hunters” Writer, penciller: Frank Miller Finisher: Klaus Janson Colourists: Glynis Wein & Klaus Janson (#174), Christie Scheele & Bob Sharen (#175), Glynis Wein (#176) Letterer: Joe Rosen Editor: Denny O’Neil We’ve already had Elektra and the Kingpin, and now we […]<\/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-11286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11286","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=11286"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11401,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11286\/revisions\/11401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}