{"id":11746,"date":"2026-03-08T12:13:52","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T12:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11746"},"modified":"2026-03-08T12:13:52","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T12:13:52","slug":"daredevil-villains-74-rotgut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11746","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #74: Rotgut"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #239-240 (February\/March 1987)<\/strong>
\nWriter: Ann Nocenti<\/strong>
\nArtist:Louis Williams<\/strong>
\nInkers: Al Williamson & (#239 only) Geoff Isherwood<\/strong>
\nColourists: Christie Scheele (#239), Bob Sharen & Petra Scotese (#240)<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Rosen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Ralph Macchio<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve skipped another couple of issues. Issue #237, as I mentioned last time, is the one issue that Steve Englehart wrote before quitting, and appears under his “John Harkness” pseudonym. It features Klaw as the guest villain, so it doesn’t concern us. Issue #238 is the official start of Ann Nocenti’s run (since issue #236 was meant to be a fill-in), but it’s a Mutant Massacre tie-in, and the guest villain is Sabretooth.<\/p>\n

So that brings us to this two-parter, where Nocenti starts to get into her stride. She’ll be working with rotating artists for the first year or so, until John Romita Jr finally comes aboard with issue #250. The most frequent contributor is Louis Williams, who also drew the Englehart issue, and returns for another two-parter in issues #243-244. Daredevil <\/em>was his first work at Marvel, and his other credits seem to be fairly limited. I’m not sure why – he was certainly up to the job. He’s a good fit for this story, with plenty of atmospheric detail and suitably seedy and horrific qualities to his work.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To recap, then: with “Born Again”, Frank Miller left Daredevil with a new status quo, free of his middle class professional trappings, and starting a new life in Hell’s Kitchen with Karen Page. Ann Nocenti starts backtracking on Matt and Karen as a happy couple almost immediately, and goes back to the Roy Thomas-era idea that Karen struggles to accept Matt’s life as a vigilante. But otherwise she doubles down on Miller’s direction, and it’s here, more than twenty years into the series, that Daredevil finally becomes the neighbourhood hero of Hell’s Kitchen.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, Hell’s Kitchen was a poor and working-class area, particularly associated with Irish Americans. That’s essentially how Nocenti plays it, but how far it represented the reality of Hell’s Kitchen by 1987 is hard to for me to judge. Wikipedia claims that gentrification had started in the early 1980s, but also says that a first wave had petered out by this time, and that the second was a few years into the future. It’s fair to say that Nocenti is not noticeably writing a part-gentrified neighbourhood. But presumably there were parts of Hell’s Kitchen that were still broadly like this in 1987. And besides, the whole point of the new set-up was to reconnect Matt with his roots, and this was the version that made sense for that story.<\/p>\n

So if Daredevil is now the hero of Hell’s Kitchen, what sort of villains does he fight there? They have to fit with the stakes of this new setting (which is better suited to Daredevil’s power level anyway). Developers trying to change the nature of the area might work. Crime stories are obviously an option. But this is still a superhero comic, so you also want something heightened. And on top of that, Ann Nocenti likes her stories to be very explicitly about the discussion of ideas, so you want characters who can engage in that.<\/p>\n

What this leads to, for the first phase of Nocenti’s run, is a string of characters defined by mental illness. We won’t reach her more enduring creations until after this phase. So Jack Hazzard in issue #236 was hallucinating. Sabretooth in issue #238 was compelled to kill by a throwback hunting instinct he didn’t quite understand. (Nocenti’s take on Sabretooth, comparing him to a house cat with urges no longer suited to his situation, is very weird with hindsight – but this was before Sabretooth had been established as Wolverine’s arch-enemy, and as X-Men<\/em> editor, she presumably had some idea of how Claremont viewed him at the time.) And with this issue, we have Rotgut.<\/p>\n

We first encounter Rotgut in the basement of his apartment building as he makes a random threatening phone call to a pregnant woman. Here’s his opening line.<\/p>\n

I was watching you and you’ve got it. Got the gut rot. There are viruses now that are smarter than us. They hide in our bloodstreams and are too smart for the antibodies to detect. No army is fighting them. They are furtive, sneaky deadly. I saw you drunk and drinking, I saw you lean back and enjoy that feeling of brain cells dying. That’s what the high comes from, the sensation of the brain cells screaming and dying. You’re too hot. You’re radioactive. You’ve got to take a bath in ice cubes and drink the coldest thing you have so you drop your temperature and your blood will ooze and freeze and clot. It’s the only thing you can do. I saw you touching everyone and spreading your diseases. I saw you smoking. You’re probably smoking right now, killing that bulge in you, that child in you, filling its lungs with cancer, deforming its fingers, making that innocent baby’s cells creep. You’re a killer keep killing killing your baby and dusting your house it doesn’t matter we’re all covered with dead skin, skin is always dying and flaking away and lying around us calling itself dust. You’re a rotgut I’m a rotgut you’re not living you’re dying.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You get the idea. The general vibe is that he’s a schizophrenic (pop culture version) who is obsessed with the death, rot and corruption in the world, and wants to purge it. He believes that he’s on the same side as Daredevil in trying to cut out disease. But he has no terribly coherent plan about how to do that, beyond just killing things that are in front of him and that register to him as corruption. There’s no real logic to his agenda beyond that. He’s also a racist – “Her eyes slant. Foreign devils are the worst. She came here to infect the gene pool.” Rotgut himself appears to be an African American albino, though no characters mention this.<\/p>\n

A couple of panels show the world from Rotgut’s perspective, which is basically Sienkiewicz-style distortion. The idea seems to be to contrast his perspective with Daredevil’s, which sees the beauty in Hell’s Kitchen – perhaps to a rose tinted degree. After all, this isn’t a great neighbourhood, and Rotgut is not entirely wrong in seeing corruption and disease everywhere. His tinfoil hat ravings about the fear hormones of slaughtered cattle are mixed in with complaints about passive smoking and forever plastics. He is, however, completely obsessive. A flashback shows him being lectured about cleanliness by his apparently OCD mother, who’s presented as the main cause of his problems (along with the time when he was forced to kiss his dying grandmother).<\/p>\n

When they first cross paths, Daredevil recognises Rotgut as potentially dangerous, but has nothing more than vague suspicions, so he lets the guy go. Rotgut promptly heads off to kill a prostitute, which he regards as a public service. So issue #240 sees Daredevil actually trying to catch the lunatic serial killer, while Rotgut puts his grand plan into action. He’s going to kill everyone in his apartment building by meddling with the plumbing and poisoning the water. He literally has a red tank, like a giant pill, with DANGER: POISON written on the side – it’s like something out of a Road Runner cartoon, but that only makes him seem even more detached from reality, particularly given the visual style of the rest of the story. His beloved mother also lives in the same apartment building, but Rotgut is so addled that he’s simply forgotten that she’ll die too.<\/p>\n

Naturally, Daredevil stops him, and we have a bit of philosophical debate along the way. Daredevil insists that he’s not like Rotgut, because he fights for<\/em> something, while Rotgut only wants to purge things. When Rotgut realises that he’s nearly killed his own mother, he begs forgiveness and tries to kill himself. Finally, he repeats his point that he and Daredevil are both doing the same thing, and Daredevil replies with the rather limp line “I’m sorry. You are… confused.”<\/p>\n

A subplot involves the neighbourhood kids trying to warn people in the building about the poison; one of the boys decides to let an annoying man drink the poisoned water and die, and the story ends by implying that the boy has just had the same sort of life-changing moment that set Rotgut on his path. This is a rather similar structure to issue #236, which ends with young Tommy set to follow in Jack Hazzard’s footsteps, but fortunately Nocenti won’t keep repeating it.<\/p>\n

It’s an odd way to kick off a run. There’s something effective about the contrast between Daredevil and Rotgut seeing different sides of Hell’s Kitchen – and perhaps in Matt’s view being just as unrealistic in the other direction – but beyond that, the attempt to set up a parallel between them is a strain. Sure, they’re both trying to make the world a better place, and they both act as if they’re above the law while doing it. But Daredevil is a vigilante with a social conscience, and Rotgut is a delusional serial killer. It’s not really comparable, which is why Nocenti struggles to give Daredevil anything much to say in response.<\/p>\n

Rotgut never returns, but he doesn’t lend himself to sequels; he’s too erratic to be anything more than a one-off idea, and to make him a workable regular villain, you’d need to tone him down into something closer to a Batman villain. But that’s not really the point here. He’s here mainly to present a competing view of Hell’s Kitchen, in the form of an exaggerated stereotype, and help to establish the new setting. He serves that role well enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #239-240 (February\/March 1987) Writer: Ann Nocenti Artist:Louis Williams Inkers: Al Williamson & (#239 only) Geoff Isherwood Colourists: Christie Scheele (#239), Bob Sharen & Petra Scotese (#240) Letterer: Joe Rosen Editor: Ralph Macchio We’ve skipped another couple of issues. Issue #237, as I mentioned last time, is the one issue that Steve Englehart wrote before […]<\/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-11746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11746","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=11746"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11847,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11746\/revisions\/11847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}