Issue(s): Daredevil annual #1
Cover Date: Sep 67
Title: "Electro, and the Emissaries of Evil!"
Credits:
Stan Lee - Writer
Gene Colan - Penciler
John Tartaglione - Inker

Review/plot:
It's Daredevil's first annual, and something should be done to celebrate, so Electro has totally got this, you guys. He's done something like this before. You get a bunch of his A-List villains and form a team and go after him. It'll be fun! So who have we got here. It's Friday night, so Mr. Hyde is unavailable.

Gladiator? Ok, that's cool.

Stilt-Man. Hrmm. Umm. Ok.

Leap-Frog? Uh. Wow.

Anybody else?

Who? The Matador?!?

Well, we'll make do with what we've got. Actually Daredevil has to pop some pills to get through it.

You know it's totally just a party for Daredevil because Electro actually had Daredevil beat right in the beginning but instead of just killing him or whatever, he ran away so that he could do it again properly.

And in the end, they let him tie them all up with some wire and pretend like it actually means something.

It was a valiant effort, but it didn't work. Matt Murdock is still pining for Karen. Oh Karen. Oh oh oh Karen my darling Karen.

A back-up feature shows Gene Colan showing up at Stan Lee's house for a plotting session.

Quality Rating: C-

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: The MCP places this between Daredevil #34-35.

References:

• Not everybody gets a footnote, but the Gladiator's defeat in Daredevil #23 is referenced.
  
• Electro rescued Stilt-Man after his defeat in Daredevil #27.
  
• Another back-up feature attempts to explain the madness of Mike Murdock, with a footnote to his first "appearance" in Daredevil #25.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

The weird thing is that this annual is the first time Zemo is referred to as BARON Zemo.

Well considering the first time this sort of team was done we had idiots like Leap-Frog and the Matador with them barely introduced, seeing Typhoid Mary's group not too long after introduction feels like an obvious upgrade.

Is DD stashing pills in his billy-club?

Cullen, just in case that isn't a rhetorical question, in the early days Daredevil used to stash all sorts of crazy stuff in his club. Tape recorders, smoke bombs, window shades. I think this is the only time we see the "nutrition capsules".

Thanks - that's what it looked like, but wanted to be sure.
Because putting something like pills in an item you wield and throw seems like a real liability, in that it would interfere with the balance and weight of the object.

That's not even getting into all the other things the club is supposed to be able to do (extend, shoot a rope to swing from, etc.). I'm guessing at some point a handbook or bonus page gave us a cutaway view demonstrating how this all "works." Maybe not, though!

Someone commissioned John Byrne to do a reimagining of this issue's cover back in 2010.

Have a look:

http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=35671&PN=0&TPN=1

Wow, that's so very odd that the first time Zemo was ever actually referred to as "Baron" was in a humorous back-up story that ran in, of all places, the first Daredevil annual, published over two years after the character died, and that this was almost certainly due to Stan Lee's notoriously bad memory causing him to forget that the character had only ever been referred to as "Doctor Zemo" while he was still alive.

So, just recently, DD has been beaten and (inexplicably) spared from death by the Cobra and Mr. Hyde (2x), the Beetle, and now Electro. At this rate, Mike Murdock's upcoming "death" should be no surprise, at all.

And I bet Matt/Mike/DD is taking some whackier pills than just "nutrition capsules". A drug problem would explain quite a bit of his recent actions, I'm thinking.

Supervillains don't think like normal people or even normal criminals; if they did, they wouldn't become supervillains in the first place.

This was actually an entertaining story but you missed an important (so to speak) detail. The Matador has his cloak, he thinks, draped over DD and runs him through only to find that he has mortally wounded the Leapfrog. Well not mortally but pretty badly because the Leapfrog is not seen again until his son becomes Frog-Man in Marvel Team-Up so it obviously took a long time to recover.

@Bobby- he's next seen again in Defenders 62-64. Still, you're right- a pretty long time.

It's like Stan Lee recycled the first Spider-Man annual when Webhead took on the Sinister Six: Tailor the story for DD, borrow Electro since they faced off in issue #2 (Is there a member of Spidey's Rogues' Gallery Daredevil HASN'T fought?), then subtract by one and make it the "Furious Five" (with apologies to Grandmaster Flash).