Issue(s): Daredevil #75, Daredevil #76
Cover Date: Apr-May 71
Title: "Now rides the ghost of El Condor!" / "The deathmarch of El Condor!"
Credits:
Gerry Conway - Writer
Gene Colan - Penciler
Syd Shores / Tom Palmer - Inker

Review/plot:
Syd Shores had been inking the title regularly for a while. He's replaced by Tom Palmer with issue #76, although we'll have a few breaks in Palmer's run, including some issues where Shores returns.

These issues have Conway thrashing in yet another direction. This time (per the cover of issue #75) the story is "Ripped from today's screaming headlines". It involves Foggy, in his capacity as Assistant District Attorney of New York, traveling to the fictional country of Delvadia on the invitation of a Senator friend of his. The Senators are on this fact finding mission because American diplomats to Delvadia keep getting kidnapped by a revolutionary named El Condor, who is described as "nothing less than the most romantic Latin American revolutionary since Che Guevara".

He doesn't seem very romantic, though. He seems like a petty thug.

Of course, Matt Murdock is kind of a jerk, too, giving his friend Foggy a concussion to preserve his secret identity.

Holy crap, Matt. What happened to that Vulcan neck pinch from Daredevil #68?

Anyway, i don't know what the point of this story is. Conway doesn't seem to have anything specific to say about Latin American revolutionaries. Nothing good, anyway. They're disingenuous thugs backed by foreign powers. They couldn't possibly have any legitimate grievances.

A weird bit in the beginning basically declares that yes, we know this way of writing Hispanic characters is outdated and racist, but we're going to do it anyway.

Conway is sure to repeat that point in the next issue.

Actually, a solid three pages of issue #76 are devoted to recapping issue #75. I know every issue could be someone's first, but what about those of us that have read the last issue? We don't really have to read it again, do we?

The story ends with El Condor getting crushed by his own statue.

Quality Rating: D

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Delvadia is later revealed to be the home country of the Tarantula, and in those stories Conway portrays the revolutionaries sympathetically and the government unsympathetically. Maybe Conway felt bad about these issues?

Matt Murdock's obviously really blind, based on that outfit he's wearing in the last scan.

Weird narration shifts from third person to second person. And is Daredevil calling himself "friend" in a thought balloon?

And yeah, the politics on display here are pretty shallow and gross. There certainly were plenty of pseudo-nationalists running around the Third World at the time, proclaiming liberation but really in the service of privileged cliques and foreign interests... but those were U.S. allies, not Guevara acolytes.

Marvelmania #6(9/70) listed Marie Severin & Herb Trimpe as the artists for #75.

I get the sense that between this and the various "Black militants are dupes led by self-serving crooks" stories of this period that Roy Thomas was passing Tom Wolfe's Radical Chicand Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers around the office. Presumably he backed off after the response to Incredible Hulk #142, in which Wolfe actually appears and plugs the book.

Had Roy Thomas been consulted, he probably could have tied el Condor to El Gaucho from the golden age. http://www.reocities.com/jjnevins/avenger.html

Up to this point Daredevil has been bad in an amusingly silly way, but this two parter is just bad. Apart from Matt's outfit at the end. I want a leopard print tie and matching 'kerchief.

Eh, considering the Matador was one of his early villains, somehow terrible Hispanic/Spanish stereotypes are just something Matt keeps coming across back when no one knew what to do with him.