The first annual of the Daredevil comic was published in 1967, and later republished as Giant-Sized Daredevil, with a different cover but same content otherwise, in 1975.
As I have mentioned before, I have a penchant for comics that can tell me simple stories with lots of action. I bought this at my local comic book store because my brain looked at "$6.00" and looked at "#1" and I figured I had quite the deal. I was unaware at the time that this was a 1970s reprint of 1960s material, but it still seemed like a good deal. And, as I would find out, it would provide, in Monkey's Paw fashion, what I desired: Daredevil fighting five gimmicky villains while making wisecracks.
Okay frantic one...hang loose!! We're leaving small talk behind, and there's nothin' but action ahead...!
We just tossed this in so you wouldn't think we were kidding...!
This was scripted by
Stan Lee, and drawn by
Gene Colan. Stan Lee provides a chatty commentary on what he is doing, even admitting, with a sly wink, that Daredevil's internal monologue is a way to catch us, the readers up, with what is going on with Daredevil. After our standard introduction, the story begins when Daredevil chances upon
Electro and
The Matador having a meeting. Electro is a B-List villain, and The Matador is a
gimmick villain whose gimmick is that...he is a
bullfighter. The meeting is about how to take out Daredevil, which Daredevil interrupts, to the surprise of his adversaries, announcing himself:
Just that lovable ol' Daredevil...me!
He fights both of them, and then later searches down the super-team they are putting together to fight him...
The Emissaries of Evil, featuring Electro, The Matador,
Stilt-Man (a C-List villain with extending hydraulic legs), The Gladiator (a semi-serious villain) and
Leap Frog...a man in a frog costume with springs on his heels. And for about twenty pages, Daredevil engages in
fisticuffs with this motley crew, and after he wraps up (quite literally, lassoing them up and leaving them for the authorities), there is a one page
denouement where we get a little bit of
angst when he complains that neither
Foggy Nelson nor
Karen Page, his co-workers, can ever know that
mild-mannered blind lawyer Matt Murdock is really
Daredevil.
The annual, both the original and the reprint, also featured some back-up material. The most interesting is a three page story showing Stan Lee and Gene Colan having a story conference, an ironic bit of self-mockery showing Stan Lee tossing off wild ideas while his artist tries to keep up. This aside, as well as Stan Lee's various asides while he narrated the story, which was slyly post-modernistic and self-conscious, contradicted greatly with the story, which was a very straight-forward action story. Even during the early years of Marvel, there was always an edge of self-awareness in their stories.
Another interesting thing for me was how different the Daredevil in this story seemed. Daredevil is a rowdy brawler, full of wisecracks, basically showing the same personality as Spider-Man. During the 1960s, Marvel's main characters were The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and The Avengers. Two of Stan Lee's creations, The X-Men and Daredevil, were not yet popular, and Stan Lee himself didn't quite know what to do with them. His original conception of Daredevil, shown in this issue, was as a happy, boisterous brawler, and it would take about twenty years until Frank Miller finally found the direction the character would take. One thing about Stan Lee's flood of ideas in the early 1960s is that they came so fast that he often didn't know what to do with them, and it would take years or decades for the ideas to reach maturity.