The Overlord said:
I have a question, are Are Daredevill's villains too similar to Batman's villains? On the surface one can argue that Owl, Jester and Mr. Fear are just the poor man's versions of Penguin, Joker and Scarecrow, but lets go deeper then that. The Batman villain Deadshot an assassin who can't miss was introduced 2 and half decades before Bullseye.
Let's talk about that example for a moment. Deadshot was first introduced in "Batman #59" in 1950, but my understanding is that he was
not introduced as a professional assassin. He was just a spoiled rich brat who was an extremely good shot with a handgun and pretended to be fighting crime with trick shooting while he was actually trying to build up his own criminal empire behind the scenes. Batman eventually figured it all out and arrested him (according to a brief flashback sequence in the "Strange Apparitions" TPB -- I've never read the original story from 1950).
Then he was not seen or heard from for
27 years after that single story!
In 1976 Marv Wolfman created the Bullseye character who became one of Daredevil's classic enemies. I don't know if Wolfman had ever read, or even heard of, that single story way back in 1950 that introduced the rich young marksman called Deadshot. It's very possible that he hadn't. It wouldn't be much of a coincidence that he decided to create a new character with great aim. Let's face it: If you establish that a villain has no inherent superpowers, but habitually goes around attacking people with gunshots or other projectiles, it makes sense to say that he has very good aim so that the reader will actually feel a bit nervous when the hero faces off with him!
(What are you going to do instead -- have him say to the superhero, "Hey, you better watch out! I always hit my target at least
1 time out of every
100 practice shots, so I just might get lucky on my first try when I aim at you today!" Somehow that just wouldn't carry the same drama as establishing that on the target range, the villain normally scores
100 hits out of every
100 shots!
)
Then, around late 1977 according to a source I just checked, DC published the story by Steve Englehart that brought "Deadshot" back into Batman's life, this time wearing his red-and-gray costume that he had never bothered with before (wore a tux and top hat in the 1950 story, I gather). Now Floyd Lawton was starting to work as a freelance assassin, which was a completely new development in his life if I've got this right.
So it's perfectly possible that Englehart, if anything, may have been inspired by the Bullseye character at Marvel to "create" a similar character for Batman's continuity. Remembering the "spoiled rich kid" Deadshot character from his own childhood comic book reading or something, Engelhart may have decided to dust off this long-forgotten character and change him enough to give him more in common with Bullseye. So even though Deadshot technically "came first," the latecomer Bullseye may have inspired the modern Deadshot
as we know him today, instead of the other way around! Or Englehart may not have been thinking of Bullseye at all when he said, "Hey, whatever happened to good old Deadshot? What if I gave him a brand new paint job?"
With things like this, it can be incredibly hard to figure out which way the chains of "cause and effect" were going, if there was any cause-and-effect relationship at all!
