{"id":9789,"date":"2024-02-18T14:49:43","date_gmt":"2024-02-18T14:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9789"},"modified":"2024-02-19T15:28:20","modified_gmt":"2024-02-19T15:28:20","slug":"daredevil-villains-16-the-boss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9789","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #16: The Boss"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #29 (June 1967)
\n“Unmasked!”<\/strong>
\nWriter, editor: Stan Lee<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Gene Colan<\/strong>
\nInker: John Tartaglione<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Sam Rosen<\/strong>
\nColourist: not credited<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Daredevil\u00a0<\/em>approached issue #30, Stan Lee was getting downright sluggish when it came to new ideas for villains. Last month was little green men. This month is “the heartless hood they call… the Boss!” The Boss is just a regular old crime boss, with no particular hook. Often characters like this represent Daredevil<\/em> toying with the sort of stories that will eventually make the book work. Less so in this case.<\/p>\n

The issue opens with Matt pondering a dilemma. He’s decided to ask Karen to marry him. No, you didn’t miss an issue. It’s all or nothing with Matt. The dilemma is: should he marry her as Matt, or as Mike? Yes, this sounds like an excellent foundation for a healthy marriage. As Colan draws him, Matt at home looks like a genial English professor, with a nice cardigan and a tweed jacket. For some reason he also has a signed photograph of Karen Page. Seems like an odd gift for Karen to give to a man she believes to be completely blind, but it keeps showing up in later issues.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, we check in on the Masked Marauder’s men. The Marauder died two issues ago, and his men have been waiting patiently for “over a month” for further orders. Finally, they decide that he’s really not coming back, and so they open his last instruction. It tells them to go after Nelson and Murdock, find out who Daredevil is, and then avenge the Marauder’s defeat. The Marauder certainly has a lot of faith in his men to carry out this vague instruction from a man who is, presumably, no longer paying their wages. But follow it they do, heading to the Nelson & Murdock offices in the Marauder’s customised truck that very night.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But one of them sells the group out to the Boss. “I figger… with the Marauder gone – that you’re the only one big enough to fill his shoes!” All the Boss needs to do is show up tonight, round up the Marauder’s henchmen, and seize control of the group. Colan makes this scene look a lot better than it deserves to be, with the Boss as a cheerfully confident, relaxed figure, stretched out on his chair and seeming to find the whole thing very diverting. As he often does with Karen, Colan gives the Boss a level of charisma that really isn’t there in the writing.<\/p>\n

The Boss and a car full of ordinary gangsters show up to attack the Marauder’s hi-tech gang and defeat them handily in less than two pages. Having thus seized control, the Boss decides to go on with the “fight Daredevil” plan anyway. So they kidnap Karen and leave a message telling Daredevil where to find her. (This, of course, will prompt Matt to decide that he can’t marry Karen after all because his life is far too dangerous. You know how it goes.)<\/p>\n

Matt duly heads to the spooky house “on the outskirts of town” where Karen is being held. Obviously, the villains’ plan is just to kill Daredevil when he shows up. Daredevil has a plan to outwit them, but it’s one of those mystifying ideas where you just have to shrug and say, hell, it was the sixties. He shows up in costume, but he pretends to be blind Matt Murdock pretending<\/em> to be Daredevil. Why? Well, because then the gang will capture him rather than shoot him on sight… apparently?<\/p>\n

And it work. Matt is captured, and then he does precisely what you’d expect: he escapes the cell, goes back as Proper Daredevil, and beats up all the baddies. Why couldn’t he have just done that in the first place? Because then the story would be even more generic than it already is! The Boss’s mixed crew of underlings, now made up of both conventional mobsters and costumed supervillain henchmen, completely fail to get along. Their lack of teamwork lets Daredevil to beat them all singlehandedly, and the Boss simply surrenders rather than fight. And that’s the issue.<\/p>\n

So let’s be fair to Stan. Yes, the Boss is completely off the peg. But the story hook here is probably meant <\/em>to be the culture clash between two different styles of villain – the regular mob and the supervillains. If that’s the idea, then it makes sense for the Boss to be a standard issue mob boss. But the story never really gets into the tension between the groups. They’re just two gangs who don’t get on – the Marauder’s group are at least visually distinct, but nothing else really turns on where they came from.<\/p>\n

After this issue, Lee goes into a long stretch where he just recycles cast-offs from the rest of the Marvel Universe. The well of inspiration is so obviously running dry at this point that you’d think Lee surely had to be on his way out, but in fact he sticks around through to issue #50. Fortunately, things pick up again towards the end of his run. But at this point he was really starting to struggle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #29 (June 1967) “Unmasked!” Writer, editor: Stan Lee Penciller: Gene Colan Inker: John Tartaglione Letterer: Sam Rosen Colourist: not credited As Daredevil\u00a0approached issue #30, Stan Lee was getting downright sluggish when it came to new ideas for villains. Last month was little green men. This month is “the heartless hood they call… the Boss!” […]<\/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-9789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9789","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=9789"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9862,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9789\/revisions\/9862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}