{"id":9685,"date":"2024-02-11T11:52:16","date_gmt":"2024-02-11T11:52:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9685"},"modified":"2024-02-11T11:52:16","modified_gmt":"2024-02-11T11:52:16","slug":"daredevil-villains-15-the-queega","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9685","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #15: The Queega"},"content":{"rendered":"

Again, we’re skipping a couple of issues with returning villains – issues #26-27 feature the return of Stilt-Man and the final defeat of the Masked Marauder.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #28 (May 1967)<\/strong>
\n“Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Planet!”<\/strong>
\nWriter, editor: Stan Lee<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Gene Colan<\/strong>
\nInker: Dick Ayers<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Sam Rosen<\/strong>
\nColourist: not credited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, it’s a flying saucer issue. The aliens are really just little green men – well, they’re quite big green reptiles, I suppose, but you get the point. They aren’t even named in this issue. The name “Queega” comes from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Matt accepts an invitation to give a talk at Carter College on the legal aspects of flying saucers. About a third of the book is taken up with the romantic triangle before we even get to the College, where Matt plans to wing his way through a talk on a subject he knows nothing about. As it turns out, he just gives a fairly sensible talk about how the law would treat aliens if they ever showed up. In fact, you could make a case for this being one of the more legally sound issues of Daredevil<\/em>. (Readers interested in the sum total of UK case law on this topic are directed to paragraph 23(2) of this decision<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The talk is interrupted by the sound of a gunshot. Exciting!<\/p>\n

It turns out that the shot was fired by Professor Tom Brewster, a UFO obsessive who claims to have stumbled upon some aliens in the woods. Rather surprisingly, Brewster is promptly arrested for firing a gun in a public place.<\/p>\n

Naturally, Daredevil suspects that Brewster is telling the truth. So he investigates, and stumbles upon a flying saucer. The aliens seem surprised that “another human has discovered our presence on this primitive planet”, despite having set up base two minutes’ walk from a university campus. The aliens are reptilian semi-humanoids with weird energy halos. Wouldn’t you just know it, their main weapon turns out to be a ray that blinds people. Of course, it has no effect on Daredevil whatsoever. Unfortunately, they also have a secondary weapon: a delayed-effect freeze ray, which does<\/em> work on him.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The aliens abduct Daredevil and explain their dastardly plan. They intend to blind the entire human race, and then steal all of Earth’s minerals. Literally, all of them. How are they going to do that? “We have means of transferring them to our own galaxy,” handwaves the alien captain. Daredevil protests that half the population would perish without “our precious minerals”. The aliens explain that this is “unfortunate” but “cannot be helped”. Why can’t it be helped? Hush with your questions.<\/p>\n

The aliens are very impressed by Daredevil’s courage. They offer to restore his sight and let him join them on campaigns of planetary invasion. Naturally, Daredevil is not keen.<\/p>\n

So the aliens get back to their plan. And they do get as far as blinding the entire human race. This gives us in a half page montage in which people around the world react to their sudden blindness in the sort of style you’d expect from a late 60s comic, complete with special national fonts for everyone’s lettering. “What have the Kapitalists done to us?!” says a Russian. “Muhammud has turned his face away!” says a man in a turban on an elephant.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Daredevil fights the aliens and manoeuvres them into smashing their own machine, so everyone gets their sight back after a few minutes. The only impact we see of the global blindness is Foggy and Karen’s taxi crashing harmlessly into a tree, but you’d have thought the global death toll from car crashes and industrial equipment would be alarmingly high. Apparently not, though, because nobody seems terribly bothered. Inconveniently, the aliens can’t proceed with their invasion until they fix the machine, which will take “a thousand thousand nomameters”, whatever those are. So they just dump Daredevil and go home. And that’s the end.<\/p>\n

The occasional Queega has shown up in the background of crowd scenes in cosmic stories, but otherwise they’ve been politely forgotten about. And why wouldn’t they be? They’re painfully generic, and bring nothing to the table other than whatever novelty factor alien invasions and flying saucers might still have had by 1967. Which can’t have been much.<\/p>\n

The Queega don’t even have a memorable design – aside from their little energy halos, they’re just reptile men. Colan often elevates second-rate stories by cranking up the energy and the emotion in the characters, but either he can’t figure out how to do that with alien characters, or he can’t summon up much enthusiasm for the material. Whatever the reason, it’s obvious he wants to get back to the humans.<\/p>\n

Who could blame him? Lee really is running out of ideas at this point, and you can feel the barrel being scraped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Again, we’re skipping a couple of issues with returning villains – issues #26-27 feature the return of Stilt-Man and the final defeat of the Masked Marauder. DAREDEVIL #28 (May 1967) “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Planet!” Writer, editor: Stan Lee Penciller: Gene Colan Inker: Dick Ayers Letterer: Sam Rosen Colourist: not credited Yes, it’s […]<\/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-9685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9685","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=9685"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9833,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9685\/revisions\/9833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}