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<\/a>DAREDEVIL #25 (December 1966)<\/strong>\nWriter, editor: Stan Lee<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Gene Colan<\/strong>
\nInker: Frank Giacoia<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Art Simek<\/strong>
\nColourist: Not credited<\/strong><\/p>\n
The most significant thing in this issue is the new storyline advertised on the cover. “Wow-eeeee!”, Stan proclaims. “Just wait’ll you meet ol’ Matt Murdock’s swingin’ twin brother!” Yes, it’s Mike Murdock, a notorious piece of Silver Age silliness.<\/p>\n
Foggy and Karen find a letter which reveals that Matt is Daredevil. When Matt shows up a few minutes later, he improvises wildly, and claims that Daredevil is actually his twin brother Mike. Foggy can’t help remembering that he and Matt lived together for years with no mention of a twin brother. But Matt keeps digging – complete with thought balloons of the “what the hell am I doing” variety – and winds up promising that Karen and Foggy can meet brother Mike.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Since Matt wants to discourage Foggy and Karen from asking to meet brother Mike again, he’s an irritating halfwit in an obnoxiously loud suit who says things like “Ol’ Matt’s the one with the brains, but I’m the family pussycat!” Naturally, this backfires. Foggy can’t stand the guy. But Mike is supposedly Daredevil, so Karen thinks he’s kind of cool.<\/p>\n
During the issues we skipped, Gene Colan has come aboard as regular penciller. He injects a ton of life into the book’s romantic triangle. Nothing has changed in the way that Karen Page is written, but she has vastly more charisma than before, and she suddenly looks modern. If any artist can sell a ridiculous plot about Matt pretending to be his own obnoxious brother, it’s Gene Colan, and sell it he does. Draw the main character with completely different body language and acting like a clown? Colan is absolutely up for that.<\/p>\n
The entire thing is absolutely absurd, which is precisely how it’s designed. In one sense, this storyline’s reputation is a little unfair. Much like the Coffee-a-Go-Go in X-Men<\/em>, it’s ridiculous, but that’s obviously the idea. Then again, the Coffee-a-Go-Go was just a running gag. Mike is a dominant storyline all the way through to issue #41, where Matt finally fakes his death in order to get rid of him. It turns the central Matt\/Karen romance into a farce (literally), and “wacky comedy” is not the approach to Daredevil<\/em> that finally clicked.<\/p>\n You might have noticed that we’re quite some way into this article and we haven’t yet mentioned the issue’s new villain. That’s because he’s the first in a series of questionable creations who show up around this time, before Stan just gives up for a while and starts recycling villains from other books.<\/p>\n We first meet the Leap-Frog as Matt arrives back at the airport from last issue’s story. He’s a man with spring loaded boots, but at this stage he’s still testing them out. He’s not wearing a costume yet. Instead, he’s just bouncing around the airport in a suit and tie, with a handkerchief tied over the lower half of his face. Why? Well, to see what he can get away with, apparently.<\/p>\n As so often in this phase, Colan gives the guy a lot of charm. He looks terribly smug about his creation, while everyone else seems unsure what to make of him. The airport cops can’t figure out whether to treat him as a harmless joker or a genuine threat. Nobody really feels like shooting him. Declaring his test a success, he decides to make his debut as the Leap-Frog. He gets a very, very token origin story: he invents novelty items for toy companies, he got bored of it, and he decided to invent something for himself. “Something to make me invincible”, he says. And then he dresses up as a frog.<\/p>\n The Leap-Frog isn’t intended as a proper threat. He’s a delusional guy who built a working bouncing device and thinks that that qualifies him as a supervillain. In fact, he’s just a high end nuisance. He breaks into a jewellery store and immediately sets off the alarm, something that he apparently didn’t see coming. Come to think of it, if his plan was just to burgle a jeweller and go home, I’m not sure how he thought that dressing up as a frog was supposed to help. Daredevil happens to be passing, but Leap-Frog bounces rings around him and escapes. A few pages later, after some more of the Brother Mike storyline, Daredevil catches up with the Leap-Frog again. This time, Daredevil tangles him up with a cable, and hands him over to the cops. Thanks for coming, Leap-Frog.<\/p>\n He shows up again briefly in the next issue. He escapes from his trial after the dimwitted prosecutor gets him to put on his boots in order to prove that they fit. Except the prosecutor isn’t quite that<\/em> dim, so they aren’t strapped on properly, and the Leap-Frog breaks an ankle on the next page. Then a proper villain shows up to roll his eyes at the whole thing. And it’s Stilt-Man. Two issues in, the Leap-Frog is being condescended to by Stilt-Man.<\/p>\n He returns in Daredevil Annual<\/em> #1, along with every available Daredevil<\/em> villain up to that point. And then he wanders off to be a minor character in other books. He’s effectively a subplot in his own debut, and a pretty simplistic one at that.<\/p>\n What he has going for him is an enjoyable over-confidence – he’s a gimmick villain who thinks he’s an A-lister, and Colan makes that work. But there’s only so far you can go with that. It doesn’t help, too, that we’re only 25 issues into the book and this is our second villain dressed as a frog. Colan’s art makes him feel like more of a character, but the idea is half formed at best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We jump forward quite a few issues here. So, just for the record: Issue #19 is more of the Gladiator and the Masked Marauder. Issues #20-21 are an Owl story, in which he kidnaps the judge who sentenced him to jail and forces Matt to defend him in a mock trial before a jury of […]<\/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-9683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9683","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=9683"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9822,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9683\/revisions\/9822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}