{"id":12313,"date":"2026-09-27T11:56:55","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T10:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12313"},"modified":"2026-09-27T16:47:54","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T15:47:54","slug":"daredevil-villains-89-the-crippler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12313","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #89: The Crippler"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL ANNUAL #7 (1991)<\/strong>
\n“The Von Strucker Gambit, part 1: Crippling Death”<\/strong>
\nWriter, colourist: Gregory Wright<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Ron Garney<\/strong>
\nInker: Doug Hazlewood<\/strong>
\nEditor: Ralph Macchio<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, two Annuals in a row. This is just how the timeline works out – in publishing terms, this issue came out in the second month of DG Chichester’s run, so we’ll be getting to him next time.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, we’re looking at another Annual by Gregory Wright. Once again, this is part of a crossover. In this case, it’s “The Von Strucker Gambit”, which ran through the 1991 annuals for Daredevil<\/em>, Punisher<\/em> and Captain America<\/em>. Those three titles feel like they ought to mesh reasonably well, but it’s another crossover where the individual annuals are designed to stand alone, so that the heroes never team up, and the chapters merely gesture in the direction of an overarching plot.<\/p>\n

That overarching plot is rudimentary to the point of being token. Hydra has mutated three people. At the start of the story, the trio escape and go their separate ways. Baron Strucker, who’s running Hydra at this point, sends three henchmen to get them back. Nick Fury enlists our heroes to get to them first. So it’s really three separate stories in which Hero X and Henchman Y fight over Mutate Z, while Mutate Z tries to pursue their personal agenda. The twist, such as it is, is that Strucker actually wanted the escapees to get away and fight some superheroes, so that he could gather some data. But other than Strucker himself, nobody in the Daredevil chapter knows about that, so it has no effect at all on the issue as a standalone story. “The Von Strucker Gambit” is really nothing more than a grudging gesture in the direction of being a crossover.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There are two characters that I could have chosen from this issue. One is the escapee, Sathan. She’s a “feline life-energy vampire”. She seems to be from Hell’s Kitchen, and she’s very unhappy about a series of arson attacks that are blatantly the work of a landlord who’s trying to clear the way for redevelopment. Although she’s billed as a “vampire”, she can also raise the dead and get them to fight on her behalf as zombies. So her plan is basically to send a bunch of charred zombies to avenge themselves against the landlord. It’s more vigilante territory than villainy.<\/p>\n

Apparently there were some heavy handed attempts by Hell’s Kitchen landlords to clear out their tenants in the 1980s, though not quite to the point of burning the buildings down, and so this is a perfectly reasonable starting point for a Daredevil story. In fact, if they’d just gone with that as a free standing story and eliminated all the Hydra material, it would have been a better issue. Instead, it gets overshadowed by the Hydra storyline and by the introduction of a new character who has nothing much to do with corrupt landlords.<\/p>\n

That other character, and the one we’re running with, is the Hydra agent who’s sent after Sathan. He starts off going by “Striklan”, but halfway through the story, he starts calling himself the Crippler. Unlike Sathan, he does go on to appear in further stories, and he’s working for Hydra, so we’ll go with him as this issue’s villain.<\/p>\n

In theory, the Crippler is meant to be tracking down Sathan. His investigation gets off to a good start by cornering the hired arsonist, but the Crippler’s idea of interrogation is to torture the guy in an alleyway, declare that the fires “got me hot”, and extinguish a cigarette on his own arm. At this point he seems to be motivated more by the enjoyment of tormenting other characters than by actually pursuing his mission, and goes off on a frolic of his own to attract Daredevil’s attention – by barbecuing the arsonist on a rooftop. He then sends Daredevil after Sathan, the plan (such as it is) apparently being to use Daredevil as a distraction so that he can capture Sathan himself.<\/p>\n

The high concept here is that the Crippler is a sadomasochist, but he’s a Code-approved sadomascohist, which means that he enjoys both inflicting pain on other people and being punched in the face. Strucker isn’t remotely pleased with the Crippler’s self-appointed side quests, and demands that he get back to the main plot. But it turns out that the Crippler only signed up for Hydra so that he got to hurt people, and isn’t particularly impressed by Strucker’s attempts to turn it into a neo-Nazi organisation. He’s a non-ideological sadist. The ending sees Sathan captured by the authorities; Strucker then tries to kill both Sathan and the Crippler with remote detonators, but the Crippler cuts out his implant before it can blow up, and escapes to go his own way.<\/p>\n

In a back-up strip, also written by Wright, we find that that the Crippler has set himself up as a vigilante. An origin flashback explains that he was kicked out of the army and the police for excessive violence before signing up for Hydra because he wanted to “belong with” someone. This, apparently, is his post-Hydra motivation: to “find a place where I belong.” For some reason he also seems to have developed a sense of morality, telling a defeated rapist that “it is fun, but it ain’t right. You can’t go thrusting your needs on those that don’t deserve it.” This doesn’t seem to have stopped him signing up for Hydra, and it’s not really clear what’s happened to change his views.<\/p>\n

A series of vox pops show that most New Yorkers find the guy unnerving. Bizarrely, Daredevil’s comment is that “I do not approve of him, but he deserves the chance to be heard.” Heard about what?<\/p>\n

Gregory Wright really liked this character. The Crippler returns in a back-up strip in the next year’s annual, where he torments the Wildboys. Then he joins the cast of Wright’s Silver Sable and the Wild Pack<\/em>, where he was one of the title characters. That series is mostly missing from Unlimited, so I can’t really judge how he developed there. He’s made scattered appearances since, as an increasingly generic mercenary in Silver Sable’s orbit, whenever someone thinks it’s worth giving the Wild Pack members names. He seems to have been finally killed off in the recent Venom War: Lethal Protectors<\/em> miniseries.<\/p>\n

Before the character was redirected to Silver Sable, <\/em>Wright’s original concept seems to have been to set him up within\u00a0Daredevil<\/em>‘s milieu as a BDSM-themed Punisher – a sex offender who channels his urges towards policing other sex offenders. As presented on page, it’s a dubiously simplistic understanding of sadomasochism, based entirely on the literal infliction of pain irrespective of sexual context. The confines of a Code-approved book already make this a very difficult gimmick, and it’s played very one-dimensionally, without really hinting at any hidden depths to the guy. It’s just about possible to imagine this concept working if you played it much darker, or if you went for Garth Ennis-style comedy. But when he’s just the latest urban vigilante on the block, he’s bizarre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL ANNUAL #7 (1991) “The Von Strucker Gambit, part 1: Crippling Death” Writer, colourist: Gregory Wright Penciller: Ron Garney Inker: Doug Hazlewood Editor: Ralph Macchio Yes, two Annuals in a row. This is just how the timeline works out – in publishing terms, this issue came out in the second month of DG Chichester’s run, […]<\/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-12313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12313","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=12313"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12388,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12313\/revisions\/12388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}