{"id":11877,"date":"2026-05-31T19:24:31","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T18:24:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11877"},"modified":"2026-05-31T19:24:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T18:24:31","slug":"daredevil-villains-80-bullet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11877","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #80: Bullet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #250-251 (January\/February 1988)<\/strong>
\n“Boom!” \/ “Save the Planet”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Ann Nocenti<\/strong>
\nPenciller: John Romita Jr<\/strong>
\nInker: Al Williamson<\/strong>
\nColourist: Max Scheele<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Rosen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Ralph Macchio<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s taken over a year, but at long last Ann Nocenti is joined on the book by a regular penciller. John Romita Jr will be with us until issue #282, and this is where Nocenti’s run really kicks up a gear.<\/p>\n

Romita was an established name by this point – he’d already had runs on Iron Man<\/em>,\u00a0Amazing Spider-Man<\/em> and\u00a0Uncanny X-Men<\/em>. However, 1987 had seen him take a career detour to draw the first six issues of Star Brand<\/em>. In a 2017 interview<\/a>, Romita essentially says that this was an unhappy experience, that he was thinking of quitting comics, and that he was talked into taking the\u00a0Daredevil<\/em> assignment by an offer of more creative input. Some of what Romita says in that interview doesn’t seem quite right – he talks as if Ann Nocenti was also new to the book, and says that Al Williamson was hired at his request, when he’d been inking the book on and off for a while already. But Romita’s central point, that his run on Daredevil<\/em> was where he really had the opportunity to come into his own as a creator, is hard to argue with.<\/p>\n

It’s not just that Romita’s art in this run is good, though he was certainly at his best around this time. He’s good in a way that complements Nocenti’s style – he gives the stories weight, he can play it straight when required, but he also has a degree of abstraction that matches the slightly distanced, stylised elements in Nocenti’s writing. There’s a dreamlike quality to some of the Nocenti\/Romita issues that works to their advantage. By the end of Romita’s run on the book, Daredevil will have gone slowly mad.<\/p>\n

The art isn’t the only thing that changes at this point. For most of her first year, Nocenti focussed on one-off villains; now we get a string of recurring ones.\u00a0That started with Bushwacker in the previous arc, and when she does the traditional “hero fights all his villains at once” story in a few months time, she starts with him and ignores everyone who came before. We’re into a new phase.<\/p>\n

The first Nocenti\/Romita creation is Bullet. He makes his debut as part of the Kelco storyline, which started in issues #248-249. Kelco are an evil chemical corporation, and their dumped chemicals have cost a young boy his sight. An environmental group, Save The Planet, approaches Matt’s law clinic for help against them. But behind Kelco is the Kingpin, who’s still trying to finish off the job from “Born Again”. He’s engineering this conflict in order to break Matt’s spirit and his faith in the law. The idea is for the Kingpin to prove that he can win by a combination of money and corruption, and to enrage Matt by hiring Foggy to represent Kelco. Foggy doesn’t know about the Kingpin’s involvement, and he’s perfectly comfortable with arguing Kelco’s case.<\/p>\n

Bullet is a US government agent who gets loaned out to the Kingpin as a hired gun by a corrupt general. When we first meet Bullet, he’s receiving a briefing from a very nervous general, who tries to sell him on the idea that he’s protecting American values against subversive environmentalists. So far, so Nuke. The plan is for a fake terrorist to frame Save The Planet and for Bullet to arrest him. The general is clearly expecting Bullet to have a problem with this – which suggests that up to now he’s been doing basically legitimate black ops work. But Bullet couldn’t care less. He\u00a0does\u00a0<\/em>care about the fact that there are armed guards keeping an eye on the meeting from behind a two-way mirror, and he warns the general not to hide things from him, but that’s about it. He’s a bullet – you fire him at the problem.<\/p>\n

This is basically Bullet’s thing. He’s not evil, so much as completely amoral. He simply doesn’t care about the justifications for anything, and sees himself as a cynical realist. In the context of Nocenti’s story, he represents someone who’s already embraced a complete lack of faith in the system, and a realpolitik worldview where justice is something for the rubes. And on the surface, at least, Bullet differs from most of Nocenti’s creations by seeming completely sane. There are hints of things going on beneath the surface, and we’ll come to that, but Bullet is a Nocenti villain who could get by in the day to day world. In his mind, at least, he has no dogma to drive him.<\/p>\n

Naturally, the plan to frame the environmentalists goes awry when Matt gets in the way – and in the course of this, we also learn that Bullet can shrug off charging head first into a metal door. Matt quickly figures out the scam, but since Bullet is a genuine government agent, Matt allows him to “arrest” the fake terrorist. In issue #251, Bullet frames some more campaigners, all while thinking to himself that the world could use a few less humans in it. Daredevil catches up to him, beats him, and turns him over to the police – and of course he’s released by the end of the issue. From the Kingpin’s point of view, this is Bullet’s purpose in the story; he’s there to aggravate Daredevil by being indifferent to morality and above the law<\/p>\n

But Bullet also has another side. His son Lance is a paranoid obsessive who’s convinced that the end of the world is coming. Lance looks about ten, but lives alone in Hell’s Kitchen – Bullet apparently has his own apartment nearby, and resists Lance’s cheerful pleas for daddy to come and live with him, claiming that “I can’t live here, I’d go buggy”. Lance, meanwhile, has turned the apartment into a makeshift fallout shelter and is stockpiling tinned goods.<\/p>\n

Bullet is not exactly father of the year, then. He’s vaguely concerned about Lance’s fallout shelter obsession but doesn’t really do anything about it. He does drop by with supplies, though, and when he and Lance are together, Bullet genuinely does seem to love the kid, even as he’s exasperated by Lance’s eccentricities. We’ll see in future stories that he defends Lance fiercely from any threat. He seems to have convinced himself that Lance is just going through a phase and that everything else about their relationship is basically normal. On one reading, Bullet is a distant father who sincerely loves his child and thinks he’s showing it appropriately. On another, Bullet knows that he can’t cope with Lance, knows that he’s dangerous when he loses his temper, and is torn between keeping his distance and trying to support Lance. Perhaps it’s a bit of both.<\/p>\n

As for Lance’s mother, when she eventually appears in issue #291, she seems to have no interest in the boy at all. But Bullet and Lance’s relationship feels entirely genuine and gives him a redeeming virtue of a very warped sort.<\/p>\n

As a fighter, Bullet is just a big durable guy who’s faster than you’d think and charges headlong at his targets. Matt claims that he wouldn’t survive a direct hit. If we were going solely by powers, Bullet would be a budget Rhino. But Romita gives him a great design – a hefty guy in a black suit and mask with a white line running down it that doesn’t look quite standard for the genre. It’s the material with Lance that really humanises him, though, and explains why he comes back. It’s hard to pin down quite why it works – the heartless villain who loves his son is a cliche, but somehow there’s more to it in Bullet’s case, perhaps because of his general cynicism. Lance isn’t just a typical weak spot; he undermines Bullet’s outward persona more generally.<\/p>\n

Nocenti seems to have liked Bullet, as he comes back again for her final issue. After Nocenti’s run, he’ll bounce around the Marvel Universe a bit, and eventually gets brought back as more of a supporting character by Chip Zdarsky. While he’s never been a major villain, people have found a role for him. That makes sense – Nocenti’s run is full of high-concept characters, many of whom wouldn’t quite make sense outside the context of their original story, but Bullet has a fairly portable concept (he’s a cynical hired gun) and a unique personality hook (his relationship with Lance). He’s the most traditional villain Nocenti has created to date, yet somehow he feels different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #250-251 (January\/February 1988) “Boom!” \/ “Save the Planet” Writer: Ann Nocenti Penciller: John Romita Jr Inker: Al Williamson Colourist: Max Scheele Letterer: Joe Rosen Editor: Ralph Macchio It’s taken over a year, but at long last Ann Nocenti is joined on the book by a regular penciller. John Romita Jr will be with us […]<\/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-11877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11877","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=11877"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12043,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11877\/revisions\/12043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}