{"id":9380,"date":"2023-09-24T15:21:33","date_gmt":"2023-09-24T14:21:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9380"},"modified":"2023-09-24T15:21:33","modified_gmt":"2023-09-24T14:21:33","slug":"daredevil-villains-3-the-owl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9380","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #3: The Owl"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #3 (August 1964)<\/strong>
\n“Daredevil Battles the Owl, Ominous Overlord of Crime!”<\/strong>
\nWriter, editor: Stan Lee<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Joe Orlando<\/strong>
\nInker: Vince Colletta<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Sam Rosen<\/strong>
\nColourist: uncredited<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s Daredevil’s first supervillain of his very own… for a fairly undemanding definition of “super”. And he gets a huge build-up, which suggests Stan Lee had hopes for him as a recurring villain.<\/p>\n

The Owl is a Wall Street financier. The narrator tells us that he’s “merciless” and has “no friends … no loved ones… nothing to connect him with the human race save the fact of his birth!” What this means in practice is that he’s massively rich and powerful, everyone is afraid of him, and everyone already suspects him of corruption. For some reason, he’s actually changed his name to “the Owl”. Orlando draws him as a smug, sinister fat guy in an old fashioned suit (even for the time).<\/p>\n

This could have been a workable set-up for the Owl – albeit a bit anti-capitalist for Stan Lee. He’s a rich criminal operating in plain sight and mocking the fact that nobody can prove anything against him. In fact, we know that’s a workable set-up, because it’s the Kingpin. But the Kingpin won’t debut until 1967. The Owl isn’t fighting for space with him just yet.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for the Owl, the first time around, Stan Lee doesn’t stick with the set-up. He blows it up almost immediately. The Owl is arrested for fraud. As a show of contempt, he picks a lawyer at random from the phone book, which turns out to be Nelson & Murdock, because of course it does. Matt takes the case – partly because he wants to learn more about the Owl, but partly because he actually believes that everyone is entitled to representation – and gets the Owl released overnight. According to Matt, the Owl “is charged with sheer animal power” and “almost limitless energy, all of it directed into evil channels”, which is an odd mix with the bloated fat cat that Orlando draws. But you can kind of see it, in a force of personality way.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Once released, the Owl skips town and heads to his “Aerie”, a gloriously absurd owl-themed building, which seems like an extremely sub-optimal place to hide out from the cops. He hires a couple of henchmen to pursue a new career as an outright criminal, using the fortune that he’s stashed away over the years. And the Owl then reveals his own super power by dropping his new allies through a trap door so that he can save him with his, um, “power to glide.”<\/p>\n

Yes, glide.<\/p>\n

It’s a well drawn sequence, and Lee sells it as hard as he can – “the power to glide with air currents … to drift and swoop, and plunge… like the bird which is my namesake!” But by the standards of the Marvel Universe, gliding is mundane stuff. We were fighting Electro and being shot into space just last issue. The fact that the Owl can glide is not something you can present as a game changing revelation. It doesn’t even really play much part in the story – he uses it in one panel to get into his boat. It feels like something tacked on at the last moment because Stan Lee didn’t quite have faith in the evil financier concept.<\/p>\n

The Owl shows up with his henchmen at Nelson & Murdock’s office, intending to hire Matt as a lawyer, on the logic that he’s young, inexperienced, and probably gullible. Daredevil fights them, but surrenders as soon as they kidnap his secretary and romantic interest Karen Page. If you’re unfamiliar with early Daredevil<\/em>, by the way, the entire regular cast is Matt, his partner Foggy and their secretary Karen, and their subplots run on the engine of a romance comic. Matt loves Karen, but cannot show his feelings because it would be wrong to impose on her and because he doesn’t like the idea of her feeling sorry for him. Karen loves Matt, feels sorry for him, and wonders why he’s so distant all the time. She also loves Daredevil (once she meets him), because who wouldn’t. And Foggy loves Karen, who vaguely thinks he might be an acceptable husband if Matt’s not on offer. And Matt keeps half-heartedly encouraging that relationship because he thinks so too.<\/p>\n

But back to the story. The Owl celebrates his victory with a “mad, spine-chilling chortle”. As a good Silver Age villain, it apparently doesn’t occur to him to unmask Daredevil. Instead, he takes Daredevil and Karen back to the Aerie and sticks them in hanging cages, then invites all the other top New York gangsters round to his house to see them. Daredevil promptly escapes and frees Karen; the Owl escapes in a boat and is seemingly lost when it capsizes. As for the other mobsters, they do indeed drop everything to answer the Owl’s invitation, and show up just in time for the police to arrest them all.<\/p>\n

There’s something to the Owl. He’ll return a few times – there are another four Owl stories before issue #150, after which he drops off the book’s radar. I’m focussing in this series on debut appearances, and I haven’t read his other early stories yet. But you can see why people keep trying with him, and you can also see why he’s never really clicked as a top tier villain.<\/p>\n

The self-important ex-financier using his fortune and financial skills to master the underworld, with a slightly goofy yet creepy animal theme, feels like it would work for a Batman villain. You can imagine the Owl working in a Tim Burton style. If Stan Lee thought the Marvel Universe of 1964 had a space for a darker Penguin, that’s understandable. The Owl motif is a good one. But most of what works about the Owl will be done more effectively by the Kingpin in a few years time, and the gliding thing is just a distraction. He’s a dry run for a better character.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #3 (August 1964) “Daredevil Battles the Owl, Ominous Overlord of Crime!” Writer, editor: Stan Lee Penciller: Joe Orlando Inker: Vince Colletta Letterer: Sam Rosen Colourist: uncredited It’s Daredevil’s first supervillain of his very own… for a fairly undemanding definition of “super”. And he gets a huge build-up, which suggests Stan Lee had hopes for […]<\/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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380","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=9380"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9457,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9380\/revisions\/9457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}