{"id":11562,"date":"2026-01-04T12:09:53","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T12:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11562"},"modified":"2026-01-04T12:09:53","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T12:09:53","slug":"daredevil-villains-67-crossbow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11562","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #67: Crossbow"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #204 (March 1984)<\/strong>
\n“Vengeance of the Victim!”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Denny O’Neil<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Luke McDonnell<\/strong>
\nInker: Danny Bulanadi<\/strong>
\nColourist: Bob Sharen<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Rosen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Bob Budiansky<\/strong><\/p>\n

Denny O’Neil doesn’t like the English, part two.<\/p>\n

William Johnson was still notionally the regular artist at this point, but by all accounts he struggled badly with deadlines. Issue #203 was an inventory story. This issue returns to the regular storyline, but with a fill-in artist. Luke McDonnell was the regular artist on Iron Man<\/em> at this point, but over the course of the 1984 cover dates he somehow found time to pencil not only\u00a0 this issue, but also the back-up strip in issue #202 and the whole of Further Adventures of Indiana Jones<\/em> #20.\u00a0He did skip one issue of Iron Man<\/em>, to be fair, but then again he also drew that year’s annual. He was seriously fast.<\/p>\n

Daredevil <\/em>#204 doesn’t even look like a rush job; the opening splash page on the streets of New York is full of properly designed individual bystanders and journalists. Regular inker Danny Bulanadi must have helped, but it’s still remarkable.<\/p>\n

This is the second part of the Micah Synn storyline that began in issue #202. Crossbow is a hitman, who’s been hired by Lord Barrington Synn to kill Micah. Barrington is a stereotypical simpering aristocrat, who wants Micah dead “before anyone learns that he and I are of the same ancestry”. Apparently, Micah is a brutal, savage heathen and “a blot on the Synn honour”. Later on, there will be mention of Matt and Foggy pursuing some sort of claim that Micah might have on the Synn estate, but at this point Barrington seems simply to regard Micah as a family embarrassment. Of course, Micah really is awful, but Barrington doesn’t know about any of that. His objection appears to be simply that the man has gone a bit African.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Crossbow himself is an Englishman dressed in Robin Hood gear. In fact, he looks a lot like Green Arrow. Suspiciously like Green Arrow, in fact. As you might expect, he carries a crossbow. He says things like “This scumscullion of a city, it’d throw any laddybuck off his aim” and “Fancy foreign kinda fightin’… not fair to a workin’ man.”<\/p>\n

Since he’s a secondary villain designed to keep Daredevil busy while the Micah Synn plotline builds, Crossbow doesn’t really get that much to do in his debut issue. Micah keeps the spotlight. But we do learn that even though Crossbow is being paid \u00a350,000 for this job (about \u00a3200,000 in today’s money), he’d do it on principle. Crossbow claims that he doesn’t like the way the world has changed, and “I put meself at hire to anyone who wants to make things proper again”. So the idea is apparently that he’s some sort of working class English reactionary working as a hired gun for the reactionary establishment.<\/p>\n

There’s potentially something in that concept, but in practice it has nothing to do with the plot. It’s just a bit of colour to liven up his scenes, while Daredevil and Micah get on with the main story. Crossbow’s function in the plot is to force Daredevil into a position where he has to save Micah, and then to put up a token fight against Daredevil before being defeated. And that’s what he does.<\/p>\n

Crossbow shows up twice more in O’Neil’s run, and hasn’t appeared again since. In issue #210, Micah breaks Crossbow out of jail and orders him to kill Daredevil. Crossbow plays along in order to get revenge on Daredevil, but still plans to kill Micah anyway, just on principle. In practice, Daredevil escapes, and Crossbow simply continues as Micah’s henchman. This feels as if it was meant to head somewhere, but it doesn’t. Micah’s story ends in issue #214, without Crossbow being involved.<\/p>\n

His third and final appearance is in issue #216, when he shows up in a subplot and has another go at killing Daredevil, with predictable results. This gives Daredevil the opportunity to interrogate Crossbow about how he was planning to get out of the country after killing Micah. That information is important to the main story, because Crossbow responds by telling Daredevil about to “the Old Woman of Beare”, who was apparently supposed to help him leave the country. This is, to put it mildly, extremely confused. Crossbow is an English reactionary; the Old Woman of Beare is working for the IRA. We’ll get to the IRA storyline next time, but the problem here ought to be fairly obvious.<\/p>\n

Crossbow is weirdly positioned in O’Neil’s stories. He’s never the focus of anything, and his motivations are frankly bizarre. Much like his employer Barrington Synn, Crossbow is a reflection of O’Neil’s bizarrely simplistic grasp of England far more than he’s an actual functioning character. He’s not explicitly positioned as a comedy character, but he’s never the focus of attention, and his reactionary politics seem to want to turn the clock back to the middle ages, rather than the Victorians. This doesn’t really map on to anything in the real world.<\/p>\n

You might expect Crossbow to fit into the well established tradition of archer characters, such as Hawkeye and, well, Green Arrow. O’Neil, of course, had written Green Arrow in the past. To some extent Crossbow is a parody of that character. Normally, archer characters are presented as having a dzzling mastery of a unique weapon. And Crossbow is very good with his weapon – he can break a rope with a single shot fired from a good distance away, and the story is perfectly clear that crossbows are lethal. But we’re also told, very directly, that he’d be an awful lot more dangerous if he’d just use a gun. His choice of weapon is treated as something that hobbles him, akin to the Riddler obsessively leaving clues for Batman.<\/p>\n

This leaves Crossbow in a weird position – not quite a credible threat, not quite a comedy character. He doesn’t really say anything worthwile about England, and he doesn’t really say anything worthwhile about Green Arrow either. As a secondary villain designed principally to stop Daredevil from resolving more important plots too quickly, he serves his function well enough. But you can see why nobody, not even his creator, ever felt like building a story around him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #204 (March 1984) “Vengeance of the Victim!” Writer: Denny O’Neil Penciller: Luke McDonnell Inker: Danny Bulanadi Colourist: Bob Sharen Letterer: Joe Rosen Editor: Bob Budiansky Denny O’Neil doesn’t like the English, part two. William Johnson was still notionally the regular artist at this point, but by all accounts he struggled badly with deadlines. Issue […]<\/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-11562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11562","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=11562"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11670,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11562\/revisions\/11670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}