Issue(s): Daredevil #253
Cover Date: Apr 88
Title: "Merry Christmas, Kingpin"
Credits:
Ann Nocenti - Writer
John Romita Jr. - Penciler
Al Williamson - Inker
Marc Siry - Assistant Editor
Ralph Macchio - Editor

Review/plot:
Eightball, one of the Bratpack kids that followed Ann Nocenti over to this title from her Longshot series, is infatuated with the Wildboys, rough criminals in Hell's Kitchen.

Daredevil is on their trail, and has to deal with Eightball's weirdness.

Eightball also doesn't like girls.

The Kingpin, meanwhile, is as out of it as Eightball, obsessively thinking about Daredevil.

He's also Ebenezer Scrooge.

That bites him in the butt when a real estate deal collapses because the buyer didn't like being bothered on Christmas. But the Kingpin continues his obsessive focus on DD.

Daredevil takes out the Wildboys...

...and convinces Eightball not to follow in their footsteps (although it takes a while to sink in).

Quality Rating: B

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: It's Christmas! Pushing this issue back in time to sync up with other Christmas issues that have a Fall of the Mutants dependency.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Jet and Spit have a couple more appearances.

The Wildboys reappear in a few issues time, so they'd have to be tagged under Characters Appearing.

Thanks, Michael and James.

The Wildboys even got their own MU Handbook page(embarrassingly) that described their street fighting as a "Martial Art". What else that writer considered a martial art, I shudder to speculate...

I wonder if the Miller and Nocenti DAREDEVIL eras of the '80s were carefully set up to be the Marvel book teenage boys read last in the pile. After all the cheesecake in X-MEN, DAZZLER, et cetera, they could turn to these gratuitous and increasingly frequent "Kingpin exercising in gym shorts" panels to cool off.

Eightball wonders how DD knew he wanted to roll with the Wildboyz? Well you been blabbering on about them to him like they were gods or something...just a bit obvious, that's all.

This Christmas is also shown in X-Factor #27.

The Wildboys are somewhat more embarrassing inretrospect, since their name and initial gimmick are taken from the "wilding" neologism popularized int he wake of the Central Park jogger case, in which a bunch of minority teenagers were convicted of rape and battery. The media had a field day, proclaiming that "wilding" -- random violence sprees and stranger assaults perpetrated by groups of youthful "superpredators" -- was the latest trend in urban crime.

A few years later, most of the convictions in that case were vacated, and it became fairly clear that the crime was more likely the act of one convicted rapist, who confessed and who matched the DNA evidence. The term "wilding" pretty quickly fell out of usage...and so did the Wildboys.

Aaaaaand looking at the publication dates, I see that this story predates that case. Well, there goes a perfectly good rant.