{"id":11509,"date":"2025-11-30T12:25:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T12:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11509"},"modified":"2025-11-30T12:25:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T12:25:10","slug":"daredevil-villains-64-lord-dark-wind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11509","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #64: Lord Dark Wind"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #196-199 (July to October 1983)<\/strong>
\n“Enemies” \/ “Journey” \/ “Touch of a Stranger” \/ “Daughter of a Dark Wind”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Denny O’Neil<\/strong>
\nPencillers: Klaus Janson (#196-197), Larry Hama (breakdowns on #196 and “art assist” on #197) & William Johnson (#197-199)<\/strong>
\nInkers: Klaus Janson (#196-197), Mike Mignola (#197) & Danny Bulanadi (#198-199)<\/strong>
\nColourists: Christie Scheele (#196-197), Glynis Wein (#198) & Bob Sharen (#199)<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Rosen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Linda Grant<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve been through a string of fill-ins, but with issue #200 around the corner, it’s time for an actual storyline, and for Denny O’Neil’s run to get into full swing.<\/p>\n

The change of creative team is completed here, with Klaus Janson leaving the book after the opening scene of issue #196. His replacement is William Johnson, who’ll be with us for less than a year. Compared to the artists who came before and after him, Johnson isn’t particularly well known. His only previous work for Marvel had been the final four issues of Master of Kung Fu<\/em>, and he moved over to Daredevil<\/em> when that book was cancelled.<\/p>\n

His opening splash page in issue #197 is frankly not great, but once he settles in, his art is perfectly good – if rather conservative compared to what’s come before. Reportedly<\/a>, he was taken off the book because he couldn’t handle a monthly schedule. This seems highly plausible, since he drew only eight out of eleven issues during his run, and as far as I can tell, he never worked as a regular penciller on an ongoing title again. He did some scattered fill-in work on Marvel’s licensed books over the next few years before apparently dropping out of the industry.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You can see why artist who had been hired for Master of Kung Fu<\/em> might seem like a good match for\u00a0Daredevil<\/em>, especially with all the ninjas that Frank Miller had brought into the series. And as it happens, this arc takes us to Japan. But O’Neil resists the temptation to go anywhere near the Hand. Instead, we have Lord Dark Wind, Japanese retro-nationalist. He’s here to Make Japan Great Again.<\/p>\n

In issue #196, Dark Wind sends his men to abduct Bullseye from hospital (where he’s been lying paralysed since issue #181). Dark Wind’s plan is that his surgeons will heal Bullseye, who can then be put to use as an assassin. This seems like an awful lot of work when you could just hire a different assassin, but apparently Bullseye’s reputation is just that good. Daredevil and Wolverine fail to stop the abduction, and so in issue #197, Matt flies to Japan in pursuit.<\/p>\n

Dark Wind’s boat does show up, but when Daredevil boards it, he finds that Bullseye has already been dropped off for treatment at the villain’s private island. Instead, Daredevil finds Dark Wind’s daughter Yuriko being held prisoner (for reasons that are never terribly clear), and rescues her. She promptly teams up with him against her father.<\/p>\n

Yuriko relays Dark Wind’s origin story: he was a kamikaze pilot who survived an attack by a fluke when his bomb failed to explode. He wants to atone for this disgrace, and has weird ideas about restoring traditional Japanese culture. Apparently his own face is scarred from the plane crash, and he scars his children’s faces with what appears to be Japanese writing (though nobody translates for us and some dialogue suggests that it’s meaningless). Dark Wind’s sons have already been killed while trying to assassinate the Japanese prime minister on his behalf. The scarring angle is a little confused and doesn’t get developed; later on, Dark Wind claims that he’s wearing a mask until Japan is righteous again, so he may not actually be scarred at all.<\/p>\n

Issue #198 sees Matt and Yuriko travelling across Japan to Dark Wind’s island, evading his Yakuza allies along the way. Naturally we get a scene on a bullet train. Those had been around since 1964, but O’Neil evidently thinks his American audience are a bit behind the times in this regard. “Funny,” muses Matt, “I always thought of Japan as quaint – almost primitive…”<\/p>\n

Now, to be fair, the actual\u00a0depiction<\/em> of modern Japan in the story is pretty inoffensive. It’s presented as a\u00a0 modern place full of normal people, even though Matt can’t interact with any of them because of the language barrier – the story gets some mileage out of the fact that Matt can’t do his usual thing of beating up the henchmen for info. Admittedly, on his flight to Japan, Matt is attended by a stewardess in a kimono. But a bit of digging suggests that Japan Airlines stewardesses did occasionally<\/em> wear them, at least in publicity material, so I’ll give Johnson a pass on that one.<\/p>\n

During this journey, Yuriko expands on her motivation. Her beloved Kira has joined Dark Wind’s private army, and she wants to rescue him. She regards her father as a reactionary lunatic, but also hates him for getting her brothers killed. She’s also a bit bloodthirsty, and keen to see any defeated henchmen killed. But mainly, she’s about getting Kira out of Dark Wind’s influence. We get some scenes of Kira with Dark Wind, which establish that Kira desperately wants to be a noble warrior, while Dark Wind clearly regards him as a halfwit dogsbody. Later on in the story, Yuriko gives a slightly more balanced speech about her father, saying that she understands the loyalty of his followers: “He gives them something to die for. It is only himself and his ideals, but that is more than most men have.”<\/p>\n

While all this is happening, Dark Wind has indeed managed to heal Bullseye. Something about herbs is involved, as well as modern science. Dark Wind wants Bullseye to kill the Japanese trade minister during an upcoming visit to New York, because he symbolises the “new Japan – a nation of merchants”. This, apparently, is a betrayal of the heritage of a warrior nation. Bullseye dismisses Dark Wind as a “nutcase” but accepts the lift back to New York.<\/p>\n

Matt and Yuriko make it to the island, and spend the night in a shelter together (where it is inexplicably implied that they sleep together, despite Yuriko’s motive being to rescue her boyfriend). They fight their way past Dark Wind’s private army to confront the man himself, just as an earthquake starts. There’s no plot reason for the earthquake, it just seems to be the sort of thing that happens in Japan.<\/p>\n

Daredevil gets trapped under some rubble and Dark Wind is about to kill him – his only physical action in the story, really. But then Yuriko kills him from behind. And that’s it. That’s Lord Dark Wind.<\/p>\n

Kira’s subplot ends with the poor guy proclaiming himself a failure while Yuriko consoles him: “Be quiet, beloved. Be at peace. You are free of him forever.” As for Bullseye, he escapes back to America, but has no interest whatsoever in going anywhere near the Japanese trade minister. Trade ministers are boring.<\/p>\n

On one level, this whole story could be seen as a device to get Bullseye back into circulation so that he and Daredevil can face one another in issue #200. Dark Wind himself is weirdly underwhelming: he has a plan with an obvious loophole, in that it involves assuming Bullseye to be a man of honour, so all he actually achieves is to heal a lunatic and get nothing in return, before getting killed by his own daughter. His credibility comes less from anything he actually does in the story, and more from the evident loyalty of his followers.<\/p>\n

But 1983 was awfully late for a story about the spectre of reactionary radicalism in Japan. Sunfire’s origin story played off a somewhat similar idea, and that was in 1969. The story also suffers from the fact that O’Neil wants to show a modern “real” Japan to contrast with Dark Wind, but doesn’t really have any reference points with which to do so, resulting in a generic modern country with a language barrier. Then again, perhaps that’s the point. Yuriko’s thesis is that Dark Wind represents a reactionary vision that lacks any logical merit, but can still fill the void left by a mundane modern world.<\/p>\n

We should, at last, address the elephant in the room. This story is now remembered principally as the debut of Lady Deathstrike.\u00a0Yuriko returns in Alpha Flight<\/em> #33-34, which aren’t available on Marvel Unlimited, but by all accounts rewrite the ending of this story. Kira committed suicide in response to Dark Wind’s failure, and Yuriko dedicates her life to avenging her father. You know, the one that she killed. <\/em>Her more ruthless moments in this story, and a passing suggestion that Dark Wind had something to do with Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton, become the new anchor points of her character. She becomes obsessed with revenge on Wolverine, even though they never actually meet in the original storyline.<\/p>\n

Lady Deathstrike is an almost total inversion of O’Neil’s character. If the idea was that she snapped after killing her own father, then that’s long since fallen by the wayside. But at this point, does anyone really want to do a story about Yuriko’s struggles with her father’s weird nationalist politics? Better to sweep all that under the carpet and have him be the metal skeleton guy. He’s served that role in absentia\u00a0<\/em>for decades now, and it feels like the best use of him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #196-199 (July to October 1983) “Enemies” \/ “Journey” \/ “Touch of a Stranger” \/ “Daughter of a Dark Wind” Writer: Denny O’Neil Pencillers: Klaus Janson (#196-197), Larry Hama (breakdowns on #196 and “art assist” on #197) & William Johnson (#197-199) Inkers: Klaus Janson (#196-197), Mike Mignola (#197) & Danny Bulanadi (#198-199) Colourists: Christie Scheele […]<\/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-11509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11509","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=11509"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11577,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11509\/revisions\/11577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}