“LAST HAND”
A Stan Lee Presentation
Story and Art by Frank Miller
Finished Art and Colors by Klaus Janson
Lettered by Joe Rosen
Edited by Denny O’Neil
Supervised by Jim Shooter
Published by Marvel Comics Group.
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“BULLSEYE
VS.
ELEKTRA
ONE WINS.
ONE DIES.”
-cover blurb from Daredevil No. 181
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Review by William D. Tucker.
Here Be Spoilers . . .
Daredevil-the Man Without Fear-is the horned and crimson costumed alternate identity of New York City defense attorney Matt Murdock. If you are a regular reader of the comic which bears his superheroic name, then you are aware that Murdock is a man who was once exposed to mysterious radioactive materials which robbed him of conventional sight and imbued him with a power of ‘radar vision,’ which, in some ways, is a superior way of seeing the world.
Murdock is also a master martial artist, acrobat, and has a highly evolved sense of ethics. Like other comic book superheroes such as Spider-Man or Batman, he will readily engage in bone-crunching hand-to-hand combat to take down the bad guys, but does not seek to kill people outright. Presumably, Daredevil is so skilled at martial arts that he always manages to punch people just hard enough to knock ‘em out, and not to sever their spinal cords or give them permanent brain damage, not to speak of long-term neuro-degenerative diseases which may have their roots in physical brain traumas-just you try to prove that last one in a court of law, buddy. Good thing DD’s normie job is lawyering, right?
So let’s say you just picked up no. 181 of the ongoing saga of the world’s most superheroic lawyer, and you’re scoping the cover and you see Bullseye and Elektra in the foreground with a giant image of Daredevil in the middleground and nothing but yellow in the back. Text on the cover tells us this is a ‘SPECIAL DOUBLE-SIZE ISSUE’ and that in the battle between Bullseye and Elektra only one of them will survive.
Well, it sure as hell ain’t gonna be Bullseye walking out of here alive. That guy’s an evil-doer. And Elektra, well, she’s a killer, but she’s conflicted about it, and she’s the great love of Murdock’s life. They wouldn’t kill off Elektra. You can’t do a thing like that.
So, you’re a regular Daredevil fan, and you open up the 181st issue . . . and you see an image of Daredevil’s body torturously twisted, his head caught in some crosshairs, as he is seemingly getting a bullet in the fucking bean, his DIY billy club dropping from nerveless fingers. DD’s body language in this full-page panel reminds me of some of the angsty poses Silver Surfer would strike whenever he would get upset about being trapped on Earth.
Now, we know that superheroes never really get killed in comics. If they do, they come back, somehow, some way. So, even if you’re relatively inexperienced reading comics, you most likely have absorbed through cultural osmosis the essential truth that comic book heroes never die, and that this image must be part of some kind of bait-and-switch, some gimmick, some storytelling gambit meant to put the con on rubes and children.
And, indeed, if you read the captions in the top left, you’ll realize that you are seeing the story from the perspective of a bad guy. A bad guy imagining with relish how he’s going to kill the hero.
Turn the page, and meet our narrator: a solitary blonde prisoner in a spacious cage ruminating on how he was both beaten and saved by Daredevil once upon a time.
This prisoner could accept that he was defeated by Ol’ Hornhead, but he cannot live down the humiliation of being saved by this same victor. Daredevil and this villain happened to be fighting on some subway tracks, DD knocked bad guy’s lights out, and then cleared him from the tracks just as a train was barreling their way. The bad guy, now the prisoner, cannot accept what he sees as a weakness inside himself for being dependent upon another, especially an enemy, but, perhaps, just anyone and anything in general. He’s a real tough guy this one.
I’m talking about Bullseye, who, prior to his current incarceration, was the number one assassin working for organized crime in New York City. Now, he spends his endless days and nights inside Rikers Island working out and telling himself stories about all the payback he’s going to get out of Daredevil’s ass when he gets the chance.
Daredevil 181 tells it from the perspective of the villain Bullseye, a costumed psychopath whose hands are lethal weapons, and not like how your strip mall karate instructor tells you that he had to register his hands as lethal weapons in his state of residence-that guy’s full of shit.
Because that guy?
He lives in reality.
And that’s not how reality works, no matter how deep the strip mall sensei’s self-aggrandizing tough guy fantasies penetrate his every living, waking, breathing moments. Because he still lives in reality-the one thing fantasy cannot defeat. And reality crushes our delusions in the end, every last one flattened like so many aluminum soda cans.
One day we wake up, and we are middle aged, and our knees are shot, we got that fat white gut hanging over our beltlines, and now we gotta hire an assistant half our fucking age who can still do all the katas and could probably also give the high hard one to our wife better than I ever could, that lousy little punk-ass bast-
But Bullseye is one of the numerous fictional constructs populating the Marvel Comics Universe. Bullseye is not bound by our mundane, Big Bang Universe, which gives us brains to imagine gods, immortality, and faster-than-light travel while also simultaneously precluding the actual existence of any deity, anything approaching life everlasting, and most assuredly denies us the realization of a U.S.S. Enterprise-esque FTL-capable vessel.
Bullseye lives in the Marvel Universe, which has it all: gods, FTL-capable star-spanning intergalactic empires, immortality, psychic powers, Life Model Decoys (Marvel-jargon for clones), and even if you’re an elderly World War II veteran like Nick Fury or Dum-Dum Dugan or a middle-aged cold warrior like Black Widow or Silver Sable you can maintain a catsuit ready combat physique right up ‘til the moments when you enter the gates of Valhalla or the Negative Zone or the Mystic Realms charted by the likes of Dr. Strange when he’s at war with the Dread Dormammu and Dr. Doom as he quests to save his mother’s soul from the devil.
You can have your choice of heavens or hells or the spaces in-between in the Marvel Comics Universe.
You can be immortal.
Or you can die of space cancer like an earlier version of Captain Marvel and stay dead as long as possible because the fanbase is constantly complaining about how there are no consequences in superhero comics and people what die just end up coming back and how that makes Marvel and DC comic books seem like they’re just a bunch of goddamn kiddie books for losers and I think I’ll start reading this harder edged shit from the independent press-like this book Cerebus, which I hear tell is a gritty, philosophically provocative long-form storytelling groundbreaker featuring a talking animal with a sword and shield-oh, wait.
You can be bitten by a radioactive spider and shoot long, ropy white sticky stuff all over New York City and not just because you’re hanging out in the porno theaters in Times Square with your boy Travis Bickle-no sir, it’s because you’re a spider-person, and you’re using your ‘threads’ to swing from building to building and to ‘web-up’ those nasty street criminals and you’re definitely sticking to the walls to ‘climb’ them-just like a spider-and not just because you’re committing obscene acts against inanimate objects for obscure reasons you yourself barely comprehend. Honest . . .
(. . . but did anyone ever do the perv version of Marvel Comics? Where we find out that all the costume heroes and villains are just a bunch of maniacs living out bizarre power fantasies in a world where the average person doesn’t have much of a say in anything? I guess that was a big part of Watchmen, now that I think about it. But Watchmen had its cake and ate it, too: it brought down some cynical realism while also being a totally committed superhero book. Moore and Gibbons wolfed down all the goddamn cake while still keeping the banquet table full of cake, didn’t they?)
Bullseye, as I said, is a deadly villain who uses his hands as weapons. Anything that gets into his hands he can use to lethal effect. He picks up a knife, he can throw it into your brain, your heart,or the dude can get in close and gut you like a fish. If Bullseye gets his murderous mitts on a gat, he can fill you full of lead, and when he’s squeezed off his last shot, he can bludgeon you with the butt or throw it so the barrel pierces your eye socket.
Bullseye is in superb physical condition, too, which means he can jump and kick and punch and do acrobatics and tumble and bounce back and aikido people’s shit all over the dynamic sphere and climb all over the place, but not like a perverted spider-person. Bullseye’s not some radioactive freakjob like the Hulk or some goddamn mutie like Wolverine-nowadys, we’d probably call what Bullseye does parkour, or parkour-adjacent. It’s like they do in those Assassin’s Creed games, okay?
Now, Bullseye is an assassin-for-hire, so he would make for an acceptable player character in a number of best-selling video game franchises. Mostly he used to work for Wilson Fisk, a.k.a the Kingpin. Kingpin is the lord of organized crime in the Marvel version of NYC, and Bullseye was once a top hitter for Fisk. But, as we discover in Daredevil 181 Mr. Death Hands is doing hard penitentiary time after getting knocked out by the Man Without Fear.
Bullseye gets limited time out in the yard for some fresh air, and he’s approached by another kind of Marvel Construct: Frank Castle a.k.a. The Punisher.
You are perhaps familiar with the Punisher. He’s got the black body armor with the white skull on his chest. He’s one of the comic book heroes who has no problem killing people with military grade weapons and tactics. In the 1980s, Punisher came into his own as a heavily armed vigilante mass murderer many found reminiscent of Charles Bronson’s character Paul Kersey in the Death Wish franchise.
Actually, the Punisher is a more direct rip-off of the men’s adventure novel series protagonist Mack Bolan a.k.a. The Executioner. Both Bolan and Castle were Vietnam Special Forces veterans whose families were destroyed by the mafia. Bolan wore lots of tactical gear and combat webbing and waged a one man war on crime. Castle did the same. Both were depicted as having dark hair and chiseled action hero type faces. Bolan was a character in a long-running series of paperback novels written by a variety of anonymous hacks using the collective pen name ‘Don Pendleton,’ tho’ apparently there actually was a Don Pendleton who wrote the early novels.
And, yes, they used to publish books that bore the description ‘men’s adventure,’ which basically means ‘here be extreme violence, loving descriptions of guns and explosive devices, and plenty o’ fuckin’. ‘ I read, like, two hundred of these kinds of books in grades 6 to 12. It helped make me the solid citizen that I am today!
Bullseye tries to mindfuck Punisher by telling him that all the prisoners would love to gang up on a murderous vigilante, but the Punisher isn’t rattled. In fact, the Big P tops Bullseye: he tells him that a new ace assassin has replaced Bullseye in the Kingpin’s organization. The Punisher tells the Man with the Deadly Hands straight up that he hopes he’ll do something stupid with the information and get himself killed. Bullseye takes the bait.
Now, I just told you that the Punisher is a knock-off version of Mack Bolan, but that’s not exactly how Mr. Castle started in the Marvel Universe. Originally, the Punisher was just a costumed gun for hire employed by another costumed miscreant known as the Jackal. The Jackal hired the Punisher to assassinate Spider-Man. Later on, more backstory was written for Punisher, and he eventually evolved from a random bad guy for hire . . . into an Executioner clone. Which amuses me to no end that a character ‘develops’ by becoming increasingly evacuated of any spark of originality. You gotta love comics.
But you may be picking up on something here. Bullseye is basically what the Punisher used to be: a costumed killer for hire. The Punisher, in a sense, isn’t just carrying on his overall vendetta against organized crime by manipulating Bullseye with information. Here, Castle is waging a war against his old hated self. At least that’s how I interpret it. Which is definitely some cold shit to do to a guy.
A late night talk show host named Tom Snyde wants to interview Bullseye and get a ratings boost by offering the drooling slobs out there in TV Land a glimpse into the criminal psyche. Bullseye doesn’t want anything to do with this silliness at first, but upon reflection he sees a way to use the compromised security of the interview shoot to break out of prison. Which he does, killing numerous guards and hijacking a helicopter which gives him a ride from Rikers Island back to Manhattan. Bullseye hits up a mob of freelance assassins working as independent contractors for the Kingpin and muscles them into giving up the identity of the new ace: Elektra.
Bullseye also uses his new gang of thralls to run street intel ops to triangulate upon his nemesis Daredevil. Bullseye actually does something brilliant: he hits upon the idea that Matt Murdock and Daredevil are the same person. So, you see, Bullseye isn’t completely made of stupid.
But before taking revenge against Ol’ Hornhead, Bullseye wants his old job back with the Kingpin, which means he has to kill Elektra. Bullseye finds out from the assassination contractors that Elektra has recently been hired to kill Matt Murdock’s assistant, Franklin ‘Foggy’ Nelson. Bullseye tails Nelson, which leads him to Elektra.
Elektra, meanwhile, is about to kill Nelson, but Nelson recognizes her as his best friend Matt Murdock’s college girlfriend. Elektra, who still has feelings for Murdock, is shook up by this, and let’s Nelson go. And that’s when Bullseye strikes.
This is the Main Event: Bullseye. Elektra. One lives. One dies.
And it’s a close battle. You could say that the winner had superior skill. Or maybe it was just a matter of luck. Maybe one combatant’s head wasn’t all in the game while the other’s was-hard to say.
And, yes, they did the unthinkable. They killed Elektra.
Later, Elektra came back. But she is, indeed, brutally killed in this very issue.
Did Elektra die because Bullseye was a superior warrior?
Were they evenly matched in terms of skill, but Elektra’s mind was clouded because of what Nelson said to her moments before?
Were they evenly matched in terms of skill, but Bullseye just got in a lucky shot?
Later, after being defeated yet again by DD, Bullseye tells himself another one of his little stories that basically is just, “Wah, wah, wah-Daredevil just got lucky-pity me, pity me, pity me!”
And, you know, as much as I think Bullseye is a major piece of shit, he does hit on something interesting about this idea of ‘luck.’
You see, I kinda think that much of what happens in this issue comes down to what you might call luck.
Sure, there’s superhuman skill. There’s Bullseye’s total lack of conscience. But Bullseye’s impulsive. His whole shtick revolves around being able to use whatever he can find in the moment as a lethal weapon. He is, essentially, an improvisational killer.
The weapon Bullseye uses to render Elektra defenseless is a playing card-the Ace of Spades, in fact, the Death Card. Bullseye throws it like a blade and cuts Elektra’s throat. Just one of those things Bullseye happens to have on hand. He got some distance on Elektra, and was able to use it. Earlier, he’d used the same card to murder a cabbie and steal a cab. Just making use of what he can carry easily on his person.
Bullseye then stabs Elektra with one of her own ninja blades, dons a disguise, and then watches as she staggers and crawls to Matt Murdock’s brownstone walk-up.
Later, Bullseye sneaks into the morgue where-in disguise-he observes Murdock identifying Elektra’s corpse. Bullseye speaks to another morgue employee and Murdock immediately perks up, and Bullseye realizes that his cockamamie theory about Murdoch and DD being one and the same is correct. Bullseye further confirms this by throwing a blade which Murdock effortlessly blocks with his walking stick.
Bullseye retreats from the morgue and has a sit-down with the Kingpin, and tries to sell Fisk on the notion that Murdoch is Daredevil, but the Kingpin doesn’t trust or respect Bullseye and basically tells him to go out and kill DD and bring back the corpse as proof. That’s what makes the Kingpin the Kingpin. No mercy, no compassion, no second chances, no freebies, no bullshit, just results.
Bullseye goes after Daredevil, and they have a wild melee inside Murdock’s apartment and out the window and across the rooftops and on a train. It is, yet again, a closely fought battle. Both of these enemies have to work in the moment. There’s no set plan. They end up balanced upon power cables high above the city streets. Daredevil balances. Bullseye slips. Daredevil catches Bullseye’s hand. Bullseye says he won’t let DD save him again. Daredevil lets him drop. Daredevil tells Bullseye he won’t kill anyone ever again. Bullseye falls from a great height, shattering his body upon the pavement.
So, you know . . . Bullseye got some of what he wanted. But not really.
I think Daredevil grabbed Bullseye’s wrist because he wanted to be able to take responsibility for 86ing Bullseye. This is his decision, not anyone else’s, not fate, not God-this is all on Daredevil/Murdoch. I said a few moments ago, that DD doesn’t set out to intentionally kill most of his enemies, and that is true. Mostly. But sometimes . . . and with some people . . . well, what can you do?
And, sure, the way the fateful moment is drawn you could interpret it that Bullseye was about to stab Daredevil with one of the blades stolen from Elektra . . . but I think that’s just some Comics Code Authority nonsense right there.
Bullseye is a major piece of shit, and if I were Daredevil I would’ve dropped him, no sweat.
That’s how I see it.
In a universe where he could’ve done anything and been anybody, Bullseye chose the Path of the Asshole. He got what he deserved every step of the way. Even the Kingpin was skeeved out by Bullseye. The Kingpin, fer Chrissakes! The Kingpin’s the biggest, the richest, and the most heartless son of a bitch in NYC. And yet even he was grossed out by Bullseye.
Oh, yeah, let him drop.
Then pick him up, lug his ass to the top of the World Trade Center . . . and drop him again.
Repeat as necessary.
And here’s the kicker: Bullseye is still alive at the end!
The cover blurb did not lie.
Bullseye is stilll alive albeit trapped inside his own paralyzed body. He’s in a hospital bed in a bleakly hilarious full body cast. (Maybe it’s just me, but I pretty much always find the sight of a character in a full body cast to be comical.)
Bullseye lives . . . inside his brain. Lives off the delusional stories that have sustained him-maybe for his whole life, when you think about it. Hyper-aggressive. Macho. Full of entitlement. Full of bogus victimhood. Full of self-aggrandizing fantasies of power and domination. Utterly incapable of taking responsibility for his actions. Talented, yet jealous, insecure, and hypercompetitive. No respect for human life. Convinced that he is the One, that he has some kind of special destiny.
That’s Bullseye.
Fuck that guy.
