How the Man Without Fear Got Here

When Daredevil debuted in April 1964, he represented the last of the first great wave of Marvel superheroes that we readers already knew we couldn’t get enough of,

At age 9, I immediately liked him — even that yellow costume that everybody else seemed to hate (I love that sunny color). I did hope that Matt Murdock would eventually regain his sight, not realizing how integral his disability was to the drama Stan Lee had in mind.

We’d had blind, or rather quasi-blind super-heroes before in the Black Bat and Dr. Mid-Nite. And Daredevil’s Golden Age namesake had been mute.

But with his other senses heightened, Daredevil’s blindness became central to the storyline. It represented another application of a trick Lee liked to pull, using an obstacle as an advantage.

The disability shadowed Daredevil’s relationship with Karen Page, bringing a note of tragic stoicism to the feature. It helped preserve the secret of his identity, because no one would believe Matt Murdock could be a superhero. It provided a satisfying underdog counterpoint to contrast with and underline the heroics Daredevil performed.

Daredevil’s blindness-related super powers, carefully thought out, were dramatically more subtle than the more common wall-smashing variety, but equally effective.

His sensory abilities enabled him to hear distant trouble, overhear secret conversations, dodge and deflect projectiles and punches and, appropriately enough for a moral crusader, detect lies. And they remained a hidden asset, invisible to the public.

In fact, the character was so well conceived that a half-century later he became the protagonist for what is arguably the best superhero show that has ever appeared on television. Daredevil’s Netflix series strikes a perfect balance between the fantastic and the credible without ever losing sight of the adventure and the moral struggle that is central to the superhero genre. The show keeps Daredevil (Charlie Cox) in fairly constant and convincing peril, something that rarely happens in stories where your hero is a superman.

Lee had confidence in Daredevil’s TV potential from the beginning, and in fact Daredevil nearly made it to the tube in 1983.

“We made a deal with Warner Brothers TV and Stirling Silliphant,” Lee told David Anthony Kraft’s Comics Interview. “Stirling proposed writing a pilot script for Daredevil and went to the ABC network. And they loved the concept.”

In 1971, Silliphant had written another TV show about a blind hero, a private detective named Longstreet starring James Franciscus. But for whatever reason, ABC's ardor for Daredevil cooled.

Daredevil had another run at television in 1989, in the TV movie The Trial of the Incredible Hulk. Played by Rex Smith in a ninja-like costume, the superhero was so effectively used that he essentially took over the story. The late Bill Bixby also starred, and directed.

Yet Daredevil was born late, literally. Lee tapped Bill Everett, creator of the Sub-Mariner, to draw the first issue. But Everett got behind on the project, and to fill in Lee had to scramble for a new title.

He called it The Avengers.

The Joads and the Trumps

A passage that reads like Sanskrit to President Trumpolini:

Tom: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together and yelled…

Ma: Oh, Tommy, they’d drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casey.

Tom: They’d drag me anyways. Sooner or later they’d get me for one thing if not for another. Until then…

Ma: Tommy, you’re not aimin’ to kill nobody.

Tom: No, Ma, not that. That ain’t it. It’s just, well as long as I’m an outlaw anyways… maybe I can do somethin’… maybe I can just find out somethin’, just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t somethin’ that can be done about it. I ain’t thought it out all clear, Ma. I can’t. I don’t know enough.

Ma: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I’d never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

Tom: Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then…

Ma: Then what, Tom?

Tom: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.

Ma: I don’t understand it, Tom.

Tom: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.

When the Avengers Reassembled

I remember being disappointed at the big shake-up in the Avengers line-up in issue 16 (May 1965). How ironic it was, as the comic books used to say, to learn from Stan Lee, decades later, that it was only what readers like me had asked for.

 “(U)sually when those things happen it’s because you want to give the book a shot in the arm as far as sales go,” Stan told David Anthony Kraft’s Comics Interview in 1990. “I may have figured, “Maybe it’s getting a little dull. It’s the same thing all the time. Maybe I’ll see if I can try to stimulate more interest by getting new characters.

“And it may also have been … because I was finding it too difficult to seem to be realistic. For example, in his own book, Thor might have been trapped in Asgard somewhere, and yet in the Avengers book, he’s here attending a meeting.

“I seem to remember, I did get mail from a lot of readers about that point, and I felt, ‘Maybe it’s destroying the pseudo-realism of the stories, where a character is dying in one story and in the other story, he’s chairman of the Avengers meeting.’ I think that had a lot to do with it, as a matter of fact.”

Stan paid serious attention to readers’ wishes, as best he could discern them — one of the secrets of Marvel’s early success. But it was clear to me from the first issue that the Avengers, rather than the Fantastic Four, had been intended as Marvel’s direct answer to the Justice League — a team composed of preexisting superheroes who had their own features. So I was disappointed to see that conception change with the 16^th issue. Disney Marvel wisely replicated that pattern with the movies, establishing all the separate franchises before combining them into the spectacularly successful Avengers movie series.

But had I paid more attention, I would have seen the advantages to the new line-up of Captain America, Hawkeye, Quicksilver and his sister, the Scarlet Witch. The team was now well balanced in terms of both powers and drama, with dramatic conflicts built right into the mix.

First, the three new members were former criminals, inherently hard to trust (Hawkeye had fought Iron Man, and the siblings had been Magneto’s pawns against the X-Men).

Quicksilver’s temper was as fast as his speed. And Hawkeye both resented and admired Captain America, and was as eager to replace him as a jealous younger brother might be. Over the years, Clint Barton would evolve, naturally and realistically, into a great friend and admirer of Cap. Cap himself, noble as he was, was on the verge of chucking the whole business and going to work fighting Hydra for Nick Fury.

The lack of the raw power of a Thor, a Hulk or an Iron Man made for potentially more suspenseful fights that necessarily relied on Cap’s experience in strategy. Hawkeye brought his supreme skill and versatile trick arrows to the table, and Quicksilver brought his genuinely impressive super speed.

Odd that the lineup change made the Avengers more closely resemble the JLA, in a way, now with their own “Green Arrow” and “Flash.”

The Scarlet Witch was the weak sister of the bunch, literally, with powers that were irritatingly unpredictable and minor. Early Marvel had a regrettable tendency to saddle women with relatively ineffectual abilities — invisibility, shrinking, mild telekinesis and “sort of maybe making something happen” (the Scarlet Witch’s power). They were super-second-class citizens. All that smashing-through-walls stuff was to be left to the men.

A review of those early issues also shows how, with the spotlight off the more powerful members, the title came to function as a Captain America comic in many ways. Some older fans particularly wanted to see at that time (Stan Lee included, presumably).

And — now without a feature of their and therefore without a continuity conflict — Giant-Man and the Wasp would soon return, revamped and streamlined, to provide fresh interest in the ever-shifting and expanding line-up.

That, too, became an angle that gave the Avengers their own distinct identity, as the super-hero team without a fixed membership. They weren’t a family like the FF or a besieged minority like the X-Men. They were a team of crime-fighting champions united solely by their interest in protecting the planet.

All that, and the glorious art of Wally Wood for a time. Wood was as good at portraying pure stalwart power as Jack Kirby. His superheroes always looked as if they were made of some sort of fluid granite.

I didn’t know what I was missing.

You May Control a Mad Elephant

Given my lifelong fascination with super powers, this quote strikes me forcefully. By the way, we just happen to have a mad elephant on hand that needs taming right now.

How the Mighty Heroes Are Fallen

In January 1966, the overnight success of the Batman TV program led to a miscalculation in the entertainment industry.

The archly comical ABC show was created to be “camp,” a term defined by Merriam-Webster as “…something so outrageously artificial, affected, inappropriate or out-of-date as to be considered amusing.”

The early TV stories, lifted right from the comic books, didn’t sit so well on actual human beings in tights — even though it was fun to see Adam West address each crazy scheme involving puzzles, umbrellas, Rube Goldberg death traps and brightly colored knockout gas as if it were the imminent detonation of a hydrogen bomb.

A 12-year-old then, I understood that the show was laughing at Batman, not with him. And I didn’t appreciate it one little bit when that same attitude backwashed into superhero comics — not just the Batman comics, but many other bandwagon riders.

Take the revived Archie Comics MLJ superheroes, for example. Subjected to the faux-Stan Lee writing of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and the indifferent art of Paul Reinman, 1940s stalwarts like the Web, the Shield, the Fox, Steel Sterling and the Black Hood became goofballs as the Fly-Man title turned into Mighty Comics in 1966-67.

Only the Web — now a henpecked, middle-aged superhero making a comeback attempt — had the seeds of a real story, touching on themes that would be developed in superhero stories 20 or more years later.

But finally, once all the publicity dust settles, things that are said to be “…so bad they’re good” are usually, after all, just bad.

The Batman show, and the comic book superheroes that copied it, all quickly fell victim to the problem that afflicts every camp melodrama. You can’t generate concern about the fate of characters after you’ve encouraged the audience to laugh at them by making them appear ridiculous. The ticking time bomb can’t be suspenseful when we know it’s really a jack-in-the-box.

This Looks Like a Job for Tiny Supermen!

It’s a swarm of bees! It’s a cloud of wasps! No, it’s a hundred tiny Supermen!

The Mort Weisinger-edited Silver Age Superman mythos reached its zenith when the Superman Emergency Squad was introduced in 1960.

We’d already seen the arrival of Brainiac, whose shrinking ray gave us the Kryptonian bottled city of Kandor, to be stored in another recent innovation, Superman’s arctic Fortress of Solitude (shamelessly lifted from Doc Savage).

Krypto the Superdog had arrived even earlier, and Supergirl more recently. Her own expanding mythos would give us Streaky the Supercat and Comet the Superhorse. Lori Lemaris, Superman’s lost collegiate love, was on hand if we happened to need telepathic assistance from a mermaid.

Kandor would in turn be source of further mythic evolution for the Man of Tomorrow. Superman’s increasingly complex and useful robots were also stored there, as was another new element, the Phantom Zone projector.

The tiny city would become the urban bottlescape for Superman and Jimmy’s Batman-and-Robin adventures as Nightwing and Flamebird. And, in Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen 48 (Oct.-Nov. 1960), it would give us the Superman Emergency Squad, a silly team I loved.

In this Otto Binder story with art by Curt Swan, we met Superman’s tiny flying army from the Kandor. After shoving their way out of the corked bottled, they swarmed to the rescue dressed in Superman costumes (which would actually make them uniforms, I suppose). Initially someone insisted that they should all look like Superman too, which seems a bit fetishistic even for Silver Age comic books.

They returned in The War Between Supergirl and the Superman Emergency Squad (Action Comics 276, May 1961), a tale penned by Robert Bernstein and drawn by Wayne Boring. The “war” was staged so Superman could gaslight a criminal into thinking himself delusional as a means of shielding Superman’s exposed secret identity.

In the Kennedy era, already having been popularized on TV, radio, movie serials and cartoons and a newspaper comic strip, Superman was featured in seven comic book titles, or eight if you count The Justice League of America, where he was initially downplayed.

But the Man of Tomorrow was central to the titles Action Comics, Superman, Adventure Comics, Superboy, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and World’s Finest. Important additions to the Superman mythos might appear in any one of them — the tiny Supermen in Jimmy Olsen, the Phantom Zone in Adventure, Bizarro in Superboy and Luthor’s sister Lena Thorul in Lois Lane.

The Quest Began on a Coffee Shop Place Mat...

“(A)s we would come to understand much later, our crises each contained the seed of a magnificent gift. We were both forced, by pain, to look under the surface of things. To investigate deeper into the nature of our human-beingness — its impermanence, its lack of continuity, its disappointment…”

“Paula and I sat one evening after class in the coffee shop beneath the yoga studio, discussing our lives. We discovered we both secretly felt our breakdowns were a kind of spiritual crisis. … As we identified, together, the aspects of this search that we shared, I scribbled them down on the paper place mat in front of me with a big red crayon:

“ — A search for ‘the quiet’ in which the small inner voice could be heard.

“ — A longing for the authentic and the real.

“ — A visceral need for self-expression.

“ — A sense of rebellion against the ‘captivity’ of our old lives.

“ — An inchoate sense of something unimaginable about to be born out of the disorganization of our lives.”

—  Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self