{"id":9595,"date":"2024-01-21T16:23:58","date_gmt":"2024-01-21T16:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9595"},"modified":"2024-01-24T21:16:52","modified_gmt":"2024-01-24T21:16:52","slug":"daredevil-villains-12-the-masked-marauder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9595","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #12: The Masked Marauder"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #16-17 (May & June 1966)<\/strong>
\n“Enter… Spider-Man” \/ “None Are So Blind”<\/strong>
\nWriter, editor: Stan Lee<\/strong>
\nPenciller: John Romita<\/strong>
\nInker: Frank Giacoia<\/strong>
\nLetterers: Artie Simek (#16) & Sam Rosen (#17)<\/strong>
\nColourist: not credited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sixteen issues into the series, Daredevil <\/i>has had a steady stream of bad guys. But only the Ox has appeared more than once. That changes here, as this two-parter introduces Daredevil’s first recurring enemy. He’s the main villain through to issue #27 – and after that, he never appears in the series again. Meet the Masked Marauder, a villain exactly as generic as he sounds.<\/p>\n

When we first meet the Masked Marauder, he’s already an established supervillain. He wears a purple jumpsuit and a green cape, the standard colours of Silver Age villainy in the Marvel Universe. He has a gang of thugs who do all the hard work for him. They wear purple too. He is, as advertised, Masked. If we’re being honest about it, though, he doesn’t do much Marauding. He’s a high-tech master planner, who creates elaborate devices and conceals them in trucks. But the Masked Planner didn’t have the same ring to it.<\/p>\n

In this story, the Masked Marauder’s unspectacular nature isn’t such a problem. The real focus is Spider-Man. He and Daredevil don’t get on, they fight, they team up – you know the drill. It’s Spider-Man that the kids want to see, and it’s Spider-Man that they get.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As the story begins, Spider-Man has just foiled the Masked Marauder’s attempt to rob the World Motors Building. Clearly this can’t be allowed to continue, so the Marauder comes up with a plan. He’ll keep both Spider-Man and Daredevil occupied while he commits crimes, by tricking them into fighting one another. And how is he going to do this? By dressing his thugs in Daredevil costumes, and sending them out to pick a fight with Spider-Man. When one of the underlings points out that he doesn’t fancy fighting Spider-Man single handedly, the Marauder reprimands the poor guy with his secret weapon: the Opti-Blast. The Opti-Blast is a ray that shoots from the titular Mask. It causes temporary blindness. You can probably see where this is going.<\/p>\n

To give the Marauder his due, his fake Daredevil plan actually works. That leaves him free to return to the World Motors Center and steal the plans for – brace yourself, now – “the most powerful auto engine ever devised”. \u00a0He does at least have the decency to steal it using an absurdly elaborate hydraulic elevator, but come on. It’s a car engine. Stan tries his best to build it up, to be sure. It’s “the greatest new engine discovery of the decade”. It’s a threat to national security because you could use it “for weapons of war”. But it’s still a car engine.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure why Stan went for something so mundane, since it’s not really important to the plot. It’s never made clear what the Marauder intends to do with the engine plans. He specifically says he’s not going to sell them, and talks about a master plan, but we never find out what it was. Maybe something fell by the wayside.<\/p>\n

Still, the theft of the “vital XB-390 engine” is front page news, and now Spider-Man and Daredevil each suspect that the other is working for the Marauder. Daredevil finds out that the Marauder didn’t steal the formula for the fuel, and leaks this information to J Jonah Jameson, in the hope that the Marauder will go back to the World Motors Center a third<\/em> time. Remarkably, not only does Jonah run this story but he buys airtime to announce it on TV. And the Marauder does indeed decide to rob the building again: “They’ll never expect us to dare attack the same building so soon again! And that is why we will succeed!”<\/p>\n

This time, the Marauder and his men return to the World Motors Center in a giant blimp, which the guards decide must be legit because it says WORLD MOTORS on the side. Spider-Man fights the bad guys first, and nearly has the fight won when the Marauder blinds him. Naturally, Daredevil is completely unfazed by the beam and easily beats up the Marauder before shooting the blimp. Somehow or other, the Marauder manages to slip away in the confusion, beat up a guard, steal his uniform, and escape. The art makes a big deal of not showing us his face.<\/p>\n

The story ends by giving the Marauder a reason to come back, as he stumbles upon Foggy Nelson and Karen Page. Spider-Man has accused Foggy of being Daredevil, and Foggy is running with it to impress Karen. We’ll come back to this subplot next time, when it’s the centre of the story. What matters for the moment is that the Marauder overhears their conversation and concludes that Foggy is the man he wants to kill. And that’s the end of the Masked Marauder’s debut.<\/p>\n

In that story, the Marauder does exactly what he needs to do – he drives the plot forward, and he doesn’t overshadow Spider-Man. Thoughtfully, he has a signature weapon which is uniquely useless against Daredevil, so that Daredevil can bring something to the table even though Spider-Man is vastly more powerful. And that’s all he needed to do. Linking him to the Foggy\/Karen comedy subplot is a little strange, but heck, he was passing.<\/p>\n

Given how often he turns up over the next year, though, Stan Lee does seem to have been quite excited by the Masked Marauder for a while. That’s despite the fact that he has no back story, no real gimmick, and no apparent motivations. There’s supposed to be a mystery about his true identity, but it doesn’t work, because Daredevil <\/em>only has two supporting characters at this point – Foggy Nelson and Karen Page – and both of them are ruled out of contention from the word go. Eventually, the Masked Marauder turns out to be Frank Farnum, the manager of Nelson & Murdock’s office building. He’s not gone undercover to spy on Daredevil or anything like that. It’s just a coincidence.<\/p>\n

What does the Masked Marauder bring to the table? A baseline level of competent villainy. He builds hi-tech gadgets, and they work. His plans are over elaborate, but they mostly work. He steals stuff, and it’s not very exciting stuff, but you can see why he’d want it. He’s competent.<\/p>\n

And he does have some personality. He’s hugely self-important. He’s desperate for respect. He’s a control freak. He repeatedly proclaims his genius and the tremendous importance of everyone following his plans to the letter. Apparently there’s a later story which interprets him as having obsessive compulsive personality disorder, and that would fit with how Stan writes him. The best Masked Marauder stories are the ones where he tries to enlist Gladiator as a henchman only to be stuck with the big lug as an self-proclaimed, wholly unwanted equal partner. Their odd-couple dynamic has something going for it, and it’s as close as the Marauder ever gets to working.<\/p>\n

But there’s no real concept to him, and it’s hard to understand why Stan used him so much over the coming year before coming to his senses and moving on, other than a shortage of other ideas. The Masked Marauder really is the generic supervillain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #16-17 (May & June 1966) “Enter… Spider-Man” \/ “None Are So Blind” Writer, editor: Stan Lee Penciller: John Romita Inker: Frank Giacoia Letterers: Artie Simek (#16) & Sam Rosen (#17) Colourist: not credited Sixteen issues into the series, Daredevil has had a steady stream of bad guys. But only the Ox has appeared more […]<\/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-9595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595","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=9595"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9773,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595\/revisions\/9773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}