{"id":11364,"date":"2025-10-05T12:14:38","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T11:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11364"},"modified":"2025-10-05T14:04:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T13:04:37","slug":"daredevil-villains-61-willow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11364","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #61: Willow"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #193 (April 1983)<\/strong>
\n“Bitsy’s Revenge”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Larry Hama<\/strong>
\nArtist: Klaus Janson<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Rosen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Denny O’Neil<\/strong><\/p>\n

Frank Miller’s run ended with issue #191, and by most standards he left the book in a much healthier state than he’d found it. Sales had turned around, it was back on a monthly schedule, and it was a book everyone was talking about. But all of that rested heavily on Miller himself, and left Marvel with the question: what now?<\/p>\n

Klaus Janson stuck around for a few more issues on art. That gave the book some degree of visual continuity during this transition, although to be honest, less than you might expect. His layouts are more traditional and his issues feel a little more restrained, though there are still visual flourishes to be found. But it’s still Klaus Janson, and there’s still some consistency.<\/p>\n

Who would even want to put themselves forward as the next regular writer of Daredevil<\/em>, though? As it turns out, the answer seems to have been “nobody”. After two issues by fill-in writers, editor Denny O’Neill wound up writing the book himself – in his own words, “mostly because there didn’t seem to be (m)any other viable candidates for it”<\/a>. But we’ll get to that next time.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first fill-in, issue #192, was by Alan Brennert, mostly a TV and SF writer. It’s actually pretty good; it’s a Ben Urich story which picks up on some points from Miller’s run, has some reasonable things to say about corruption, and rises respectably to the challenge of following Miller. Presumably he simply wasn\u2019t available to be the regular writer. But the villain is the Kingpin, so the issue is beyond our remit. Instead, we’re here to talk about issue #193. This one’s by Larry Hama, who was in the first year of his G.I. Joe\u00a0<\/em>run at the time.<\/p>\n

The story opens with Daredevil swinging by the New York armoury to visit his never-before-mentioned friend Sarge, only to find the veteran mortally wounded by a gunshot. Sarge explains that the attackers have stolen the new Dragon anti-tank missiles. Even worse, they stole his .45, “Bitsy”, a family heirloom that he took to Vietnam with him.<\/p>\n

The robbers are double crossed by their getaway driver, who escapes with the loot as soon as they\u2019ve loaded it into the back of the truck. That leaves everyone else to get beaten up by Daredevil, and he learns that they were hired by a guy called Carmine Pesca. Pesca plans to target the SS Madagascar, a cruise ship that sails for France in the morning, with millions of dollars worth of diamonds in the hold.<\/p>\n

So Matt decides to join the cruise as a passenger – you\u2019d have thought his diary would be busier, but apparently not.\u00a0Pesca turns out to be a passenger on the ship, and Matt also meets the ship’s magician, “Willow the Phantasmagoric”. She has a remarkably elaborate act for a cruise ship act: she’s using holograms to make it look as if she’s conjuring up an elephant on stage and she can make volunteers vanish into the rafters with a harness and wire. (She’s entirely unbothered about the fact that Matt knows how it’s done, but there’s nothing particularly unrealistic about that<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

She also has two rather stereotypical assistants called Ali and Akbar – which would be more of a problem if they didn\u2019t turn out to be disguised thugs. As it is, they\u2019re basically hiding in plain sight.<\/p>\n

That night, the ship is attacked with the stolen Dragon missiles. The idea is to knock out the ship’s radio and to intimidate the captain into surrendering the diamonds. But it also knocks the ship’s radar dish out of line. This somehow messes with Daredevil’s radar sense, giving us a set piece where he has to climb the mast blind in order to hack off the damaged dish with an axe. (Yes, that’s why the cover shows a maniacal Daredevil wielding a sharp implement.)<\/p>\n

Pesca turns out to be a stooge hired by Willow as an audience plant, and of course the real villain is Willow herself. A brief fight leads to Willow melodramatically producing Sarge’s stolen gun – remember that? – and trying to shoot Daredevil. Unfortunately for her, the gun doesn’t work; it’s been jammed with shrapnel ever since Vietnam when Sarge survived a premature grenade explosion by sheer fluke, and he only carried it as a keepsake. So it blows up in her face, which either knocks her out or kills her. It’s left unclear.<\/p>\n

It’s a superior fill-in story, and it gives Janson plenty to get his teeth into, but it’s also very much an all-purpose story. Hama tailors it to Daredevil up to a point: there’s the set piece with the radar dish, and a bit of colour in how he reacts to Willow’s act. But as a story set mostly on a cruise ship, with none of the regular supporting cast or settings coming into play, you could plug pretty much any Marvel solo hero into this one. It’s easy to imagine Hama writing this exact same story for Wolverine<\/em> in the 1990s, and it would have worked just as well – perhaps better, because Wolverine would be able to see Willow’s act. But you could do this one with Spider-Man or Captain America or Batman without much difficulty. In fact, you could even do it as a format-breaking issue of GI Joe <\/em>and play up the missiles more.<\/p>\n

In that sense, it’s not really a Daredevil story. Still, in terms of tone, it’s within regular Daredevil<\/em> parameters. And stories like this stand or fall on how interested you are in the guest villain. Willow\u00a0is<\/em> engaging, at least as a one-off. The misdirection setting up Pesca as the villain is well executed, the stage magic is completely unrealistic but still feels <\/i>like stage magic within the context of the Marvel Universe. And Willow’s personality switch at the end comes off well. The moral about the gun feels tacked on, though – it doesn’t really connect to the main plot at all, beyond a very vague “bad person gets comeuppance” aspect, and there\u2019s absolutely no good reason for Willow to produce the Gun That Is A Metaphor which she happened to steal at the beginning of the story, rather than just having her own gun.<\/p>\n

Obviously, Willow is not a character designed to return. Aside from the fact that this is a fill-in story, her gimmick is a reveal which can only be done once. As a recurring character she’d be a budget Mysterio, and that wouldn’t work. In fact, we\u2019ll get exactly that with another magic-themed fill-in villain within the next year. But as a one-off character here, in a story designed mainly to keep the book ticking over, she does her job well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #193 (April 1983) “Bitsy’s Revenge” Writer: Larry Hama Artist: Klaus Janson Letterer: Joe Rosen Editor: Denny O’Neil Frank Miller’s run ended with issue #191, and by most standards he left the book in a much healthier state than he’d found it. Sales had turned around, it was back on a monthly schedule, and it […]<\/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-11364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11364","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=11364"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11452,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11364\/revisions\/11452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}