{"id":9634,"date":"2024-01-28T17:09:15","date_gmt":"2024-01-28T17:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9634"},"modified":"2024-01-28T17:09:15","modified_gmt":"2024-01-28T17:09:15","slug":"daredevil-villains-13-the-gladiator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9634","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #13: The Gladiator"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #18 (July 1966)<\/strong>
\n“There Shall Come a Gladiator!”<\/strong>
\nWriter, editor: Stan Lee<\/strong>
\nPenciller: John Romita<\/strong>
\nInker: Frank Giacoia<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Sam Rosen<\/strong>
\nColourist: not credited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Early\u00a0Daredevil<\/em> doesn’t have a large supporting cast. It’s just Foggy Nelson and Karen Page. And the heart of the book is the romantic triangle between Foggy, Karen and Matt.<\/p>\n

Today, Karen has been out of the picture for many, many years. She was killed off in the late 1990s. Foggy’s established role for decades now has been the solid, dependable, long-suffering best friend who’s stood by Matt all through the years. And to be fair, that’s basically how he was set up in issue #1.<\/p>\n

But in the early Silver Age, Foggy Nelson’s main function is to get in the way of Matt and Karen. Foggy loves Karen. Karen loves Matt, and she’s quite keen on Daredevil too. Matt loves Karen, but thinks she just feels sorry for him because he’s blind. Matt thinks Foggy is better husband material for her, and she’s willing to entertain him as a fallback option.<\/p>\n

This role isn’t a promising starting point for Foggy. To make matters worse, he spends a lot of time in the early issues bitching about Daredevil whenever Karen mentions him, or even privately hoping that Matt doesn’t<\/em> get his sight back, because it’d ruin his chances with Karen. Foggy does at least feel guilty about such things crossing his mind. From time to time he gets to show some decency and integrity. But fundamentally he’s a blocking character, not a supportive rock.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At some point, this storyline – if you can call it a storyline, because it’s really more of a static state of affairs – had to come to the foreground. And so in issue #17, Spider-Man bursts into the offices of Nelson & Murdock, intending to confront Daredevil. In a remarkable piece of plot contrivance, his spider-sense tells him that Daredevil is in the room, and tells him that Matt is genuinely blind (!), but doesn’t tell him that Matt is Daredevil. And since Daredevil couldn’t possibly be a blind man or a girl, Spider-Man briefly concludes that it must be Foggy, and accuses him in full view of Karen. Sensing his chance, Foggy keeps hinting to her that he’s Daredevil, and because it’s the Silver Age, she takes him seriously.<\/p>\n

That brings us to this issue, where Foggy decides to get his very own Daredevil costume. And this is where we meet the Gladiator. Later on, he’s given the real name Melvin Potter, but for the moment he’s just a weirdo running a costume shop.<\/p>\n

The Masked Marauder didn’t come to much as a long term Daredevil villain – he dominates the book for a year or so and then vanishes. The Gladiator fares rather better, eventually. He appears in four issues over the next six months, before vanishing from the title for a good long while. By the time he finally becomes a regular, after issue #100, his original premise has long since fallen by the wayside. In fact, it’s pretty much fallen by the wayside by the next issue, because it’s entirely bizarre.<\/p>\n

Melvin debuts as a looming, ominous figure, who runs a costume shop that specialises in surprisingly convincing hero and villain costumes. When Foggy shows up as an actual paying customer, Melvin’s first reaction is to grumble about being disturbed. Foggy describes him as “a creepy-looking character” with “the blazing eyes of a real fanatic”, so naturally he decides to buy a Daredevil costume from him anyway. Melvin \u00a0explains that he doesn’t do Daredevil costumes in Foggy’s size, and perhaps sir would prefer a costume more befitting his waistline. But Foggy explains that he needs it to impress a girl, and so Melvin agrees to alter a costume into Foggy’s size.<\/p>\n

But Melvin is angry about superheroes. According to him, superheroes are “nothing but overrated, conceited, swaggering braggarts” whose appeal lies entirely in their “colourful costumes”. Without those costumes, he says, they’d be nothing! Anyone could be a hero or villain if they had a good costume with the right powers. And that’s why he’s been building his Gladiator suit. That’s the original high concept. Melvin wants to prove that anyone can be super if they have the right clothes.<\/p>\n

You can sort of see how Melvin’s worldview makes sense when it comes to Daredevil or Captain America. But Spider-Man? The Fantastic Four? The Hulk? Leave aside the shared universe thing – it doesn’t make sense in terms of the parameters of the genre, even in 1966. Yet Melvin specifically gives Thor as an example of what he’s complaining about.<\/p>\n

For his debut as the Gladiator, Melvin offers to pose as a villain so that Foggy can pretend to be Daredevil and beat him. In fact, the Gladiator plans to kill Foggy. The plan is that, somehow or other, this is going to lead him into a fight with the real Daredevil, which is going to prove something, somehow. Stan doesn’t seem to have thought it through much more thoroughly than that.<\/p>\n

Melvin proudly shows us his creation. Despite living in a world where Iron Man exists, he regards it as “the greatest fighting garb of all”. After all, he says, “it is the costume, only the costume, that gives these egotistical braggarts the respect of the whole world”. How is the Gladiator costume going to achieve this for Melvin? Why, thanks to its “specially constructed footwear”, made of “tough nylon”, and studded with blades. “My boots alone,” he tells us, “assure me of victory.” He also has what he curiously describes as “wrist shields”, perhaps for Comics Code reasons, because they sure look like circular saw blades. And he has a helmet, with a respirator. “It has taken me years, and every cent I have, to create this costume,” he says.<\/p>\n

Naturally, when the Gladiator tries to kill Foggy, the real Daredevil steps in. Daredevil describes the Gladiator as a clumsy but powerful lunatic, so there’s no suggestion at this stage that he’s even a trained fighter. The big lug even gets confused about whether he’s still fighting Foggy. What’s more, he keeps rambling on about his costume, to the point where Daredevil concludes that the guy is just some sort of oddball obsessive. And so Daredevil beats him up and leaves him to \u00a0the cops.<\/p>\n

There’s a weird meta idea in here, trying to get out. The Gladiator is a guy who hates the superhero genre, and he’s built his own supervillain costume in order to prove that it’s all silly. And he’s going to make his debut in some sort of parody of a superhero fight. It’s the sort of thing that might have worked for Peter Milligan. But Stan doesn’t really know where to go with the Gladiator’s obsession with costumes. In his debut, Foggy is an idiot pretending to be a hero, while Gladiator himself is an amateur in a home-made supervillain costume. But even if he’s not exactly Iron Man, his costume works well enough for him to be a real supervillain too. It’s all a bit confused.<\/p>\n

Stan obviously thought so too, because Gladiator gets heavily retooled the very next issue. The Masked Marauder breaks him out of jail, intending to pressgang him into service as a new henchman. The Gladiator is having none of it. The costume obsession has been ditched. He’s now a guy too powerful and strong-willed for the Marauder to keep under control, and the Marauder grudgingly has to accept him as a partner. The two then form an enjoyable bitchy odd couple pairing, until issue #23, when the Marauder dumps him as part of a failed attempt to take over the Maggia. By that point, the Gladiator has become a blue collar bruiser and a thorn in the self-important Marauder’s side.<\/p>\n

The Gladiator will eventually wind up with a different gimmick, as a supervillain who wishes he hadn’t got into this job in the first place. That comes into play remarkably early. He was already regretting his criminal career when he appeared in Iron Man<\/em> #7 in 1968. In a roundabout way, his debut plays into that set-up – the feebleness of his motivation for becoming a supervillain, and the fact that he forgets about it almost instantly, becomes the point. Instead, he’s a guy who drifted into the supervillain life in a moment of madness.<\/p>\n

The other thing he keeps from this story is his costume. It can’t live up to his hype for it, of course. But he’s still a large angry man coming at you with two circular saws. By the standards of the mid-60s it’s quite brutal, and for a street-level character like Daredevil, it has an intimidation factor. It’s perfectly pitched for his eventual role, as someone who’s just about managed hang in there as a minor supervillain. None of that was the original idea, but Gladiator’s debut leaves him perversely well suited to the role.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #18 (July 1966) “There Shall Come a Gladiator!” Writer, editor: Stan Lee Penciller: John Romita Inker: Frank Giacoia Letterer: Sam Rosen Colourist: not credited Early\u00a0Daredevil doesn’t have a large supporting cast. It’s just Foggy Nelson and Karen Page. And the heart of the book is the romantic triangle between Foggy, Karen and Matt. Today, […]<\/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-9634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9634","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=9634"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9787,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9634\/revisions\/9787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}