{"id":12134,"date":"2026-08-09T12:44:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T11:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12134"},"modified":"2026-08-12T21:58:54","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T20:58:54","slug":"daredevil-villains-83-typhoid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12134","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #83: Typhoid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #254-256 (May to July 1988)<\/strong>
\n“Typhoid” \/ “Temptation” \/ “Blindspots”<\/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

Up to this point, Ann Nocenti has given us a lot of one-off villains, and a few who showed more staying power. But Typhoid really is a major addition to the rogues gallery, and someone who goes on to be used across the Marvel Universe.<\/p>\n

She’s also the first Nocenti creation to get an extended storyline. Previous new characters appeared in one or two issues, but Typhoid is around for nearly a year. While I’ve given the credits for issues #254-256 above, she appears in some form in every issue from #254 to #263, except for a fill-in story in issue #258.<\/p>\n

Issue #254 opens with a splash page of Typhoid, complete with her swords, her one-armed jacket, her weird metal shoulder plates, her fishnets, her braids, and the white make-up on the right half of her face. She has a serious expression. Meanwhile, the narrator tells us that poisonous people live among without knowing what they are, doing what they have to do to survive. “Touch her, she’s the best,” the narrator adds. The opening scene has her breaking up a mugging, only to enlist the mugger as her sidekick – she “brands” the guy by clawing his face with her fingernails, offers him excitement, kisses him, and declares that “Typhoid’s on top, she calls the shots”. It’s mostly played as if the mugger, Rip, is receiving some sort of infection.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Soon after, Typhoid and Rip burst into a room full of crack dealers and gunning them all down. Although she mentions something about killing scum, Typhoid actually seems to be mainly there to steal their cash. Somehow, the room catches fire. And then she insists on having sex with her befuddled new underling, in the burning building full of dead people.<\/p>\n

It’s quite the way to introduce a new villain in a Code approved comic in 1988.<\/p>\n

Typhoid carries out a string of these attacks, which attract the attention of both the Kingpin (since she’s interfering with his business) and Daredevil (who takes her to be a Punisher-style vigilante). Via the Kingpin’s investigations, we get a brief origin story. Typhoid has had a multiple personality since infancy: “Mary”, who is fragile and sickly, and “Typhoid”, who is murderous and apparently immune to Mary’s illnesses, but runs a constant fever. Mary is so innocent that she’s oblivious to Typhoid’s very existence. Somewhere along the line, Typhoid has escaped from her institution, spent some time as an actress, and then become a criminal. She also has low-level psychic powers, which will later lead to her being classed as a mutant, but in this story are simply unexplained.<\/p>\n

The two personalities have entirely different heartbeats, scents and so forth. The conventional dual identity trope doesn’t really work in\u00a0Daredevil<\/em> because Matt ought to be able to recognise the same person in different clothes. Typhoid inverts that – everyone else can tell that she and Mary look the same, but Matt is oblivious. Naturally, the two personalities are played as a distorted parallel of Matt and his Daredevil identity.<\/p>\n

The Kingpin decides that this woman’s remarkably convenient qualities are almost perfectly designed to mess with Matt Murdock, and he’s not wrong. For a while now, Kingpin has been trying to lure Matt into litigating against one of his companies, Kelco, which polluted a river and blinded a kid called Tyrone. Kingpin’s idea is to win the case by throwing money at it, and to break Matt’s faith in the legal system. Now he plans to ruin Matt’s personal life too, by having Mary seduce Matt and Typhoid seduce Daredevil. “When the smoke clears,” Kingpin thinks, “you will have destroyed a man as only a woman can.”<\/p>\n

Typhoid duly shows up to meet the Kingpin, and tries her psychic schtick on him, but the Kingpin turns out to be out of her league in that regard. After being momentarily taken aback, she changes gear and starts treating him as if they were equals. This is key to their pairing in the coming issues: Kingpin thinks she’s a tool under his control, but tolerates what he regards as her pretensions of autonomy… up to a point.<\/p>\n

At any rate, Typhoid accepts the contract. Soon after, while Matt is visiting Tyrone in hospital, Mary shows up claiming to be a volunteer worker with the blind, and starts talking about her blind father and about how incredibly insightful blind men. Matt is naturally smitten.<\/p>\n

This is where the story doesn’t quite make sense. If Mary is oblivious to Typhoid, then why is she trying to seduce Matt? And how did she get set up as a volunteer worker so quickly? Apparently she’s not lying – she seems to have some legitimate support role for Tyrone – but does that mean that she was coincidentally already a volunteer working with blind children before Typhoid was hired? Or that the Kingpin set her up with the job overnight, without her being aware of it? On some level, for this to work, we have to accept that Typhoid is able to steer Mary, or that Mary is subconsciously reaching out to Matt to protect her from Typhoid – which certainly\u00a0 seems to be the case in later issues. For whatever reason, though, Mary is flirting with Matt from the off. (Typhoid suggests that Mary is genuinely in love with him and claims to be enjoying the prospect of breaking Mary’s heart too.)<\/p>\n

Later in the same issue, they meet again as Daredevil and Typhoid. She presents herself to Daredevil as the unfettered version of his vigilante persona. She also calls him her “merry Christian”, a phrase that she keeps coming back to, in apparent mockery of his professed values. But the Typhoid persona makes far less headway in seducing Daredevil: he perceives her as blurry, indistinct, and finds something about her inexplicably disorienting and repellent. Basically, he reacts to her as if she’s a feverish hallucination.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Kelco subplot reaches trial. Nocenti’s grasp of the law is very shaky, and it’s never entirely clear how strong Kelco’s legal defence is meant to be, but the basic angle is meant to be Matt making an overriding pitch to the jurors’ morality. Once the jury are out, the Kingpin can see that things are going badly, so he sends Typhoid to intimidate a juror. Interpreting this remit in her own unique way, Typhoid shows up at the poor woman’s house, lectures her about how boring she is, and calls her a bad feminist for playing by the rules instead of “grab[bing] at power”. Then Typhoid reports back to the Kingpin, claims that the meeting was a massive success, and tries to make the Kingpin jealous by talking up how hot Matt is.<\/p>\n

Later that night, Typhoid and Daredevil have an odd underwater fight in a sewer, where she taunts him for having kissed her as Mary, and he completely fails to realise what she’s talking about. Finally, the jury find against the Kingpin and everyone is happy, including Mary.<\/p>\n

That’s the opening arc. Here’s where the storyline goes after that. Kingpin confronts Typhoid about the fact that she’s fighting Daredevil when she was meant to be seducing him, and suggests that the Mary persona’s love for Matt is holding her back. Typhoid privately concludes that he’s right, and that Mary is gaining influence because of Matt. Because she doubts that Mary will let her attack Matt directly, she rounds up all of Matt’s villains from the last year or so to attack him instead. That fight ends with Daredevil defeated, and Typhoid chucks him off a bridge while shedding a tear.<\/p>\n

The Kingpin isn’t at all happy about this turn of events, because it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original plan. This lead to Typhoid literally encouraging Kingpin to “beat me, tie me, throw me in a river” and “make me happy”, after which he slaps her about, and they appear to have sex. Again, this was a Code approved book. Afterwards, Typhoid still thinks that she’s the one in charge.<\/p>\n

The final two Typhoid issues are an “Inferno” tie-in, with New York transformed by demons thanks to events over in Uncanny X-Men<\/em>. As with “Fall of the Mutants”, Nocenti treats this simply as a backdrop to her own stories. Supposedly, once “Inferno” was over, Marvel’s New Yorkers wrote it off as a mass hallucination.\u00a0Daredevil\u00a0<\/em>is the book where that makes most sense, as it presents “Inferno” as less a literal transformation and more a delirious mass psychosis. During these events, Mary tells Karen Page about her and Matt – so ironically, it’s Mary, not Typhoid, who actually fulfils Kingpin’s original remit. Later, Typhoid shows up in a subplot, and introduces the Kingpin to Mephisto.<\/p>\n

And that’s it. Typhoid doesn’t return to Daredevil <\/em>until DG Chichester’s run.<\/p>\n

But Nocenti did return to Typhoid in a string of Marvel Comics Presents<\/em> stories, which are rather cluttered by guests like Wolverine and Vengeance. In those, we meet two more personalities: Bloody Mary, who kills domestic abusers, and “Walker”, a unified personality who seems to be the stable one. The core idea is that the first three personalities define themselves in relation to men – “Virgin” Mary seeks protection from men, Typhoid Mary tries to use men, and Bloody Mary hates men – but Walker has escaped this trap and embodies a more coherent feminism oriented around Mary herself.<\/p>\n

All that has largely fallen by the wayside. Although the character became a staple of the Marvel Universe, it was predominantly Typhoid that came back, with the innocent Mary showing up to some degree.<\/p>\n

Originally, Typhoid was an interrogation of the bad girl trope. Indeed, as a blade-wielding red-clad woman working for the Kingpin and in a love-hate relationship with Daredevil, she seems to be a riff on Elektra. Maybe not a parody of Elektra as such, but at least a sickly distortion of her, and of Matt’s relationship with her.<\/p>\n

Later writers have been much more prone to taking the Typhoid persona at face value. That works too; Typhoid is at least a distinctive version of the trope, and she can bring a general hint of madness to proceedings even when nothing deeper is in play. She still fills a unique role in that capacity. She’s certainly one of the Nocenti\/Romita creations with the greatest staying power. But it feels like what has stuck is the character’s surface level, rather than her animating ideas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #254-256 (May to July 1988) “Typhoid” \/ “Temptation” \/ “Blindspots” Writer: Ann Nocenti Penciller: John Romita Jr Inker: Al Williamson Colourist: Max Scheele Letterer: Joe Rosen Editor: Ralph Macchio Up to this point, Ann Nocenti has given us a lot of one-off villains, and a few who showed more staying power. But Typhoid really […]<\/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-12134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12134","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=12134"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12223,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12134\/revisions\/12223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}