The recurring cast keeps growing: Bindle and Spine, the government agents (I think the Blues Brothers riff was James’ idea — I’d have to check the scripts to be sure), Chiroptera, our Batman analogue, and Gutsy, The Man With Guts: our Daredevil, and maybe my second favourite side character in the whole shootin’ match (Basilica doesn’t get introduced until very late in the series — oh, hang on, I also have a lot of affection for the Quizzler). Hup! Ha! Ho!
One of the recurring gags about Man-Man being bitten by a radioactive man and having the proportionate abilities of a man makes him completely invisible to women, which felt funny when I was in my 20s but feels a bit… incel… now. Eh. It was a different time.
Paul being “Towel Man” is a recurring gag through the series. “The Hand” are a group of ninjas that Daredevil fights. There was a whole lotta ninja in comics in the late ’80s and early ’90s. So the (poorly written) gag here is that while Matt Murdock got a full set of super-powers, chiefly extraordinarily heightened senses including a “radar sense” that lets him detect things around him more accurately than a sighted man, Gutsy got none of that. He’s just blind and extraordinarily dumb.In the last panel, Bindle (or Spine) is holding a gun. James used photos for backgrounds and props, which is very very cool, but sometimes the fine greyscale photos would vanish against his magnificent chunky-lined art. There’s no particular reason Frenchy, a very angry Belgian Walloon, swears in “joual,” which is Quèbecois patois, except I lived in Quebec at the time. Joual is to French like Cockney is to English. One distinctive characteristic of Québecois swearing is that it’s all out of the Catholic church… “Calice” (chalice), “Sacrement” (sacrement), “Hosti” (the host), etc. In this case, though, it’s “disgusting prostitute’s panties.”
