Issue(s): Daredevil #209
Cover Date: Aug 84
Title: "Blast from the past!"
Credits:
Arthur Byron Cover & Harlan Ellison - Writer
David Mazzucchelli - Penciler
Dan Bulanadi - Inker

Review/plot:
Harlan Ellison's credit is just "from an idea by".

This issue begins the night following the events of last issue. As we saw then, there are additional roaming bomb-children robots sent out by Mrs. Death-Stalker to lure Daredevil to her death-trap house. Daredevil has already escaped the house, but the other robots are still out there.

But right now Daredevil catches an arsonist that it turns out he knows from childhood. His name is Johnny Squarejohn. They were friends until Johnny joined a gang. Matt makes sure that Johnny's lawyer will get him a plea bargain in return for his testimony against the people who hired him.

Meanwhile, Daredevil has to start getting rid of all the bomb-bots.

There's a lot!

He eventually gets them all rounded up and lets them explode. But one survives. Johnny, for whom things haven't been going well, shows up, and sacrifices himself to save Daredevil, who he knows to be Matt.

Foggy and Debbie have a blow-out fight about Micah Synn and the state of their marriage in general this issue. Matt is practically oblivious to it, in part due to the fact that it's a noisy restaurant (which is a nice touch), and partially because his mind is on the robot bombs. Foggy is aware at this point that Debbie seems to have an interest in Micah.

Here's a letter from this issue:

What have you done to Debbie Nelson? This is not the woman Foggy married, nor was there ever anything in her character to justify such inaccurate characterization as that portrayed in DD #204! I'm a psychology major and know a little something about human personality, and Debbie's is not even similar to what we had witnessed earlier! This personality change would require extremely radical alteration of her basic personality!

"Johnny Squarejohn" is a pure fill-in character. Introduce someone new into Daredevil's backstory, tell a story about him, and neatly get rid of him at the end. But the robot girls are very creepy and very well done; i think i liked this issue better than the previous one.

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

An interesting story about the Harlan Ellison issues: supposedly these were done at Denny O'Neil's behest as he was very sick and needed to recover. Jim Shooter then had some argument with Harlan over the story(possibly over ownership rights) and Harlan apparently stopped work on it. Then Denny supposedly contacted Harlan, told him his job was at stake and to stop messing around, upon which Harlan finished. The relationship between Denny and Harlan never really got better after that.

Jim Shooter says he doesn't remember the issues at all. See the end of this post:

http://www.jimshooter.com/2011/10/stan-meets-mobster-and-other-tales-to.html