{"id":9563,"date":"2023-12-10T13:36:43","date_gmt":"2023-12-10T13:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9563"},"modified":"2023-12-10T13:36:43","modified_gmt":"2023-12-10T13:36:43","slug":"daredevil-villains-9-the-organization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9563","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #9: The Organization"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #10 (October 1965)<\/strong>
\n“While the City Sleeps, part 1: The Organization”<\/strong>
\nWriter, finishing penciller, inker: Wally Wood<\/strong>
\nLayout penciller: Bob Powell<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Artie Simek<\/strong>
\nEditor: Stan Lee<\/strong><\/p>\n

DAREDEVIL #11 (December 1965)<\/strong>
\n“A Time to Unmask!”<\/strong>
\nWriter, editor: Stan Lee<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Bobby Powell<\/strong>
\nInker: Wally Wood<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Sam Rosen<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even the most casual glance at those credits might suggest a troubled production, and that’s exactly what this is. According to Brian Cronin’s “Comic Book Legends Revealed”<\/a>, it goes something like this: Wally Wood didn’t care for the Marvel method and felt that he was writing the book without being paid for it. So he asked to write a story and Stan Lee agreed. But when Wood’s story came in, Lee hated it.<\/p>\n

Accounts vary as to how heavily Lee edited issue #10. Wood claims that relatively little was changed. Lee, in a spectacularly ungracious bitching session on the letters page of issue #12, said that “about the only thing left that Wally himself had written was his name”. The surviving original art suggests the truth is somewhere in the middle and that the published story is basically what Wood wrote. Either way, Lee refused to let Wood finish the story, wrote the concluding half himself, and fired Wood after reducing him to working as inker on part 2.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So what did Stan Lee find so objectionable about this story? It’s obviously different from the issues around it. The plotting is much denser, the tone is less fantastic. There are supervillains, but they’re not Stan Lee’s normal type of supervillains. It does feel a little old fashioned for the mid sixties. This is not Stan Lee’s vision for Daredevil<\/em>. In fact, it’s closer in tone to issue #1 than to the stories that followed – which means it’s also closer to the style of Daredevil<\/em> that eventually succeeded. But that’s not what Stan Lee wanted to do in 1965.<\/p>\n

The story involves Foggy Nelson agreeing to run for District Attorney as the candidate of the Reform Party. You can imagine Stan’s heart sinking already. The Reform Party’s actual policies are left vague beyond a suggestion that they’re running on an anti-corruption ticket, but since the core members are all “prominent, wealthy men”, and nobody suggests that it’s unreasonable for Foggy to associate with them, presumably they’re meant to be centre-right.<\/p>\n

In reality, the Reform Party is a vehicle for the Organizer, a mysterious hooded man. Part of the gimmick is that we’re meant to work out which of the various interchangeable politicians is the Organizer – the rest are honest stooges, just like Foggy. This mystery is in fact solveable – the Organizer always wears the same distinctive ring, whether he’s in costume or not. The art never draws attention to it, but it’s there.<\/p>\n

Whether you actually care which politician is the Organizer may be another question. Is it Abner Jonas, mayoral candidate? Milton Monroe, candidate for assemblyman? Or could it be – brace yourself now – Bernard Harris, candidate for borough president?<\/p>\n

To British eyes there is something quite adorable about the low ambitions of a supervillain whose main goal is to seize control of local government. At last, responsibility for waste collection, pothole repair and school catchment areas shall be mine! But even today, stories treat the Mayor of New York as an important position, so it must play differently to Americans.<\/p>\n

The Organizer’s main henchmen are Ape-Man, Bird-Man, Cat-Man and Frog-Man. The basic plan is for them to commit a bunch of crimes so that the city government looks weak, and then target the Reform Party itself so that everyone will think that criminals are desperate to stop the Reform Party from winning the election. The other party members, including Foggy, seem to have been chosen on the grounds that they’re easily manipulated. To that end, the Organizer also brings out Foggy’s ex-girlfriend Debbie Harris, who will eventually return as a regular supporting character, but debuts here as a manipulative femme fatale. The animal-themed guys will eventually wind up as “the Ani-Men”, at this stage they’re all just the Organization.<\/p>\n

The Organizer directs his men remotely, appearing to them on screens, and monitoring them using their headsets and the TV cameras mounted on their chests. This being 1965, what was no doubt intended to be cutting edge now looks absurdly cumbersome. Wood seems to have been aiming for some sort of “remote control” gimmick, but it never comes to much – there’s nothing inherently new or hi-tech about a behind-the-scenes mastermind, which is basically all the Organizer is. But for years to come, the Ani-Men will still cart around their headsets as a hangover from this story.<\/p>\n

The Organization’s animal theme seems to be completely arbitrary – presumably, the Organizer just wanted his villains to look like a \u00a0coherent group and plucked a theme out of the air. But the Ani-Men are a bit odd, and they don’t feel like normal Silver Age Daredevil villains. Part 1 opens with a lengthy recruitment montage, in which they’re apparently picked for their experience, but come across as baffled middle aged guys who’ve been hauled off the streets. At least two of them are being blackmailed to make them stick around. None of them are quite sure what the Organizer is trying to achieve or why he wants them to dress up as animals. None of them seem to be particularly effective fighters – Frog-Man is a former Navy frogman and knows what he’s doing underwater, but never seems like a threat otherwise.<\/p>\n

By part two, the campaign is not going so well. The Organizer decides to shift tack: he’s going to kill the present mayor so that the Reform Party’s candidate will win the election unopposed. I’m not quite sure how that works when you’re a third party candidate, but that’s the plot. In due course Daredevil impersonates Frog-Man and uses his camera to film the Organizer – which \u00a0at least tries to tie the “remote control” theme into the resolution by having it backfire. As for Foggy, he gets to redeem himself by helping to expose Jonas as the Organizer, Jonas is defeated, and Debbie Harris vanishes as suddenly as she appeared.<\/p>\n

It’s not a wholly successful story. The mystery is undercut by the potential Organizers all being basically identical. And the story gestures in the direction of being about political corruption without ever really going there – we’re emphatically assured that the other Reform Party members were just innocent dupes.<\/p>\n

But Daredevil seems to fit in a story about political shenanigans, and the future Ani-Men are unexpectedly endearing as a bunch of guys who land somewhere between being real supervillains and pretend ones. Their ridiculously basic gimmicks make so much more sense in that context. If you were so inclined, you could even see them as parody supervillains. They’re literally a bunch of schlubs who were paid to dress up in silly costumes and play the role. The fact that they actually come back as minor villains in later stories, without the Organizer, is rather odd. Their origin story boils down to “this weird guy gave me a costume, and I still have it”.<\/p>\n

As for the Organizer, he’s a one-off villain in concept – once you’ve exposed the scheme, that’s him done. So it’s understandable that nobody thought to bring him back, quite aside from Stan Lee’s obvious aversion to the story. The Organizer’s remote control theme has either aged badly, or didn’t click in the first place. On his own, he’s a generic schemer villain; he needs the Ani-Men to make him fun, and perhaps that’s why they’re the ones who came back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #10 (October 1965) “While the City Sleeps, part 1: The Organization” Writer, finishing penciller, inker: Wally Wood Layout penciller: Bob Powell Letterer: Artie Simek Editor: Stan Lee DAREDEVIL #11 (December 1965) “A Time to Unmask!” Writer, editor: Stan Lee Penciller: Bobby Powell Inker: Wally Wood Letterer: Sam Rosen Even the most casual glance at […]<\/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-9563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9563","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=9563"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9666,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9563\/revisions\/9666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}