{"id":12272,"date":"2026-09-06T12:04:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T11:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12272"},"modified":"2026-09-06T12:04:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T11:04:23","slug":"daredevil-villains-86-blackheart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12272","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #86: Blackheart"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #270 (September 1989)<\/strong>
\n“Blackheart!”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Ann Nocenti<\/strong>
\nPenciller: John Romita Jr<\/strong>
\nInkers: Mike Manley & Al Williamson<\/strong>
\nColourists: Max Scheele<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Rosen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Ralph Macchio<\/strong><\/p>\n

We skipped over quite a few issues last time, so for anyone wondering what was in them: issues #259-263 are the end of the Typhoid Mary storyline, with the last two of those issues doubling as Inferno tie-ins. Issue #264 is a fill-in story with the Owl. (Yes, I know there are some gimmicky street gangs in it too, but it’s an Owl story.) Issue #265 is another Inferno tie-in. Issue #266 was a Christmas story with guest villain Mephisto. And issue #267, which we covered last time, has Bullet and the debut of Skip Ash, with Daredevil leaving New York City to spend some time upstate.<\/p>\n

Issue #268 is a small town crime story, and issue #269 has Freedom Force as the guest villains. So that brings us to issue #270. I skipped over Mephisto earlier, but he does show up quite extensive in the next year or so. Nonetheless, he’s still an outside villain, as the storyline acknowledged – it ends with the Silver Surfer showing up to deal with him, and Daredevil leaving the two of them to get on with it. Besides, we get to talk about those issues anyway, thanks to Blackheart, who\u00a0is<\/em> a Daredevil original.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Issue #270 opens by telling us about a hilltop which has been cursed since a woman was murdered there in 1658. Strange roses bloom there. In the present day, a sexual assault between two teenagers tips the location over the edge, causing Blackheart to spontaneously emerge from the ground. His character design that only really makes sense in Romita’s blocky, stylised art. He’s essentially a thorn-covered black silhouette, with some bluish highlights that give only the impression of a face. The narrator refers to his “blinding darkness”, and you can see the idea.<\/p>\n

On seeing the two teenagers, Blackheart recognises the girl as good, and is delighted by their reaction to him. So he kills them both. Mephisto shows up to congratulate his “son” on his first kill. Blackheart attacks Mephisto on sight, to no apparent effect. Mephisto is very pleased with his son’s feistiness, but lectures him about knowing his place, and tells him that he needs to show more imagination “explore more sublime forms of evil”. For example, it would have been much more impressive to lure the innocent girl into committing a murder. Mephisto then gives Blackheart a human form, warns him that he needs a disguise because evil loses its power when it’s seen too clearly, and sends him out into the world.<\/p>\n

All that is the first half of the issue. The second half is very straightforward, perhaps because the whole point is that Blackheart isn’t very sophisticated. For some reason, even though we’re in the middle of the upstate New York period, Daredevil is in Coney Island. Blackheart attacks Daredevil, and a passing Spider-Man gets involved too. The broad idea is that Blackheart is trying to lure Daredevil into killing him, but Spider-Man snaps him out of it, and when the fight attracts a crowd (making him too visible and undermining his power) Blackheart teleports away. The issue ends with a very stylised splash page of the hill. The narrator tells us that Blackheart has collapsed onto the hill, sinking into the ground, and hoping to be allowed to rest in peace – but the art is virtually abstract.<\/p>\n

In his first appearance, Blackheart is barely a character. He doesn’t speak, he mostly acts on instinct, he’s presented as a confused child, and when he does have a coherent thought, it’s relayed to us via the third person narrator. He seems to be simply a toy of Mephisto, who becomes less co-operative the more self-aware he becomes.<\/p>\n

When Nocenti comes back to Blackheart in issues #278-282, he’s matured somewhat. Issue #278 opens with Mephisto repeating his lecture about imaginative evil, and so Blackheart has another go at luring Daredevil. This time, he makes his presence known, but stays in a meek, human disguise, and provokes Daredevil into beating him up – which is just following Mephisto’s formula. But he also points out all Daredevil’s own traits of aloof superiority. By issue #280, he’s hanging around on the fringes of the story, disguised as minor characters, and influencing Daredevil’s makeshift supporting cast to fight.<\/p>\n

Blackheart decides that Mephisto’s vision is old and tired, and that he’s the next generation of evil. He starts questioning Mephisto to his face about whether there’s any point in being worshipped by the damned. But ultimately he concedes that he can’t actually corrupt Daredevil and co, just make them squabble. So, at Mephisto’s suggestion, Blackheart just pulls the whole bunch of them directly into Hell, where they spend the next few issues. From Blackheart’s point of view, the message he draws from his own failure is that humans aren’t as controllable as Mephisto makes out, which in turn implies that Mephisto’s control of his kingdom must be more tenuous than it appears. So he decides to lead a revolution.<\/p>\n

In part, these stories are a response to the fall of the Berlin Wall – Blackheart argues that Mephisto represents a form of authoritarian dictatorship which is now becoming obsolete. But Blackheart also argues that Mephisto has allowed himself to become the humans’ image of evil, and that he is just as trapped and cursed as everyone else in Hell – this is Mephisto as the dictator with no exit strategy. Mephisto keeps squashing Blackheart but can’t make him go away. Finally, Mephisto punishes Blackheart by exiling him to earth, intending that Blackheart will learn why reigning in Hell is better than living among humans. Blackheart will keep his powers, but it’ll drive him mad to use them. And that’s how Blackheart is left by Nocenti, evidently intended as a workable character for future use.<\/p>\n

Nocenti didn’t come back to him, but he did find a place in books like Ghost Rider<\/em> where he could serve as a more straightforward agent of Mephisto, or as a rival claimant on the throne of Hell. Somehow, he eventually wound up in the Avengers Academy\u00a0<\/em>Infinity Comic. Being the son of Mephisto is a pretty flexible concept, after all, and Romita’s design for him is great when the art style can accommodate it.<\/p>\n

But the angle in Nocenti’s stories is more specifically about the idea of a new generation of evil. The fill-in story in issue #264 also touches on this theme, with the Owl forced to work with a bunch of disrespectful gang members who treat him as a joke. In that story, though, it’s the younger generation who come across as idiots, since it was an issue drawn by Steve Ditko, with a meta angle of “respect your elders”. Here, Mephisto sees well worn tropes as something eternal and artistic, while Blackheart apparently follows through on the literal implications of Mephisto that evil should be creative.<\/p>\n

The oddity about this story is that Blackheart doesn’t really end up representing a new manifestation of evil at all. Presumably the idea is that evil will manifest in new ways in new circumstances, but there’s little sense of what that might be. At times Blackheart comes across as a noble rebel paying lip service to the idea that he’s evil.<\/p>\n

You can also question whether he’s really viable as a future Daredevil villain. The Mephisto arc is fantastic, and features some of Romita’s best art, but it also works in part because it’s such a departure – after that story, Nocenti tacks back towards normalcy. There’s a place for outright magic in Daredevil<\/em>, but it’s probably a sparing one. Still, in banishing him to Earth, Nocenti was clearly trying to create a Blackheart who could exist among humans as an Antichrist figure, a corrupter, or perhaps simply as an ambiguous revolutionary; she was trying to incarnate a Mephisto-type character in such a way that he could function as a Daredevil villain who was forced by circumstances to act with subtlety. That balance could have worked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #270 (September 1989) “Blackheart!” Writer: Ann Nocenti Penciller: John Romita Jr Inkers: Mike Manley & Al Williamson Colourists: Max Scheele Letterer: Joe Rosen Editor: Ralph Macchio We skipped over quite a few issues last time, so for anyone wondering what was in them: issues #259-263 are the end of the Typhoid Mary storyline, with […]<\/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-12272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12272","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=12272"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12328,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12272\/revisions\/12328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}