{"id":9395,"date":"2023-11-05T11:28:14","date_gmt":"2023-11-05T11:28:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9395"},"modified":"2023-11-05T22:11:32","modified_gmt":"2023-11-05T22:11:32","slug":"daredevil-villains-6-mister-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9395","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #6: Mister Fear"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #6 (February 1965)<\/strong>
\n“Trapped By … the Fellowship of Fear”<\/strong>
\nWriter, editor: Stan Lee<\/strong>
\nArtist: Wally Wood<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Sam Rosen<\/strong>
\nColourist: uncredited<\/strong><\/p>\n

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the thinking behind this one. Daredevil is the Man Without Fear. It says so on the cover. So clearly his natural enemy is someone who inspires fear. Hence, Mister Fear. Job done. Pub?<\/p>\n

Even without Daredevil’s gimmick to play off, fear is a fine motif for a villain. After all, over at DC, it’s  the Scarecrow’s whole thing. But that’s hindsight. At this point, the Scarecrow is a villain who appeared in two stories during World War II and was never seen again. He won’t be revived for another couple of years. The fear motif is open for use. So once again<\/a>, Daredevil <\/em>gets in first with a version of an idea that another character will get right in a few years time.<\/p>\n

But Mr Fear doesn’t stick around. The identity doesn’t get revived for years, and even then, it’s someone else under the mask. So what went wrong?<\/p>\n

We might start by asking whether Daredevil’s “Man Without Fear” tagline is anything more than a tagline. Is the idea really central to the character? Is Daredevil noticeably more fearless than any other superhero? Well, not really. His central gimmick is his blindness and the way he works around that with his other senses. There are moments in the early issues which really play down how much he’s getting from his radar sense and suggest that he’s taking incredible risks on the information available to him, to be sure. There’s one in this issue, where he jumps from a rooftop to attack some bad guys and, if you take the dialogue literally, he’s just hoping<\/em> that there’s going to be a lamppost to grab hold of.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Even those moments don’t position Daredevil as a Man Without Fear, though, so much as a Man Without Common Sense Who Gets Lucky A Lot. So maybe Mr Fear’s problem is that he doesn’t mesh with Daredevil as neatly as you’d expect. Or maybe the problem is that this particular story is muddled – much of Mr Fear’s plan has nothing to do with fear at all, and fear becomes just a random weapon that he happens to have available to him.<\/p>\n

Or maybe there’s a more fundamental problem: Mr Fear is positioned as a loser from the word go.<\/p>\n

Stan Lee can usually be relied upon to hype up any new villain, no matter how questionable. He told us before that the Matador was the greatest threat to law and order that New York had ever seen. In a couple of issues time, he’ll be selling Stilt-Man in the same way. But here’s how he opens issue #6:<\/p>\n

“Remember the Purple Man in D.D. #4? Well, we have a hunch that this month’s villain will remind you of him in some ways! But, though their methods may be somewhat similar, you’ll find that our ‘Mr Fear’ is far, far different than you first suspect!”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That’s the opening pitch: Mr Fear is a bit like the Purple Man, but don’t worry, this isn’t just a retread of two issues ago, honest. It doesn’t exactly ooze confidence. (Just to confirm that he wasn’t on top form this month, Stan also tells us that Daredevil is “like a brooding wingless eagle”, an image far more disturbing than he can have intended.)<\/p>\n

Mr Fear is Zoltan Drago, proprietor of a failed waxworks. His museum has models of all the world’s greatest heroes and villains, but nobody is interested. So he comes up with an evil scheme. Not a scheme about fear, mind you. No, his plan is to find a way of bringing his waxworks to life and then use them to take over the world. Even the narrator describes this as “slightly mad”. After all, even if it wasn’t completely impossible, how many waxworks is he going to churn out? How does this put him in any better position than just hiring a hundred mercenaries?<\/p>\n

But it’s while experimenting with waxwork-animating chemicals that Drago accidentally stumbles upon his “fear gas”, which can fill anyone with terror. So he drops the whole waxworks idea, and decides to become a fear-based supervillain instead. Step one is to get some henchmen – except that he’s scared of hiring anyone too good, because they might turn on him. And so he settles for the Eel and the Ox, who were C-list even in the Silver Age. We’re not off to a good start in the imposing villainy stakes.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, Dr Strange, Sorcerer Supreme<\/em> #33 retcons Drago’s origin, revealing that he’s being secretly influenced and driven mad by the Dweller in Darkness. I suppose that makes slightly more sense than him just randomly trying to animate waxworks.<\/p>\n

For that matter – if there’s a strong thematic connection between waxworks and fear, it’s been lost somewhat in the mists of time. I mean, I know there’s the film House of Wax<\/em>, and waxworks had chambers of horrors, and I suppose there’s an uncanny valley aspect to them at a push, but… mostly I associate waxworks with shonky tourist attractions where you can take a photograph with a model of Nicky Campbell, if you really must.<\/p>\n

Having assembled his Fellowship of Fear, Mr Fear then hatches a pointlessly elaborate scheme which has nothing to do with fear at all. He hires an entire film crew so that the Eel and the Ox can commit a break-in in broad daylight while pretending that it’s a film shoot. Daredevil steps in, Mr Fear drives him into a panic with fear gas, and our hero is publicly humiliated. Of course, the innocent film crew have filmed the whole thing, meaning that there’s a documentary record of the crime being committed – and they duly hand it over to the police.<\/p>\n

Mr Fear decides to press his luck by luring Daredevil to the wax museum with a new Daredevil model. Remember how the starting point of the character was that he was bitter because nobody came to see his hero and villain waxworks? Well, for some reason, the Daredevil waxwork is a huge draw. If only he’d just made a Daredevil waxwork in the first place, all this could have been avoided.<\/p>\n

All this leads to Daredevil returning to explore the museum at night, and some shenanigans with people pretending to be waxworks. Foggy Nelson manages to tear Fear’s mask off, but gets injured and winds up in hospital. The villains try to kill him by pretending to be doctors – thoughtfully leaving all of their special equipment at home, despite it being their main advantage over Daredevil. That goes about as well as you’d think. Mr Fear then retreats back to his waxworks, despite the base having already  been exposed. His reasoning is that nobody would expect him to do anything so stupid. By this point, Ox and Eel are openly complaining that he’s useless.<\/p>\n

And then Daredevil defeats him by standing in front of a fan, so that the fear gas blows harmlessly away.<\/p>\n

Mr Fear isn’t a fundamentally bad idea , but he was the one that Stan decided to undercut. He’s not exactly played for laughs, but he comes across as a no-hoper who fluked his way into a few days of success before reality caught up with him. As a break from the Silver Age formula, it’s quite entertaining, but perhaps the concept would have had some legs if it had been played straight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #6 (February 1965) “Trapped By … the Fellowship of Fear” Writer, editor: Stan Lee Artist: Wally Wood Letterer: Sam Rosen Colourist: uncredited It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the thinking behind this one. Daredevil is the Man Without Fear. It says so on the cover. So clearly his natural enemy is someone […]<\/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-9395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9395","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=9395"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9572,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9395\/revisions\/9572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}