Issue(s): Daredevil #131, Daredevil #132
Cover Date: Mar-Apr 76
Title: "Watch out for Bullseye, he never misses!" / "Bullseye rules supreme!"
Credits:
Marv Wolfman - Writer
Bob Brown - Penciler
Klaus Janson - Inker

Review/plot:
This is the first appearance of Bullseye. He is out to make a name for himself as an assassin, so he sends a message to a wealthy executive (via a paper plane that he throws so well that it breaks right through a glass window) demanding money...

...and then immediately shows up asking for the money, knowing that the exec couldn't pay even if he would have been willing to. He just wants to make an example of him. So he kills him with a ballpoint pen.

Pretty brutal.

Daredevil gets the scoop on Bullseye from a Jake Conover, reporter for the Daily Bugle. Conover will not appear again for a long while, but he'll eventually become one of the people to use the identity of the Rose.

Conover explains that Bullseye "always had this unique knack for throwing things" but discovered his lethal potential during Vietnam.

Daredevil then gets to meet Bullseye personally. Bullseye sends a grenade as a calling card...

...and then pelts Daredevil with garbage.

He leads Daredevil to a circus tent. Cameras will record their fight, and men armed with machine guns will fire on the crowd if DD tries to leave.

Bullseye has the upper hand throughout the fight with Daredevil in the beginning of the story, but it is because of the grenade explosion. When Bullseye gets away, Daredevil is chewed out by the police (Lt. Bert Rose) for interfering, but Daredevil argues back that the police are not equipped to handle super-powered criminals. I thought that was interesting.

Bullseye continues to be fairly brutal as he extorts money from rich folks, but he's there's no more on-panel murders like in his introductory scene.

To illustrate the difference between Bullseye now and his post-Frank Miller self, in this issue he fights DD in a circus and at one point he launches a human cannonball at him.

Daredevil beats him fairly easily in their rematch.

And yes, i concede that this issue features a circus and the Ringmaster doesn't show up.

In addition to all of this, a new client at Nelson & Murdock's storefront law office asks Matt to investigate a slum apartment building run by Glenn Industries - which is Heather's father's business.

And there's a continuation of strange radio commercials. These started previously and were part of the reason why Foggy Nelson lost the District Attorney election to Blake Tower. But even with the election settled, a mysterious villain forces his kidnapped scientist to continue broadcasts...

...which announce all sorts of strange things.

Foggy's fiance Debbie Harris is also missing.

Issue #131 begins with Daredevil taking out a group of thieves called the Rocketeers. As the caption says, this is meant to show the kind of things Daredevil deals with that aren't worth showing in the comics, and he takes these guys out without them even getting a chance to use their suits' abilities. The technology behind these suits will eventually be relevant to the Torpedo and ROM, however.

A lot going on, and an interesting new villain.

Police lieutenant Bert Rose will be a minor recurring character. Despite his affectation for roses, this character does not become the Rose (just clearing that up since Jake Conover also appears in this arc). In the lettercol for issue #138, it's shown that Bert Rose actually first appeared in Daredevil #1.

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 6 - first Bullseye, Jake Conover, & Rocketeers.

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References:

• In his fight with Bullseye, Daredevil is extra cautious about civilian bystanders because of his experience with the suburban family in Daredevil #127.
  
• Trying to reassure Matt's new girlfriend Heather Glenn that Matt will be ok even though he's been missing a while, Foggy brings up the fact that in Daredevil #29 Matt once 'pretended' to be Daredevil to rescue Karen Page from a criminal gang.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Daredevil vs. Bullseye TPB (#132 is an original)

Bob Brown died not long after this, making him the 3rd artist to die on Daredevil.

Bullseye's costume was designed by Wolfman & John Romita.

In the mid-1980s, there was an attempt by persons unknown at Marvel to force Dave Stevens to change the name of his extremely popular "Rocketeer" character by claiming copyright violation of the DD Rocketeer name. This attempt was stopped when it was discovered that DC had some Rocketeers of their own from the early 1960s. Shooter got a lot of blame for this, but it's unknown if he had any actual involvement in Marvel's legal department.

Klaus Janson's inks look much better with Bob Brown than Frank Miller. Perhaps Miller brings down Janson.

At the bottom of the Daily Bugle page shown here, it reads:
1st column:"Police Commissioner John Hiltunen discovered Patrick Leo dead in his apt."
2nd column:?
3rd column:"way too many Neal Adams comics. Boredom, he cried? No he lied. Killed by"
4th column:?

Anybody want to take a whack at the other two? I suspect Janson put them in.

Mark, i took a close look at that text, and i couldn't even decipher the two that you provided without looking at what you wrote.

Supposedly, Bullseye's only "power" is his perfect aim. Pretty sure that doesn't equal paper airplane going through glass window. He's not Gambit, after all.

Finally deciphered that 2nd column in that Daily Bugle page:

"officer Ribaldi says [it] was murder. Hilton however said"

Still can't make out the 4th column.

Bullseye's gimmick here isn't just that he's got perfect aim; there's also some stuff about how he can make a deadly weapon out of literally anything. There's a bit in #132 where he tries to impale DD with an umbrella as if it's a sword, for example, and the "human cannonball" thing is probably a (cheesy) way of trying to show that anything he gets a hold of might be used to kill the hero.

Bullseye's weird "cartridge-gun" thing comes back a few more times too, and even shows up in Bullseye's first go-round under Roger McKenzie and Frank Miller, where he uses some of the cartridges to take out the Black Widow.

131 issues into his run, Daredevil finally gets his arch-nemesis although it will be several more years before Bullseye really gets to claim that spot under Frank Miller.

One thing I've found interesting in comics is how future writers are able to handle characters for good or bad and make them real threats or losers later.