{"id":11289,"date":"2025-09-28T15:05:28","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T14:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11289"},"modified":"2025-09-28T15:05:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T14:05:28","slug":"daredevil-villains-60-the-king-of-the-sewers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11289","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #60: The King of the Sewers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #180 (March 1982)<\/strong>
\n“The Damned”<\/strong>
\nWriter, penciller: Frank Miller<\/strong>
\nFinisher, colourist: Klaus Janson<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Sam Rosen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Denny O’Neil<\/strong><\/p>\n

Frank Miller’s first run as writer covers issues #168 to #191, but it’s built heavily around the trinity that we’ve already covered: Elektra, the Kingpin and the Hand. There are some edge cases in the rest of Miller’s run who might have qualified for this feature, to be sure. The Kingpin’s mayoral candidate Randolph Winston Cherryh gets a major speaking part, but he’s still basically a Kingpin pawn. There’s a subplot about the board of Glenn Industries trying to seize control of the company from Heather, but they’re mostly anonymous white collar criminals. And there are generic drug dealers and the like who drive the plot of individual stories. But these are gimmick-free criminals with a single story, and they all share the spotlight with more recognisable characters.<\/p>\n

Once we score all of those guys off the list, this turns out to be our final entry from the Miller run. For those of you who might be wondering, issue #177 doesn’t have a villain – it’s an issue of Stick helping Daredevil to get his radar back. Issues #178-179 are the Kingpin. Issue #181 is Bullseye. Issues #182-184 have the Punisher as guest villain on loan from Spider-Man. Issue #185 is the Kingpin again. Issue #186 is Stilt-Man. Issues #187-190 are the Hand and the Kingpin. And issue #191 is Bullseye.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The story I skipped over in that list is Daredevil <\/em>#180, and the King of the Sewers. Now, to be honest, you’d struggle to say that this guy was particularly central to the plot either. His story is a subplot in a storyline which is mainly about the Kingpin’s efforts to get his stooge Randolph Cherryh elected as Mayor of New York. But the King of the Sewers is a supervillain of sorts, and he’ll come back for a whole storyline in issue #333, so he merits a post.<\/p>\n

As you might recall, the Kingpin’s beloved wife Vanessa was seemingly killed in an explosion. The main point of doing that was to clear the way for his return to crime, by removing Vanessa’s influence on him. But Vanessa isn’t dead, and instead she starts showing up in a subplot, stumbling around New York as a mentally broken homeless woman. Apparently explosions can do that. Eventually Ben Urich recognises her, and tells Daredevil.<\/p>\n

So Ben and Daredevil go searching for Vanessa in the sewers. Daredevil is feeling traditionally heroic in this issue, and he’s sure to spell out that while it would be awfully nice if Vanessa talked the Kingpin back into retirement, that’s just a bonus. Rescuing her and getting her some help is a worthwhile goal in its own right. Daredevil is also on crutches, after being lured into a steel trap by Elektra last issue. But come on, how hard can it be to go for a wander around the sewers?<\/p>\n

As is always the way in these stories, it turns out that there’s an entire community beneath New York, made up of equally mad, desperate and sore-covered people. They drag Daredevil and Ben before their King – a big fat bald guy, apparently an albino. He wears a bit of jewellery and not much else, and carries a spiked club. He also has green speech balloons, whatever that’s supposed to signify. His followers appear to worship him. The King himself seems to have at least a basic level of intellectual coherence, but nobody else seems to be in any sort of shape to handle tasks such as gathering food. The viability of this community is a bit puzzling, to be honest, but we’re not meant to think too carefully about how it works.<\/p>\n

The King has recently killed his previous queen on grounds of being annoying, and has replaced her with Vanessa on the grounds that she has a nice ring. Vanessa has draped herself at his feet with a rather blank expression. Since this is a story about the New York sewers, the King naturally tries to feed Daredevil and Ben to his pet crocodile, but Daredevil escapes and beats him up with his own club. The sewer people then immediately declare Daredevil their new king, and Vanessa gives him her ring.<\/p>\n

Apparently Daredevil completely ignores his new role as leader of the sewer people. Instead he shows up at the Kingpin’s office and uses the ring as proof that Vanessa is alive. The Kingpin has just pulled off the task of getting Randolph Cherryh elected as a puppet mayor, but in order to get Vanessa back, he agrees to get Cherryh to resign. And that’s the story.<\/p>\n

The King of the Sewers is not what you would call a well rounded character. In fact, the whole thing seems intended to be more symbolic than anything else. The narrator describes the story as if it were a descent into the underworld, though it doesn’t map very neatly onto the tale of Orpheus. The King himself is clearly a distorted version of the Kingpin, playing up his grotesqueness and parodying his superficial respectability; although everyone in the community seems to be enthralled by the King, Vanessa’s response to him is presumably meant to be tied to his resemblance to her husband. The Kingpin’s love for Vanessa is always played as genuine, but it becomes rather controlling and creepy under Miller, with Vanessa stripped of all the imperious qualities that she had under previous writers. Perhaps the King’s main function is just to sell the idea that the Kingpin’s love is oppressive, but that Vanessa is somehow doomed to remain in his orbit.<\/p>\n

It reads like a curious detour, and while the idea of an underground community is hardly out of place for Daredevil<\/em>, Miller doesn’t seem to have had any interest in returning to the place. He isn’t really trying to make it feel like a working community, so much as a pit of madness beneath the surface. Other than the King himself, nobody here is a functioning character – at this point, not even Vanessa herself.<\/p>\n

Still, that didn’t mean that later writers couldn’t have returned to the setting and fleshed it out. And tunnel dwellers and sewer alligators are standard urban legend material for early 80s New York, so at first glance it’s a little surprising that Miller’s successors didn’t go back to this available thread.<\/p>\n

The obvious answer is that another book did<\/em> go back to this idea, and did it better – or at least, did it in a way that was more viable as a recurring setting. About a year later, the Morlocks make their debut in Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men.\u00a0<\/em>The story is rather similar, but with mutants, and with more rounded characters. Someone is kidnapped to the hidden community, and the heroes have to get them back. The hero wins by beating the community leader in a fight, is acclaimed as the new leader, and does nothing about it.<\/p>\n

While it’s a decent idea for Daredevil<\/em>, it’s a better one for\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em>, where the Morlocks also provided the first signs of an underground mutant culture. There isn’t really a place for the King of the Sewers once Callisto is in circulation, all the more so because he’s so obviously designed as a distorted shadow of the Kingpin. The hidden community trope does work, but starting from scratch with the Morlocks was a better bet than trying to retool the King of the Sewers to fit the role.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #180 (March 1982) “The Damned” Writer, penciller: Frank Miller Finisher, colourist: Klaus Janson Letterer: Sam Rosen Editor: Denny O’Neil Frank Miller’s first run as writer covers issues #168 to #191, but it’s built heavily around the trinity that we’ve already covered: Elektra, the Kingpin and the Hand. There are some edge cases in the […]<\/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-11289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11289","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=11289"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11435,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11289\/revisions\/11435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}