Unbagging Daredevil #219
Daredevil, Vol. 1
#219A
Release: Jun 1985
Cover: Jun 1985
Creators
| Writer | Frank Miller |
| Cover Artist | Frank Miller |
| Penciller | John Buscema |
| Inker | Gerry Talaoc |
| Colorist | Christie Scheele |
| Letterer | Joe Rosen |
| Editor | Ralph Macchio |
Not that it matters. The Biker had said it a few ugly minutes earlier…from Fagan’s murder on down…what happened had to.
I’ve often talked – at length – about the inconsistency of my comic-buying when I was younger, some of which was happenstance, and some of which was a kind of capriciousness on my part.
There were some series that I at least tried to buy regularly, but there were a lot more that I just picked up an issue of here and there on a whim.
For a time, Daredevil was somewhere in between those two extremes. I didn’t buy it regularly, but I bought it more often than I did some others. Of course, most of the issues that I’d read had come in mystery packs, but for about a year or so I would semi-regularly grab a new issue.
This issue kind of marked the end of that, which, in hindsight, is frustrating, given what followed not long after this was something that years later would become one of my all-time favorite storylines, and years after that would provide the title for the current live-action Daredevil series on Disney+.
And it was an episode of that series that made me think of this issue and consider writing an Unbagging post about it. When I saw that the episode made someone else think of it as well, I decided I had to do it.
Then I discovered that, contrary to what I thought, I no longer had this issue. Thus, it first became the subject of a Mail Call post.
But now I have it, and so here we go.
The episode that made me think of this was rather an odd one in that was what many would call a “filler” episode, as it wasn’t directly related to the ongoing story being told in the season. It wasn’t entirely disconnected – and it did a lot to connect the character to the larger MCU – but it just didn’t really fit in with the rest.
That’s what made me think of this issue, a one-and-done story that was disconnected from the larger narrative happening in the series. The story is wildly different from the story told in the episode, though it is somewhat thematically linked in that at no point in the story does Matt put on the Daredevil costume, going into action entirely in civilian garb.
(Then again, his outfit isn’t the sort of thing you’d expect to find in Matt Murdock’s wardrobe.)
Our story begins not in the typical setting of Hell’s Kitchen, but rather in a town in New Jersey called Broken Cross.
Via a more-than healthy dose of narration we learn that Broken Cross doesn’t have much going for it, at least until the arrival of a strange who came walking in.
Said stranger enters a diner where an armed robbery is in progress, though no one – not even the stranger – seems overly concerned about it.
The stranger sits at counter and the woman working behind it – Katie – pours him a cup of coffee even as the armed robber – a young man with a mohawk named Beaver – points his gun at him.
Katie flips one of the burgers from the grill to Beaver’s face, and when he reaches across to point the gun at her in retaliation, the stranger slams Beaver’s hand to the counter, knocking the gun free.
Beaver pulls a knife, and the stranger kicks it out of his hand, then kicks Beaver through the window.
The law is waiting outside for Beaver, though the officer – Lt. Costello – is more interested in the stranger. After checking his ID, he tells the stranger that it would be best if he’s gone by morning.
As the stranger walks away, Poppa, the owner of the establishment, asks Lt. Costello if the stranger doesn’t remind him of someone, but Costello doesn’t want to hear it.
Katie pulls up and offers the stranger a ride and the reader an info-dump, explaining that Beaver won’t be spending any time in jail, as his mother – Ma Stillwell – keeps her boys out of trouble. Beaver, it seems, robs Poppa’s place something like twice a week – explaining why everyone was so blasé about it – and then his Ma makes him return the money.
She also notes that Beaver’s brother Billy is “queer for fires,” and had skipped bail, and she wonders if Billy is the reason the stranger is there, though he doesn’t respond.
Katie also thinks to herself that the stranger reminds her of someone she once knew…
At the Stillwell home, Ma Stillwell is doling out some punishment to Beaver, which his brother encourages, while Lt. Costello lets her know he’s worried about this stranger, as, like Katie, he suspects that he’s there for Billy, and he may start poking around into certain other things, things that have caused both his and Ma Stillwell’s hands to get dirty.
At Katie’s suggestion, the stranger checks in at a boarding house called Cosie’s Motel, run by Cosie who is, in true Frank Miller fashion, something of a…well, let’s just call her a “fallen woman.”
Cosie is in her cups and initially mistakes the stranger for someone named John, though realize that’s not possible. But for some reason, he’s been on her mind tonight.
As Cosie passes out, the stranger heads upstairs to find a room, and it’s by some random chance that he picks the room that he once stayed in, a room that, had Cosie been conscious she would not have allowed him to choose.
The stranger’s dreams are troubled, filled with images of a man being beaten to death with bicycle chains. Waking from his uneasy sleep, he gets dressed and decides to hit the town, walking into the local dive bar and into another encounter with Beaver.
Once again, it doesn’t go well for Beaver, who takes out his frustration on someone known only as Biker, needling him about how his friends are no longer around to help him after what they did.
Biker responds to Beaver’s taunts by smashing a bottle in his face, and soon a full-on bar room brawl has broken out,
It doesn’t last long, however, as Costello shows up, sends Beaver home, and takes the stranger and Biker into custody.
Later, Costello confers with Ma Stillwell – who this time takes her wrath out on Billy – about how something seemed to have gotten into the Biker, and how there was talk of someone named Fagan, which seemed to catch the stranger’s attention.
Ma Stillwell tells Costello that the Biker, the stranger, and even Cosie need to be taken care of, the latter for the noise she made at the trial.
At the jail, the Biker provides another info-dump in conversation with the stranger in the cell next to his.
It seemed that Broken Cross once had a cop who, to the extent that such a thing is possible, defied the truth that ACAB, named Fagan. As with everyone else, Biker feels like he’s talking to Fagan when he talks to the stranger, even though the two look nothing alike.
It’s impossible for anyone to talk to Fagan, though, given that he was beaten to death with bicycle chains back in Biker’s “glory days” when he and his brothers rode into town.
Back at her place, Cosie has woken up, despite her best efforts, and she’s still thinking of the good man that the stranger reminded her off.
Someone enters the house and for a moment she thinks she sees him again, but when her vision clears, she sees that it’s Beaver.
Back at the jail, the Biker resumes his story. Back in those days, he and his fellow bikers used to tease young Beaver, who wanted to be one of them. In order to prove himself, Beaver took a gun that his Ma left lying around and shot a homeless man.
Fagan, being too good for his own good, was closing in on proving that Beaver had done it, which Ma Stillwell couldn’t allow, so she conspired with Costello, who had lost out on a promotion to Fagan, to solve two problems at once.
Fagan was beaten to death and Biker’s brothers were blamed for it, though Biker insists they didn’t do it, despite the run-ins they’d had with Fagan.
Costello steps in and finishes the story, insisting that it wasn’t their innocence that caused Biker’s brothers to smash themselves into a retaining wall. Sending the officer who’d been watching the Biker and the stranger home, Costello lets Biker out of his cell and shoots him.
He prepares to do the same to the stranger, but that doesn’t work out for him.
Though fading fast, the Biker is still alive and tells the stranger to head to Cosie’s.
After he leaves, Costello gets up off the floor and hits Biker, then jumps in his car to head after the stranger.
The Biker makes his way outside where his old bike – which he’d earlier mentioned he’d been forced to sell to Pliskin, the officer who had been watching them – is waiting for him, as by some strange chance Pliskin had decided to walk home.
The stranger arrives at Cosie’s too late.
Beaver hadn’t left any way for there to be much blood in her. The stranger probably wished he was blind.
Then it’s Billy’s time to shine, as a Molotov Cocktail comes flying in through the open door and the whole place rapidly goes up.
Outside, Ma Stillwell and her boys watch the fire as Costello pulls up insisting that they have to run because it’s clear to him, given how he was able to avoid getting shot, isn’t human.
As if to prove Costello’s claim, the stranger walks out of the raging conflagration.
Costello, Ma Stillwell, and the boys jump into Costello’s car and drive away in terror, only to find justice waiting for them in the form of a head-on collision with Biker.
The closing narration, as the stranger walks away from Broken Cross, encourages people to stay away from the rotten little town, but advises them to stop in at Poppa’s and talk to Katie, if, against all sense, they do decide to visit.
If you stay long, though, she’ll probably start talking about ghosts. So don’t.
I don’t know why this marked the end of my semi-regular buying of Daredevil back then, because I can tell you that this weird little story kind of blew my mind when I read it, and it’s stuck with me for decades.
As with all things Miller, I think you kind of had to be there to appreciate the impact he had on comics, especially if you’re too young to have read anything he wrote prior to 9/11 back when it was actually new and had not been poorly imitated countless times by others, and basically done over and over again by Miller as he quickly became a parody of himself.
I was already a fan of his work from what I’d read in other issues of Daredevil, but in so many ways this was nothing like any of old horn-head’s other adventures that I’d read or really like anything I’d read, period.
Indeed, there’s nothing that actually marks it as a Daredevil story at all beyond the fact that the stranger appears to be Matt Murdock and it’s an issue of Daredevil.
But he never dons the costume, is never referred to as anything other than “the stranger,” and never actually speaks a word throughout the entire story. If you didn’t know it was supposed to be a Daredevil story you probably wouldn’t guess that it is.
Even the cheeky reference to wishing he were blind wouldn’t seem out of place in a story featuring a different character, it just wouldn’t have the ironic bite.
And that seems to be by design, as it was a story clearly inspired by Westerns – even the title of the story evokes images of cowboys – despite taking place on the East Coast, with Matt being a “man with no name” type, and it’s an example of Miller applying storytelling techniques from other media to comics in a way that few of his contemporaries managed.
Again, it’s all old hat now, and much of what is here has gone past being tropes in in Miller’s work to becoming fully ossified, but it was all pretty new and innovative to me forty years ago.
I don’t know that Big John Buscema was the right penciler for this style of story, but he still delivered like the pro that he was. I will say that Gerry Talaoc does strike me as the right inker, so Buscema’s work definitely gets an assist in that regard.
Of course, I’m not sure who would have been the right choice for penciler other than perhaps Miller himself, particularly given that this feels like a proto-Sin City yarn.
Regardless, that image of Beaver – I’m surprised Frank didn’t go all-out and name his brother Wally rather than Billy – standing there silently with his switchblade is haunting.
The episode of the Disney+ series that brought this to mind has a much lighter tone, and as mentioned has little in common with the narrative – though New Jersey does feature prominently, in its own way, in the episode – I’m not the only one who saw the connection, so I thought this was an interesting artifact of a time when Frank Miller was still in the process of becoming FRANK MILLER, with all that carries with it.
Born and raised in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Jon Maki developed an enduring love for comics at an early age.
