{"id":9377,"date":"2023-09-10T16:36:33","date_gmt":"2023-09-10T15:36:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9377"},"modified":"2023-09-10T16:36:33","modified_gmt":"2023-09-10T15:36:33","slug":"daredevil-villains-2-electro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9377","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #2: Electro"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #2 (June 1964)<\/strong>
\n“The Evil Menace of Electro”<\/strong>
\nWriter, editor: Stan Lee<\/strong>
\nArtist: Joe Orlando<\/strong>
\nInker: Vince Colletta<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Sam Rosen<\/strong>
\nColourist: uncredited<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you’re going to play Daredevil as a swashbuckling solo superhero who swings through the streets of Marvel’s New York, there’s an elephant in the room: Spider-Man already exists. So what makes this new guy stand out? One solution would be to give Daredevil his very own arch enemy. Instead, here’s Electro.<\/p>\n

Now, this is only the second Electro story. He debuted in Amazing Spider-Man<\/em> #9 four months earlier. He hasn’t been slotted as a C-lister yet. But even allowing for all of that, Daredevil’s not even met a supervillain of his own yet, and already he’s dealing with Spider-Man’s hand-me-downs. How was that supposed to help him?<\/p>\n

It’s not like Electro is an especially strong concept. His back story and powers have no particular synergy with Daredevil. Max Dillon is a lineman who gets electric powers when he’s struck by lightning, and decides to become a criminal. That’s it. That’s the character. Electro stands and falls on the strength of his electricity gimmick, and there are certainly worse gimmicks. It’s a strong enough visual to have kept him around to the present day. But he’s still a gimmick villain. Going to him as early as issue #2 is not a good sign.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The story, then. The Fantastic Four show up at the offices of Nelson & Murdock, playing the same “welcome to the Marvel Universe” role that Spider-Man will have in later years. Their lease is up for renewal. They want a lawyer to visit the Baxter Building and check that it matches the lease. Foggy says that leases are Matt’s department, and he’s not in right now. So the FF cheerfully add Matt’s photo to their security system and then head off for a meeting in Washington DC.<\/p>\n

For obvious reasons, a lot of early Daredevil <\/em>stories start with a client hiring Matt. It’s not just an easy way to get him into a story; Stan Lee also understood the entertainment value in having Matt be a normal lawyer for bizarre clients. Sometimes the results make reasonable sense. And sometimes they don’t. Here, for example, the Fantastic Four, who have a hi-tech security system because their technology is so incredibly important, are giving unsupervised access to a blind rookie lawyer they’ve never met and who they seem to have picked at random from the phone book. Why? So that he can check the building against the lease – a task which requires him to visit the building, but not to see anything once he gets there.<\/p>\n

Naturally, Matt misses the FF’s visit because he’s busy as Daredevil, dealing with street level crime. He catches a bunch of car thieves, which requires the narrator to get excited as Daredevil “unhesitatingly approaches a dingy garage”. As it happens, these guys work for Electro. But Daredevil and Electro are both bored with this mundane level of crime, and ready for a bigger challenge. In Electro’s case, he decides to break into the Baxter Building while the FF are out of town, steal some secrets, and “sell them to a hostile nation for a fortune”. It’s a plan, I guess, but it’s an uninspired one.<\/p>\n

Electro duly gets in to the Baxter Building by using his powers to shut down the security systems. Matt shows up, senses trouble, and changes into his Daredevil costume. Pages 9 to 21: they fight.<\/p>\n

I mean, there’s a bit more to it than that. Electro knocks Daredevil out and tries to launch him into space. Daredevil steers the ship safely back to Earth, because his senses let him figure out what the controls do. And then Stan really pushes his luck by telling us that Matt was able to find a safe place to crash land in Central Park by listening out for heartbeats. From inside the plunging rocket. Really. And there’s a cameo at the end by the Rockettes. But really it’s just an extended fight.<\/p>\n

These days, for all practical purposes, Daredevil’s radar sense is just sight without colour. For Stan, it’s much vaguer and hazier than that, and it’s the little details he picks up with his other senses that let him understand what’s going on around him. It’s not just the powers; it’s how clever he is at interpreting the information he has. But the creators haven’t figured out how to get this across visually, so it becomes a relentless internal monologue. “The temperature has risen 27 degrees! It can only mean arc lights indicating a stage show! And the scent of perfume and theatrical make-up – showgirls!” And so on.<\/p>\n

There’s a lot of this in the early issues. Evidently Stan recognised it as the book’s unique selling point. So maybe his priority in issue #2 was to focus on that, and Electro was just chosen as a recognisable off-the-shelf villain who didn’t need any work to set him up. But that’s being very generous. It’s just a random fight scene with a random Spider-Man villain.<\/p>\n

Tonally, this is a massive overcorrection from the car thieves. Future issues dial it back a bit and find a much better balance, but that only makes this issue seem like even more of a misfire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #2 (June 1964) “The Evil Menace of Electro” Writer, editor: Stan Lee Artist: Joe Orlando Inker: Vince Colletta Letterer: Sam Rosen Colourist: uncredited If you’re going to play Daredevil as a swashbuckling solo superhero who swings through the streets of Marvel’s New York, there’s an elephant in the room: Spider-Man already exists. So what […]<\/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-9377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9377","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=9377"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9417,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9377\/revisions\/9417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}