{"id":9569,"date":"2024-01-07T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-07T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9569"},"modified":"2024-01-07T13:55:05","modified_gmt":"2024-01-07T13:55:05","slug":"daredevil-villains-11-the-ox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9569","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #11: The Ox"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #15 (April 1966)<\/strong>
\n“–And Men Shall Call Him… Ox!”<\/strong>
\nWriter, editor: Stan Lee<\/strong>
\nPenciller: John Romita<\/strong>
\nInker: “Frankie Ray” (Frank Giacoia)<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Art Simek<\/strong><\/p>\n

We’ve seen the Ox before. He was one of Mr Fear’s henchmen back in issue #6. But this time it’s different. It’s his spotlight story, and now there are two… um, two Oxen?<\/p>\n

With Ka-Zar’s origin story out of the way, Stan Lee reverts to the established Daredevil<\/em> formula. Matt’s back in New York, he’s back in the office, and he’s back in the romantic triangle with Karen and Foggy. Poor Foggy is still feeling the after-effects of being hospitalised by the Fellowship of Fear back in issue #6. Not that he’s mentioned it in issues #7-14, of course, but apparently it’s still giving him dizzy spells. And so Matt is given the opportunity to reflect on how the Ox was, in fact, the most dangerous member of the Fellowship of Fear.<\/p>\n

The Ox’s gimmick is very simple: he’s big, strong and not very smart. This issue strongly implies that he’s not just mentally below average, but has some sort of disability. He debuted as one of the Enforcers in Amazing Spider-Man<\/em> #10 (1964), and has superhuman strength for no apparent reason. Presumably he’s a mutant. Since we last saw him, he’s been in jail, sharing a cell with mad scientist Karl Stragg. We quickly establish the dynamic: Stragg has a plan to use Ox’s strength to escape by slowly working on the bars, and Ox is half-heartedly playing along. But Ox isn’t entirely sure he even wants to break out, and Stragg is already getting frustrated with him. Crucially, the Ox is sensitive about his low intelligence, but Stragg is promising to raise his intelligence to normal levels if he helps them break out. That’s the Ox’s motivation.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For a moment it seems like we’re getting Of Mice and Men<\/em> with supervillains. But it quickly becomes clear that Stragg is just out for himself. After they escape, the Ox dutifully leads Stragg to Mr Fear’s laboratory – where, you may recall, Mr Fear was mainly working on fear gas and waxwork animation. Even so, Stragg whips up his mind-altering machine in the course of an evening using whatever equipment Fear had left lying around. Even more remarkably, it works. But instead of making the Ox smarter, the machine swaps his mind with Stragg’s. The idea is that Stragg wasn’t technically lying: he’s the Ox now, and in that sense, the Ox is smarter.<\/p>\n

It turns out that just as the Ox wanted to be smarter, Stragg wanted to be stronger. He’s obsessed with the idea that his great mind is trapped in a feeble (i.e., ordinary) body. Now, with the power of the Ox, he will be unstoppable.<\/p>\n

But things immediately start going wrong for Stragg as the new Ox. He heads off on a rampage of random destruction without being terribly sure why he’s doing it. Through the iron law of coincidence, he stumbles upon Karen Page on her way home from work, giving her a chance to scream, and show how intimidating the Ox is. Daredevil intervenes, but Stragg knocks him out and decides to frame him for the rampage by dressing him as the Ox. Then he hauls Karen off with him.<\/p>\n

Stan Lee overused the device of having Daredevil framed by a villain, or having Matt explain things away by claiming that people were impersonating Daredevil. But this issue brings us the device at its most gloriously insane. Let’s break it down. For a start, the Ox doesn’t even have a costume – he has a yellow jumper, a pair of green trousers, a waistcoat, and a pair of shoes. And, apparently, when Stragg took over his body, the Ox had spares of all of that in his inside pocket<\/em>. In Daredevil’s size.<\/p>\n

Then, Stragg doesn’t just strip Daredevil of his clothes and dress him as the Ox – he puts the Ox clothes over the top of the Daredevil costume. What are the police supposed to make of a man lying unconscious in the middle of a scene of destruction, with two different costumes on? Apparently they’re supposed to think that Daredevil has gone on a destructive rampage for no reason at all, disguised himself as the Ox in order to avoid the blame (while still wearing his full Daredevil costume at the same time), and then decided to have a nap on the sidewalk.<\/p>\n

The Marvel NYPD are on board with this theory. “He must’a figured he could go on a crime spree thruout the city, and in the dark of night everyone would think he was the escaped Ox!” Even Stan feels compelled to have another cop question whether this makes any sense. But the lead cop is unmoved. So Daredevil is carted off to jail, but they don’t remove his mask because “a whole team of DAs are still arguin’ about whether they got the right to do it or not!”<\/p>\n

For some reason, Stragg takes Karen back to Mr Fear’s lab. The original Ox is still sitting around looking confused, and makes a break for it with Karen. Eventually Daredevil catches up with the new Ox on a rooftop. The big guy continues to lose his mind, and eventually charges off the roof to his death because he’d forgotten that that’s how edges work. The story doesn’t really explain any of this, but the idea seems to be that the Ox’s low intelligence was tied to his powers, so Stragg gets more and more like the original Ox the longer he stays in his body. Meanwhile, the original Ox gets his wish and finds he’s smarter than he’s ever been – so he goes back to prison as the first step to starting a fresh life with a clean slate. It’s quite a sweet ending.<\/p>\n

It’s obvious why Stragg doesn’t come back – the whole story is a one-off. It’s more surprising to learn that the Ox does<\/em> come back, in issue #86, with the bizarre explanation that Stragg’s machine eventually leads the Ox’s new body to mutate into his original form. He still shows up from time to time in connection with the Enforcers, but he never took off as a solo character. Power creep is a factor here: in the mid-60s, you could get away with calling the Beast a superhero. The Ox is a big guy who can lift a car, but Stragg insists that he has “the power of a titan” and “the entire city will tremble before me”. Even at the time, this was a bit of a stretch. There’s something unavoidably comical about Stragg’s delight in being the new Ox.<\/p>\n

The Ox’s problem is that his role has been filled by a higher profile character. If you want a big strong guy who isn’t very bright and who fights Spider-Man a lot, well, that’s the Rhino – and he’ll debut in Amazing Spider-Man<\/em> in three months’ time. In a world where the Rhino exists, there’s really no place for the Ox.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #15 (April 1966) “–And Men Shall Call Him… Ox!” Writer, editor: Stan Lee Penciller: John Romita Inker: “Frankie Ray” (Frank Giacoia) Letterer: Art Simek We’ve seen the Ox before. He was one of Mr Fear’s henchmen back in issue #6. But this time it’s different. It’s his spotlight story, and now there are two… […]<\/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-9569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9569","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=9569"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9741,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9569\/revisions\/9741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}