{"id":11483,"date":"2025-11-16T13:39:03","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T13:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11483"},"modified":"2025-11-16T13:39:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T13:39:03","slug":"daredevil-villains-63-tarkington-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11483","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #63: Tarkington Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #195 (June 1983)<\/strong>
\n“Betrayal”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Denny O’Neil<\/strong>
\nArtist: Klaus Janson<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Rosen<\/strong>
\nColourist: Glynis Wein<\/strong>
\nEditor: Linda Grant<\/strong><\/p>\n

Technically, Denny O’Neil’s run as writer began with issue #194, which we covered last time. But that story reads as if it was intended to be a fill-in. This story is really where we begin his\u00a0 run, which will take us through to issue #226 in 1985 – albeit with more than a scattering of fill-ins along the way.<\/p>\n

At first, O’Neil sticks with the crime milieu that had become the book’s established format. He’ll start deviating from that fairly quickly, and the villains will get rather more eccentric. But we’ve just had some format-breaking fill-in issues, so it’s probably a good idea to go back to basics.<\/p>\n

“Tarkington Brown” is a strange name for a villain. It sounds like a firm of estate agents from Cornwall, or a whimsical otter voiced by Stephen Fry. In fact, Tarkington Brown is the mastermind behind an NYPD vigilante death squad, who hunt down and kill mobsters that escaped conviction. The story opens with Daredevil stopping the death squad from killing Bruno Ponchatrane, who is not just a mobster, but a child murderer to boot. Ponchatrane got off on a technicality, thanks to the efforts of Foggy Nelson. Foggy wasn’t desperately keen on representing him either but couldn’t see a reason to turn down the instructions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Brown himself is not a police officer. He’s a computer expert from the mayor’s office who’s been seconded to the NYPD. There are some vague mutterings about him using his computing skills to identify NYPD officers with the right personality for this sort of thing. To modern eyes, this seems rather unlikely. Even if he could write the psychological profiling software, surely the NYPD weren’t digitising files to that extent in 1983, or keeping a personnel database with a handy “Vigilante Killer Y\/N” field.<\/p>\n

But this is 1983, so computers are basically still magic. And besides, that line is only really in the story so that it can handwave away the question of how Brown put this group together. He’s not presented otherwise as being any sort of technical genius. Instead, he’s a rich, urbane, political-establishment type who hangs around at Tony Stark’s parties.<\/p>\n

At one of those parties, he meets Heather Glenn. She gives him a rambling, drunken speech about her personal problems, in the course of which she blithely reveals that Matt Murdock is Daredevil. Brown acts on this information by ordering his squad to kill Murdock, although he doesn’t tell them why. Meanwhile, Heather tries to make amends – she tells Matt what she’s done, and then she tries to persuade Brown to keep the secret. But instead, Brown decides that Heather needs to die too, because otherwise she’ll be able to expose the group.<\/p>\n

The plotting here is all very ropey. Matt’s only stopped one of the kill squad’s attacks – does that really merit Brown seeing him as the top obstacle to his agenda? And why does Tarkington decide to kill Heather? Maybe she’d put two and two together if Matt was shot just after she revealed his true identity, but how would she prove anything? And if Brown thinks it’s such a risk, what was he going to do about her if she\u00a0hadn’t\u00a0<\/em>shown up uninvited at his office? And once he’s decided that she has to die, why does he hold her at gunpoint for several pages while he waits for a phone call to confirm that Matt is dead? What’s he planning to do – shoot her in a busy office building when he gets the call? Let her go if he gets word that Matt escaped? If the idea is that he can’t kill her right away because people will hear, then what’s he ultimately planning to do with her – frogmarch her through the building at gunpoint and hope nobody notices?<\/p>\n

Anyway, Daredevil singlehandedly defeats the kill squad, shows up in time to help Heather escape, and then confronts Brown. It turns out that Brown is terminally ill, and believes he’s making a contribution to the city in his final months, as he explains in a very right-wing speech about the need to eliminate “the punks and the terrorists and the hoodlums”. O’Neil’s script only really seems to have a problem with this once he starts going after Daredevil (for getting in his way) and Heather (for being a witness); up to that point, he’s a desk bound Punisher and O’Neil seems okay with that.<\/p>\n

Janson’s art, on the other hand, gives Brown a wide-eyed naivety as he’s explaining his agenda. Thanks to Janson, he becomes a character who claims to represent moral clarity, but actually has the chilling self-certainty of a moral simpleton. It gives him an edge that isn’t really there in the script.<\/p>\n

Somewhat remarkably, Daredevil’s response is to strike a deal with Brown, and agree to leave him alone if he promises to keep Matt’s secret. Presumably the idea was meant to be that the kill squad have already been captured and Brown will die soon anyway, so there’s no point in escalating the situation. In practice, it comes across as if Daredevil doesn’t much care, and hey, a bit of light murder is fine if you’re ill and wearing a suit. The story ends with an epilogue in which we learn that Ponchatrane has killed another little girl – see, it’s morally complex!<\/p>\n

It doesn’t help that Brown shows no signs at all of actually being terminally ill. He has no visible symptoms whatsoever. He’s not lying – he dies off panel a few issues later. But if the idea was that Matt was showing mercy to a man near the end of his life, then that doesn’t come across. Instead, Brown’s illness feels more like a device to get him off the board once he knows Daredevil’s secret identity.<\/p>\n

This isn’t strictly a two-part story, but it’s followed up in issue #196, where Wolverine and Daredevil team up against Lord Dark Wind’s henchmen. O’Neil’s Wolverine was a throwback even by the time of 1983 – the Wolverine <\/em>miniseries had been published by this point, but O’Neil writes Wolverine as a smirking, violent thug. He treats Daredevil as a liberal geek who’s fun to wind up.<\/p>\n

Brown turns out to be a friend of Wolverine. There’s nothing to indicate that he knows about the death squad already, but it’s hard to imagine what else they might have in common, and Wolverine certainly doesn’t seem very bothered to be told about it. Like O’Neil, Wolverine only really seems to have a problem with Brown when he tries (again) to kill Daredevil. At that point, Wolverine does step in and claw the guy before running off in pursuit of some henchmen. Daredevil reluctantly delivers Brown to the hospital, in what they both recognise as a rather pointless exercise, given that he’ll die soon anyway.<\/p>\n

At one point, Brown mentions similar groups having existed elsewhere: “the so-called murder squad in Argentina and the group in San Francisco”. This seems to be O’Neil’s nod to his source material, since “the group in San Francisco” would be the death squad from\u00a0Magnum Force<\/em>, the 1973 sequel to\u00a0Dirty Harry<\/em>. This isn’t the worst idea in the world. In\u00a0Magnum Force<\/em>, the point is contrast the antihero cop with versions of himself who have gone too far; in\u00a0Daredevil<\/em>, at least in theory, Brown is forcing Daredevil to confron the logic of his commitment to the system.<\/p>\n

The concept could have worked for a longer storyline. But once Brown has learned Daredevil’s secret identity, he can’t really stick around.\u00a0The usual fate of villains who learn that sort of thing is to conveniently die through a cause for which the hero has no responsibility. That’s essentiall what happens here, with a passing mention of Brown’s off-panel death in issue #200. Matt’s response is that he seemed like a good man. We’re probably supposed to take it that Matt is biting his tongue. Probably.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #195 (June 1983) “Betrayal” Writer: Denny O’Neil Artist: Klaus Janson Letterer: Joe Rosen Colourist: Glynis Wein Editor: Linda Grant Technically, Denny O’Neil’s run as writer began with issue #194, which we covered last time. But that story reads as if it was intended to be a fill-in. This story is really where we begin […]<\/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-11483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11483","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=11483"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11536,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11483\/revisions\/11536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}