Mighty Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil Volume 3

Say what you will about Stan Lee as a writer, he certainly knew how to work at speed. This was especially the case during the 1960s, when he was churning out copy for a whole series of Marvel titles. Each of the comics collected here, published in 1966-67, was written by Lee and illustrated by Gene Colan, and on the masthead of issue #32 they even ask “How do they do it, month after month?”

Well I don’t know how they kept up such a pace, but they managed surprisingly well, despite some obvious lulls. One such low point being issue #28, where Daredevil has to take on aliens looking to strip-mine Earth: “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Planet!” This comic begins with a six-page intro that is quickly dismissed as “one of the longest prologues on record” in the playfully self-referential style that Lee favoured at the time (“Stan” even has a Batman-style cameo when Daredevil says hi to him as he’s climbing past an open window).

On the other hand, the volume concludes with a great four-parter that has DD taking on Mr. Hyde and Cobra, a pair of bickering supervillains. Mr. Hyde splashes a “potent chemical” in Daredevil’s face that’s meant to blind him, which of course doesn’t mean anything because he’s already blind. But, for some unexplained reason, “since the man without fear is already blind, Hyde’s formula affected his super senses instead – making them totally useless!” So until he finds the antidote, Daredevil is pretty much totally helpless, though he does make a fair run of things for a while, pretending at times to have gotten his sight back. This is a lot more difficult than pretending to be Matt Murdock’s twin brother Mike, a cool “hipster” (the word meant something different back then) that Matt invents to confuse Foggy and Karen as to Daredevil’s secret identity. This makes for a decent storyline as well.

Otherwise what we get here is what fans of the comic had come to expect. First and foremost there’s a blind superhero whose other senses are so advanced he can identify people by their heartbeats (or, in the case of the Owl, “his powerful birdlike emanations,” whatever that means). In fact, Daredevil can even fly a jet, a point that has to be dealt with by “Sly Ol’ Stan” thusly:

To save you the trouble of writing scathing letters to us, we’ll explain here and now how the sightless D.D. can pilot a plane! He feels the vibrations of the needles and dials within the instrument panel, and his own natural radar sense takes care of the rest!

The second feature common to most Daredevil comics is a B-list supervillain, or pair of B-list supervillains who never seem to get along that well. I’ve already talked about Mr. Hyde and Cobra. Among the other baddies teaming-up here are Leap-Frog (he’s got springs in his flipper-style footwear!) and Stilt-Man, and the Masked Marauder and Gladiator. That we find out the Masked Marauder is really just the landlord of the office building that Nelson and Murdock operate out of feels right. He’s found his niche.

The third recurring feature is the guest appearance by another Marvel superhero. Here we get Ka-Zar, Spider-Man, and Thor. They’re all stronger than Daredevil so he mainly has to just survive the scraps he gets into with them by jumping out of the way.

The final thing to note is the self-reflexivity and self-deprecating humour I mentioned earlier. For issue #26, “Stilt-Man Strikes Again!” a note right on the cover admits “It’s one of our least-inspired titles, but the story’s a blast!” At several points in the volume sound effects are drawn attention to. Daredevil bouncing off the top of a car with a “BTANNG!” for example, gets this notation from “Scrupulous Stan”: “Special note for those who may read this story aloud: in the sound BTANNG, the second N is silent!” This will come in handy for the Leap-Frog character, who jumps around with a PTANNG!, a SQUANNG!, and a FTINNG! And later we’re told of a “PTOW!”: “In reading this story aloud . . . the first letter in the above sound effect is presumed to be silent!” That’s from “Stickler Stan.”

Overall then, an entertaining collection that I’m sure gave fans everything they wanted, or at least were expecting. And maybe a few things they didn’t. As usual, Lee is just embarrassingly bad with anything to do with romance. At one point we see Matt alone in his apartment with a framed photo of Karen. Why a blind man has a photo of the girl he has a crush on is hard to figure, but he picks it up to address her thusly: “Karen, my darling . . . even though I cannot see you . . . your beauty is like a living thing to me! In my mind’s eye I’ve devoured your features hungrily . . . greedily . . . like a starving man!” Which is a lot of what the Little Rascals used to call mush. But the fact that he says these lines while “looking” at a photo of Karen feels almost like camp.

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