Angar and Loathing in San Francisco: Steve Gerber's Daredevil #99-107

[This post brought to you by a frequent visitor here, Thomas, who doesn't have a place to put it himself; therefore, it's my pleasure to host his stimulating thoughts on Daredevil here for the SSoS project, and I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have.

And now, without further ado: "Angar and Loathing."]


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As a Marvel superhero team, The Defenders are defined explicitly through their opposition to their more mainstream counterparts, The Avengers. While The Avengers’ roster includes A list heavy hitters like Thor and Captain America, the Defenders consists of niche B characters like Nighthawk and Doctor Strange. The Avengers’ battle cry, “Avengers Assemble,” specifically speaks to their inclusive, team oriented approach to adventuring. The Defenders, on the other hand, are a “non-team”, a group of individuals who must–at times begrudgingly–work together for a greater good. They are outsiders, loners, and marginalized individualists; hardly a team at all.

How perfect then that this series might cross paths with that of another of Marvel’s B list superheroes, Daredevil. While Captain America takes it upon himself to protect an entire nation, Daredevil focuses his efforts on a single community, Hell’s Kitchen. Daredevil, like many of the Defenders, is also an individualist, often unable to communicate effectively with those closest to him, let alone with a larger group of superheroes. He is a character who acts with a singularity of intent, regardless of what others may think of him and his actions, to such an extent that in Vol. 2 #56, Luke Cage, Peter Parker, Reed Richards, and Stephen Strange feel the need to launch an intervention on his behalf. He is a dark, complex character; a cult superhero who functions on the margins of Marvel’s superhero universe. He is just the type of hero who embodies the thematic complexities of a superhero team like the Defenders.

There is just one problem… the Daredevil I have just described… It is Brian M. Bendis’ Daredevil. It is Ann Nocenti’s Daredevil. It is, of course, Frank Miller’s Daredevil. And the Defenders I have described… It is Roy Thomas’ Defenders. It is Steve Englehart’s. Neither of these descriptions accurately summarizes Steve Gerber’s take on this group of characters.

As Plok argues in Seven Soldiers of Steve #0, Steve Gerber’s run on the Defenders can be viewed as the “longest-running graphic novel ever… a hundred regular-sized comics' worth of meditation on life outside the mainstream, but not all the way outside the mainstream.” Plok reflects on the fact that Gerber altered (ever so slightly) the basic premise of the book, and in doing so changed the characters in a significant way. As penned by Gerber, the Defenders were still outsiders, but they were outsiders looking for a place to belong, a team to be a part of, a place to call home. They were outsiders in dialogue with the inside. It was a comic about the relationships between the inside and the outside, the marginal and the mainstream, the individual and the group.

When Gerber took over Daredevil with issues #99, (after scripting Gerry Conway's plots for the two preceding issues) Matt Murdock was far from being the noir hero epitomized by Miller and expanded upon by later writers like Nocenti and Bendis. At the time that Gerber took over the title, the gritty and violent individualist was actually sharing his book with a co-star. The title had been changed to Daredevil and the Black Widow as of issue #92, the cover of which featured Black Widow telling Matt, “Stay Back! This is the Widow’s show!” Additionally, Matt’s law partner is one Jason Sloan, while Foggy Nelson and Karen Page are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps most surprising of all is the fact that Hell’s Kitchen’s very own “Guardian Devil” is 3000 miles away, having relocated to sunny southern California’s counter-culture mecca, San Francisco. By the end of Gerber’s first issue, Daredevil has battled Hawkeye in the streets of San Francisco (over their mutual affection for the Black Widow, of course!); been visited by the Vision, Black Panther, and Thor; accepted an invitation to join the Avengers; and blasted off in a quinjet to battle the X-Men supervillian Magneto! Far from being a dark, lone figure patrolling the alleyways of Hell's Kitchen, Gerber’s Daredevil was posited directly within the centre of Marvel’s 1970’s mainstream superhero milieu. This is certainly not Frank Miller's Daredevil!

Who then is this superhero who sits on the ground, a bemused look on his face, following his fight with Hawkeye in issues #99, noting, “That was the strangest fight I’ve ever had!” and what role does he play in the massive and far reaching Defenders graphic novel? Not surprisingly, he is a character not very far removed from his counterparts in the Defenders. It is actually rather fitting that nothing about this Daredevil is easily recognizable to the modern reader, for he is a character in flux. Matt seems unsure of who he is, where he should be, and what he should stand for. This dilemma is externalized in the setting of the book. San Francisco is depicted as a place where cultural boundaries have eroded, where the outside in not in relationship with the inside so much as it has become it. Over the course of Gerber’s run, the cast of the book continually attempt to understand just what it means when the margins become the centre.

On the first page of Gerber’s second issue of Daredevil, the landmark 100^th issue, the first thing the writer does is establish Daredevil's liminal positioning. Arriving back in San Francisco following his adventure with the Avengers, the captioning tells us that Matt "knows that he is... home? No--Not home. Just... back..." Hells Kitchen has not been replaced by San Francisco, it has just been temporarily superseded by it. Daredevil ejects from the cockpit and careens through the air, down towards this city that is his home, and yet not. During this fall, Matt briefly experiences a psychedelic flash and for a panel the backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay area are replaced by a swirl of cosmic shapes. Through this geographical and temporal disconnect, we are reminded that Matt is a man is transition, still adjusting to his surroundings, still learning just what it means to exist in this time and place. Throughout the next few issues, Matt struggles to navigate his way through these complex geographical and social surroundings.

To this end, issue #100 features a fascinating guest star: Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine. Rolling Stone was itself a magazine that specialized in navigating the gaps between marginal hippie culture and more traditional mainstream journalism in the late sixties and early seventies. At the time of Daredevil #100, Rolling Stone’s offices were still situated in San Francisco. It would be another three years before the magazine would become a mainstream corporate entity following its relocation to New York City. Daredevil too would eventually move back to New York, but as of issue #100, both were very much situated in the cultural space of early 1970’s San Francisco.

After rescuing Wenner from some attackers, Daredevil is given a guided tour of the Rolling Stone bullpen. As he moves amongst the journalists he thinks to himself, "This is all so different from Matt's uptight law office!" Matt’s our hero and the book’s protagonist, but he’s clearly not as cool as these hip young writers. When Wenner asks Daredevil for an interview, the relationship between counter-culture and mainstream culture becomes all the more pronounced. Daredevil says, “You're kidding! I didn't think the counter-culture was interested in anybody who works with the police!” He is genuinely startled that they would be interested in interviewing him. Wenner makes an argument that any comic book fan can understand. He tells Daredevil, "You want the system to work justly, up front, and even people who oppose the system can respect that." This admiration that the journalists have for Daredevil seems appropriate given that a large portion of Marvel’s readership was made up of University students and hippies who were drawn to Stan Lee’s angsty, outsider protagonists. One imagines that many of Rolling Stone’s readers were also readers of comics like Daredevil.

Gerber uses Matt as a pendulum, swinging him back and forth across cultural borders. In this scene for example, Daredevil seems to function as a sort of proxy for men like Jack Kirby (a tough guy World War II veteran) and Steve Ditko (a political conservative); men who suddenly found their work being rabidly enjoyed by leftist intellectuals and long haired war protestors. Insider lawyer Matt Murdock becomes an outsider within the offices of this counter-culture magazine, only to be reabsorbed into their fraternity through their admiration and respect. Only a few issues later, while at a cocktail party in the house of Kerwin Broderick, his senior law partner, Matt is asked by some snooty party goers what is his favorite opera. Matt responds “Tommy!” to the dismay of those around him. In this scene, the pendulum has swung back in the other direction. In the Rolling Stone bullpen he’s clearly one of the “older folk”, but at this party, Matt is the wild rebel lawyer who enjoys rock groups like The Who. Gerber writes Daredevil as a character who can interact with the counter-culture, but also with the local San Francisco PD, several of whom are supporting characters in the book at this point.

Gerber goes out of his way to integrate Matt into both worlds, because both worlds exist within the same central space. Neither the uptight law offices nor the rebellious Rolling Stone bullpen are at the margins, both are part of San Fransico’s mainstream culture. When Wenner first asks, "You, I presume, are Daredevil?" Matt responds, "Don't tell me I look like Alice Cooper?" The difference between superheroes and rock stars is collapsed. Wenner adds, “Some of the rock stars we cover are almost as far out!” Rock stars, hippies, superheroes, and rock journalists, by this point in time all have become central focal points in mainstream pop culture. In fact, Gerber suggests that the marginal hippy culture has been so absorbed into the mainstream that it has been co-opted by the very forces it was supposed to oppose.

This is 1973 after all, not 1968. Hell's Angels, hired as bodyguards by the Rolling Stones, have already beaten and stabbed a young black man to death in front of the stage at Altamont (after San Francisco refused to allow the concert to take place within city limits). Three others would also die at the concert, effectively putting an end to the peace and love era. Within a year of the release of Daredevil #100, Nixon would resign the presidency to avoid impeachment. America had entered a new era. As one of Wenner's Rolling Stone staff members put it,

“San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of… There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vega and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

As Hunter S. Thompson's quote so eloquently explains, the idealism, hope, and naiveté of the 1960's had quickly given way to the harsh realities of life in 1970's America. And thus, in issue #101, Steve Gerber gives us Angar the Screamer.

In the not so subtly titled “Vengeance in the Sky with Diamonds” we learn that Daredevil’s brief temporal displacement in issue #100 was the result of David Angar’s superpower, “Angar screams, and reality falls apart.” Angar has been causing psychedelic “freak outs” throughout the city in an attempt to destroy Daredevil. And just why is he screaming? What is he so angry about? The death of the sixties of course! The death of everything that San Francisco stood for less than five years earlier.

When Daredevil first encounters him, Angar seems no different than any other run-of-the-mill villain, complete with the usual boisterous quips and monologues about how powerful he is and how easily he will destroy the hero. His clothing, however, clearly marks him as something different: a counter-culture rebel. With his long hair, head-band, handlebar mustache, and denim vest with flower print and tassels, Angar’s hippy uniform suggests that he would be more at home at a rock concert than fighting a superhero.

After their battle, Angar returns home to a gigantic mansion, and Gerber provides readers with our first real insights into the character. As he walks through the entrance of the gigantic house, Angar thinks “Every time I see this place I get nauseous. The classic nouveau-riche glass palace! Twenty seven rooms of gloom. I hate it—like I hate ‘The Man’. And I put up with it—Like I put up with ‘The Man’.” As it turns out The Man is a nameless benefactor who has supplied Angar with his powers. As one might have guessed, hippy-rebel David Angar is not particularly happy to be working for someone called The Man. He rants:

“You wanna hear it again, Man? The story of our dream—of the world we were gonna build? The love, the peace, the freedom we sought? You knew you had to kill it! So, that’s what you did… in Berkeley, Chicago, Ohio. You broke us, Man! We stopped caring, most of us… but not me. I wanted vengeance on the hippies who sold out, and on you and your kind.”

Angar is disgusted with what has happened to the hippy dream. The most superficial attributes of the movement may have worked its way into mainstream culture, but the ideals of the movement were shot dead by police officers working for those with the real power. Confused, angry, lost… like so many of the Love Generation, David feels powerless to express the rage that he feels towards the moral vacuum of 1970’s America, and so he makes a deal with the devil. He quite literally sells out to The Man, agreeing to work as his hired goon in exchange for his psychedelic powers.

When Angar kidnaps Matt, in hopes of drawing out Daredevil, our hero points out that Angar is behaving like a villain. Angar responds, “Villain? Don’t call me that! I want to save the world from men like my nameless boss.” Matt, of course, recognizes the obvious hypocrisy of Angar’s argument. Matt says, “You're blowing it. Don’t you see? Look at you. You’re on a violence trip—a power trip, the works. What comes next, search and destroy missions?” The resistance to the war in Viet Nam was certainly one of the unifying themes of the 1960’s counter-culture movement, and Matt’s explicit reference to “search and destroy missions” is obviously meant to associate Angar’s behavior with that of the American government. By agreeing to work for The Man, and allowing himself to become part of the centre, outsider David Angar has been transformed into everything he hates. He, like Daredevil, finds himself bridging two cultural positions, wandering through this middle ground of San Francisco, unsure of who he is anymore.

David Angar isn’t the only one living in a “monument to money”. Matt and Natasha live in a large mansion of their own, with rent paid for by an inheritance that Natasha received; an inheritance that is quickly drying up. When his boss tries to force him to plead guilty for some clients that he knows are innocent, Matt is faced with a moral dilemma. Does he do what he knows is right and plead innocent, and risk losing his huge home, or does he toe the company line and plead guilty, thus ensuring a steady paycheck?

Matt and David’s dilemmas are brought to a head when it is revealed in issue #106 that The Man is none other than Matt’s boss, Kerwin Broderick himself. Matt Murdock and David Angar have been selling out to the same man! Both have allowed themselves to be used and manipulated as his puppets in Broderick’s grand scheme to make himself monarch of San Francisco. When Broderick merges with Terrex, a giant monster, and kills Angar’s girlfriend as part of his quest for power in issue #107, Daredevil and Angar finally team up to take down The Man. Using his psychedelic powers, Angar is able to aid in Broderick’s defeat, but he looses his own powers in the process. Daredevil and Angar have resisted the system, and brought down the would-be patriarch to whom they used to be servants, but at a cost.

Issues #99-107 of Daredevil (drawn by several different artists, with a fill in issue written by Chris Claremont) are a convoluted mess, with entire issues full of unrelated twists and turns, and countless guest stars and villains, (Moondragon, Captain Marvel, Kraven the Hunter, etc.). But amongst these various by-the-numbers battles and tangential stories and crossovers is a fascinating exploration of life in San Francisco in the early 1970’s. Gerber seizes on the San Francisco setting established by Conway and uses Daredevil’s unstable stasis to continue his Defenders graphic novel, his meditation on outsiders trying to find a place to belong. In these issues, he gives us a hero and a villain who straddle the inside and the outside, both whom are learning how to live in place where the counter-culture rubs shoulders with the mainstream every day. Daredevil, David Angar, and the city of San Francisco are all utilized by the writer to explore the realities of an America where hippies have been accepted into the mainstream, but who, in the process, have been transformed into disillusioned and powerless nobodies, or sell-outs working in collusion with the system. The conclusion that is reached is not a happy one. David Angar loses his true love (like he has lost everything else) and sacrifices his powers in order to stop The Man; and Matt Murdoch is never able to come to terms with this new setting. Apparently, neither were Daredevil’s readers.

This initial arc by Gerber, with its revolving door team of artists, was not beloved by the fans, as the letters pages of these issues testify. By issue #107, readers are told by the editors that Daredevil will be going bi-monthly because its poor sales could no longer support a monthly comic book.

When issues #108 hit the stands two months later, “and The Black Widow” had been removed from the cover and replaced with the pre-issue #92 “Daredevil The Man Without Fear” title card. Early in the story, Matt learns that his old friend Foggy Nelson has been shot, and he immediately heads back to New York. The entire San Fransico supporting cast is dropped, and Watergate is explicitly mentioned for the first time. After Matt leaves her in San Francisco, Natasha’s butler attempts to comfort her, telling her that Matt will be back soon. As tears drip down her face, Natasha voices what is already blatantly clear to all: Matt is not coming back. After this final meditation on the dreams of the sixties, Matt, the readers, and Gerber himself seem to have turned their backs on San Francisco and everything it used to represent. The outside has become the inside, and in doing so, it has been emptied of the idealism, hope, love, and passion that initially gave it life. As a character like David Angar makes clear, the sixties weren’t just over, they were dead. It was now time to look ahead to the 1970’s, to the violence of New York, to a time when no one (including the President) could be trusted… to the dark noir world of Frank Miller’s Daredevil.