{"id":12288,"date":"2026-08-30T17:57:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T16:57:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12288"},"modified":"2026-08-30T17:57:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T16:57:13","slug":"daredevil-villains-85-skip-ash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12288","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #85: Skip Ash"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #267 (June 1989)<\/strong>
\n“Cremains”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Ann Nocenti<\/strong>
\nPenciller: John Romita Jr<\/strong>
\nInker: Al Williamson<\/strong>
\nColourist: Gregory Wright<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Rosen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Ralph Macchio<\/strong><\/p>\n

Skip Ash isn’t really the main villain in issue #267. In fact, he’s not even an antagonist in the story at all. But it is his debut, and he continues to appear into the #270s, and he has a really weird side project that makes him count as a villain. So he makes the cut.<\/p>\n

As issue #267 begins, Daredevil has lost Karen Page thanks to Typhoid, and his Storefront law clinic has been closed. He’s tormented by his urges to seek revenge, but changes his mind after an altercation with Bullet, which leads him to conclude that Bullet himself is just a guy, and not the real problem. Disillusioned with everything, including himself, Matt gets a random train ticket upstate. When the train passes a government plane crashed in a nearby field – don’t ask how anyone identifies it as a “government plane” at that distance – Matt jumps off the moving train to help.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The sole occupant of the plane is Skip Ash, and Matt gets him to safety before the plane catches fire. But Skip goes back anyway to salvage the guns and cocaine that were in the plane, quite reasonably assuming that Matt won’t be able to see what he’s doing. They walk to the nearest town, and Skip decides to offer him a job, apparently because he thinks it might be useful to have someone around who can’t see what’s going on. For some reason, despite being a government affiliated drug and gun-runner, Skip also runs a farm, which is named after his daughter. It’s called “Brandy’s Gently Killed Chicken Farm”. Skip invites Matt to come and meet him there in a few weeks.<\/p>\n

This seems to be setting up a story where Matt goes to work on a chicken farm which is actually a front. But that’s not what happens. Nocenti isn’t interested in the drugs and guns, although Skip’s government connections continue to be acknowledged. It’s suggested that Skip is assisting illegal CIA operations with money laundering, and providing cover for their agents. But Nocenti is more interested in the factory farming, although even that forms part of a wider theme about programming and control.<\/p>\n

When we next see Skip, in issue #271, he’s being brought up to date on the miserable conditions of his factory farmed animals, by an aide who is clearly at least somewhat troubled by the whole thing. But Skip can’t see the problem. He doesn’t believe in animal rights and he sees protestors as hypocrites who still eat meat and wear leather. Skip has also hired a bunch of geneticists, partly to make him GM chickens, but also to modify human women into the “perfect wife”, which seems to mean an indestructible tradwife. Skip is particularly taken with a subject called Number Nine, and is absolutely convinced that she’ll love him back – after all, he’s her “creator” and “father”, with her original personality and memories overwritten. We’re told that Number Nine and her fellow subjects volunteered to be turned into “perfect beings, just like the girls they saw all their lives in all the glossy magazines”, but the creepiness of the whole thing is obvious, and Skip presents it as the next logical step from GM chickens.<\/p>\n

Skip’s daughter Brandy stages an animal-rights raid on the farm, and inadvertently frees Number Nine in the process. Skip is determined to get Number Nine back, and calls in his government contacts. They send Shotgun along to deal with it, and we’ll come to him in a future instalment. Suffice to say that he doesn’t get the job done. So in issue #274, where Skip decides that he can do a better job himself, and simply shows up at Brandy’s home to demand Number Nine back. When Daredevil won’t let her go, Skip tries to fight for her with predictable lack of success. Once he’s subdued, Daredevil and Brandy threaten to publicly expose his activities unless he stops his government work.<\/p>\n

Skip seems to accept this, but protests that he’s always allowed Brandy to think for herself and that she and Daredevil are both vigilantes with no right to judge him. While Daredevil sticks to his guns on the threats, he also gives a bizarre centrist speech about how Skip and Brandy should “respect each other’s political passion, which is a rare thing to have these days”. Skip hangs around for another few issues as a mostly constructive background member of Daredevil’s supporting cast, while the focus of the plot moves on to the Inhumans and Acts of Vengeance. He fades out after issue #278, without any further resolution of his storyline.<\/p>\n

All this is ultimately about conditioning. Freeing the factory-farmed animals is a futile gesture because they can’t survive in the outside world. Brandy couldn’t get by without her father’s money, and returned to the family fold. Daredevil has left New York but is still going through the motions of being a hero because he has no frame of reference for what else he might do – hence, presumably, his spouting of inappropriate platitudes at points in this storyline. Number Nine signed up for Skip’s experiments because of the expectations on women that she’s internalised, and she’s been turned into a virtual parody. Even the scientists in Skip’s lab, who have enough of a moral framework to be alarmed at any suggestion of going further, have apparently adjusted to their current experiments as being the norm. In this context, Skip seems to be an internalised conservative. He’s not exactly evil, he’s just working on a framework of expectations that he can’t see past, much like everyone else.<\/p>\n

The oddity in all this is Number Nine. Even if we take at face value the claim that all the women involved were consenting volunteers (which would surely imply that they weren’t very well to start with), it’s hard to imagine either centrist Daredevil or progressive Brandy regarding this as remotely forgivable in 2026. But in this story it’s treated as about on a par with running a chicken farm. To some extent, of course, that’s the point. Brandy and Daredevil both react to Number Nine in the same way that they would treat the less extreme women that she caricatures. Brandy thinks Number Nine is a gender traitor, not a victim. Daredevil can’t even seem to fully register the concept that she might be a victim since he finds women unintelligible in the first place. He can’t seem to see the problem in having someone make his meals, and talks as if Number Nine was making a free choice to serve him that ought to be respected. Perhaps the idea is that Skip atones to some degree by the mere fact of breaking from his own established role, but if so, it’s not really developed to completion.<\/p>\n

Skip never appears again after this arc, and obviously he’s tied very specifically to the short-lived supporting characters of Brandy and Number Nine. It’s perhaps more surprising that Number Nine never returns, given that her storyline isn’t fully resolved, and her relevance has hardly diminished. Something more should have been done with her, at the least.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #267 (June 1989) “Cremains” Writer: Ann Nocenti Penciller: John Romita Jr Inker: Al Williamson Colourist: Gregory Wright Letterer: Joe Rosen Editor: Ralph Macchio Skip Ash isn’t really the main villain in issue #267. In fact, he’s not even an antagonist in the story at all. But it is his debut, and he continues to […]<\/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-12288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12288","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=12288"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12312,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12288\/revisions\/12312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}