Daredevil #3 (1964)
By Stan Lee, Joe Orlando, Vince Colletta
So, What Happens? An accountant framed by the unscrupulous businessman known as the Owl suicides. Having found papers connecting the Owl to the illegal proceedings, the police arrest the man, who randomly chooses Nelson and Murdock to represent him in court. Intrigued by the Owl and his reputation, Matt accepts and arranges for him to be set temporarily free, making sure to memorize the man's distinctive traits with his special senses. The Owl never comes back to court so a warrant for his arrest is issued. Daredevil scours the city to pick up his trail, but the Owl has left by boat and moved to a fortress across the Hudson, where he is testing two new underlings known for their strength and skills: Sad Sam and "Ape" Horgon. Having been exposed, he has decided to openly become a criminal. Satisfied by the two men, the Owl keeps them in line by showing off his ability to glide thanks to his special cape. He then decides to hire Matt as a front for his operations and goes to NY to get him, but Matt senses his scent and has time to change into Daredevil and get the drop on the Owl and his men. Daredevil's skills and agility are too match for Sad Sam and Horgon, but before he can tackle the Owl, Karen Page accidentally enters the room and is taken hostage. With no other choice, Daredevil surrenders. He and Karen are taken to the Owl's fortress, where the mobster wants to show his prisoner to every gangster in town in order to be acknowledged as their boss. Left alone, Daredevil quickly escapes his cage and frees Karen. He then sends her to call the police whilst he finally faces the Owl, who's no match in a physical contest but still manages to escape thanks to his traps and gliding cape.
Notes: Matt adds a shoulder pouch to his costume where to fit his everyday clothes and is quite proud of it, but it won't last past the next issue. Since the book was bi-monthly at the time, it looks like either the readers didn't respond well to the pouch or Stan wasn't completely satisfied with DD's look and was experimenting on it, before going for a whole new costume a few months later. The Owl, Ape Horgon and Sad Sam all have profiles on the Marvel Appendix website. The Owl will go on to become one of DD's main rogues, but Horgon and Sam will never be seen again.
Something Silly This Way Comes: The shoulder pouch is quite silly, but before creating it Daredevil had to roll his clothes into a ball and kick it along on the city rooftops. One imagines the general public would notice an owl-shaped fortress across the Hudson river. And in said fortress the Owl just to happens to keep a caged gorilla for Horgon to fight against.
Review: This is an interesting story where the total really is more than the sum of its parts. After borrowing Spider-Man's Electro for issue #2, Stan creates the first original Daredevil villain, but with mixed results. By rights, the Owl is pretty ridicolous in this issue, escaping capture twice just by dumb luck and with a rather useless power. And yet, the way Stan slowly introduces him through captions in the opening pages and his demure, self-assured behaviour produce a far more menacing and sinister figure than most masked supervillains.
I'm not overly familiar with the works of Joe Orlando, but the slow pace of this issue, with more emphasis on atmosphere and setting than on fistfights, seems to suit him. The Owl looks creepy in almost every panel, and so does his aerie, which by all means should be downright silly with its eye-shaped windows. A lot of credit should also go to Vince Colletta, whose inks not only are detailed, but also play with shadows and black lines in facial close-ups to further enhance the Owl's creepy features and expressions. Colletta has quite a reputation for ruining artworks or erasing characters, but here he either made more of an effort or felt the small cast played to his strengths. The only one to suffer from the Orlando/Colletta team-up is Karen Page, whose face seems to wear an almost perpetual round-shaped, open mouth look and ends up looking a bit like a plastic doll.
It's also interesting to compare this issue, published in August 1964, with Amazing Spider-Man #10, published only three months earlier that same year. Both feature wanna-be crime lords and similar attempts to take control of all the NYC gangs, but Spidey's adventure is colorful, with two large fights and plenty of goons, whereas this story keeps the action to a minimum and prefers to focus on the Owl as a character. Spider-Man and Daredevil are Marvel's only two original street-level heroes, and it looks like Stan wanted to keep the tone of the two books different to begin with, probably to make sure they wouldn't negatively impact on each other's sales.
Final Verdict: Not much action, but the sinister introduction of one of Daredevil's major villains. 4/5
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