Issue(s): Daredevil #93, Daredevil #94
Cover Date: Nov-Dec 72
Title: "A power corrupt!" / "He can crush the world!"
Credits:
Gerry Conway - Writer
Gene Colan - Penciler
Tom Palmer - Inker

Review/plot:
Weird survivalist rich guy Damon Dran brainwashes the Black Widow and sends her after DD...

...while he has some henchmen pick up the Project Four orb, having forced the location out of Danny French.

Dran does some mad science to absorb the power of the orb...

...and becomes the Indestructible Man.

Colan does a great job depicting the Indestructible Man as a giant movie monster guy.

DD and a returned-to-her-senses Black Widow fight him...

...and you might wonder what two acrobats can do against a guy that the National Guard can't stop, but ultimately Danny French defeats him with a pointed stick.

French is killed in the explosion.

We learn that Danny French also didn't know that the grenades he was using during Project Four contained poison gas, and he's been struggling with the guilt of that since the mission. We also learn that the scientists that were killed were working for Damon Dran in the first place. I'm not sure if we learn anything more, like what the heck the point of the mission was or why the Widow, as a Soviet agent, would have been involved (look, either it was a Soviet mission, in which case i don't see how French could have been allowed to keep the orb, or it was a freelance thing, in which case i don't know why the Widow was involved), but i don't even care, dude. It's been nine issues since Danny French first came around hinting at a mysterious something, and all i know is that it's now over.

A number of complaints in the lettercols about how the Widow's been treated in this series, and Conway may be responding to that with scenes like this...

...but making her sound like she's got a chip on her shoulder is only marginally better.

Quality Rating: C

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: At the start of this arc, DD had been looking for the Black Widow for the past 36 hours, since the end of the last issue.

References:

• We learned the details for Project Four in Daredevil #90.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Y'know I know Colan's artwork doesn't seem so good for action but I think he's alright. His artwork is like something you could see in a gallery to me. Study his bodies during a fight and I think they look great.

I wonder if Conway was aiming for some (not very well-executed) political commentary here. The villain is a munitions magnate who fears nuclear destruction, he's funding secret immortality projects for himself, and his last name is an anagram of RAND (corporation).

If so, it comes off a little better than the earlier El Condor story's attempts to comment on Latin American politics, and whatever the Mister Kline story was meant to be about.