{"id":9971,"date":"2024-05-19T12:40:27","date_gmt":"2024-05-19T11:40:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9971"},"modified":"2024-05-19T12:41:48","modified_gmt":"2024-05-19T11:41:48","slug":"daredevil-villains-23-the-torpedo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9971","title":{"rendered":"Daredevil Villains #23: The Torpedo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DAREDEVIL #59 (December 1969)<\/strong>
\n“The Torpedo Will Get You if You Don’t Watch Out!”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Roy Thomas<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Gene Colan<\/strong>
\nInker: Syd Shores<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Artie Simek<\/strong>
\nColourist: not credited<\/strong>
\nEditor: Stan Lee<\/strong><\/p>\n

Roy Thomas was determined to give Crime-Wave a big build-up before he faced off against Daredevil in person. So not only did Crime-Wave get trailed in a subplot during the Death’s-Head story, but the next two issues are devoted Daredevil fighting Crime-Wave’s underlings. Last issue, we had Stunt-Master, an gimmick character who was an odd fit for Crime-Wave. This time, Thomas plays it straight, and brings us the Torpedo.<\/p>\n

Another Torpedo will debut in Daredevil <\/em>in 1975, and go on to be a supporting player in Rom<\/em>. That’s a different character entirely. This Torpedo is a one-off costumed hitman. Hence the name “torpedo”, which is just dated slang for a hitman. So at least he fits Crime-Wave’s theme.<\/p>\n

In practice, this issue is mainly about building up Crime-Wave for the next issue. It opens with Daredevil dealing with a protection racket, only to find that the store owner is too scared to testify against Crime-Wave. But Willie Lincoln has found Crime-Wave’s secret base and escaped alive. More about that next time. For the moment, the important point is that Willie is going into protective custody to keep him safe from Crime-Wave. You’d have thought they could just raid the address and gather more evidence, but apparently Willie is a devastatingly important witness.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And so Crime-Wave brings in the Torpedo to kill Willie. The Torpedo is a costumed hitman from Los Angeles. You might think from the cover and the title that this issue would be all about the Torpedo; in fact, there’s so much set-up that he doesn’t show up until the final panel of page 13. This is a recurring problem in Daredevil<\/em> stories of this period; they\u00a0 spend far too long on the opening set-up scene and then visibly run out of pages at the end. This isn’t the most extreme example, but the book still spends more than a quarter of its page count on the opening scene with the protection racket, and it ends with another hyper-compressed epilogue.<\/p>\n

Colan’s villain designs can be hit or miss, but the Torpedo is not bad at all. Unusually for the Silver Age, he’s in red and blue primary colours. He’s presented as a kind of gunslinger, with a costume that vaguely echoes a western character, complete with wide-brimmed hat and gun belt, but without being too blatant about it. He looks a bit like a more shadowy version of the Texas Twister. (It’s more obvious on the interior art than it is on the cover.)<\/p>\n

Despite his gunslinger motif, the Torpedo’s gun fires knockout gas. Or he can set it to “blast”, whatever that means. To be fair, you can just about rationalise him going for the knockout gas in this story. He’s hiding in Willie’s hotel room; Willie has guards with him; if Torpedo just shoots Willie dead, there’s a fair chance that the guards kill him before he can get away So… okay, with a lot of charity, I’m just about willing to accept that the Torpedo thinks that it’s a better plan to try to gas everyone and then kill Willie later. He’s certainly a Comics Code-friendly hitman.<\/p>\n

Naturally, Daredevil comes to the rescue. Torpedo puts up a decent fight – I’m pretty sure he’s also the first character to call Daredevil “Hornhead”, which is some sort of claim to fame. He helpfully explains why he’s called the Torpedo, which is clearly for the benefit of the readers, but Thomas makes it into a character point by playing it as a patronising explanation of something Daredevil already knows.<\/p>\n

As the fight makes its way to the roof, we learn that the Torpedo has another gimmick: his hat has a razor-sharp brim and he uses it as a throwing weapon. Now this is a bad idea. Not because it’s an awful idea in isolation, mind you, but because it’s so blatantly ripped off from Odd Job that the dialogue has to acknowledge it. It’s not even topical – by the time this issue came out, Goldfinger<\/em> was five years old. And the Torpedo only gets to use the hat once, before getting tackled by Willie. Somehow or other, Willie ends up accidentally shoving the Torpedo over the edge of the building, without going over himself. The Torpedo then plummets to his death. And that’s the end of the Torpedo.<\/p>\n

Thanks to that wonderful pacing I mentioned earlier, there are two whole panels left to wrap up the story. Willie laments having killed a man. Not to worry, says Daredevil! “In a way, the Torpedo committed suicide when he threw in with Crime-Wave!” Well, it’s certainly a take. Having thus satisfied themselves that the splattery guy on the street is no longer of any concern, Daredevil and Willie end the issue by agreeing that Crime-Wave has to be stopped.<\/p>\n

Presumably, Roy Thomas intended Torpedo to be a one-off villain, whose real function was to continue building up Crime-Wave. As it turns out, Torpedo at least had a decent character design and a punchy codename; as a random henchman, he might well have had more staying power than the character he was setting up. But Crime-Wave was the real priority here, and we’ll see next time how that turned out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAREDEVIL #59 (December 1969) “The Torpedo Will Get You if You Don’t Watch Out!” Writer: Roy Thomas Penciller: Gene Colan Inker: Syd Shores Letterer: Artie Simek Colourist: not credited Editor: Stan Lee Roy Thomas was determined to give Crime-Wave a big build-up before he faced off against Daredevil in person. So not only did Crime-Wave […]<\/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-9971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daredevil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9971","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=9971"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10110,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9971\/revisions\/10110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}