September 1967: Joining the Club

In Marvel Comics, some weapon — a shield, a hammer, webbing or claws — often served as a kind of totem for a superhero.

The weapon usually had a dual purpose: providing the hero with power and symbolizing his identity and mission. For example, Captain America, essentially a protector, carried a shield; Wolverine, essentially an aggressor, had claws.

And Daredevil, who was secretly blind, had a cane that snapped into a billy club — a tool to compensate for disability instantly transformed into a means of punishing the guilty.

Both the cane and the billy club provided freedom of movement to the superhero, as well.

“(T)he true value of Daredevil’s billy club is that it allows him to incorporate an essential item of the blind person into his superhero persona,” observed Alex S. Romagnoli and Gian S. Pagnucci in their book Enter the Superheroes: American Values, Culture and the Canon of Superhero Literature. “The billy club becomes a symbol for rising above one’s limitations. This is what we come to expect of technology in the 21^st century: that it can work miracles. We want devices that help us to navigate our world. Perhaps not a billy club that can let a blind person swing through the air, but certainly digital maps on cell phones that we can call upon when we are lost.”

Comics historian Vincent Mariani remarked, “I always felt that with the revival of Captain America and introduction of Daredevil in early 1964, Marvel achieved as perfect a cast of characters as possible. With Captain America, a link to Timely comics' Golden Age (begun with anti-hero Sub-Mariner a few years earlier) was cemented. And with Daredevil, a unique loner type of hero would be an apt compliment for the ‘offbeat’ Spider-Man and Doctor Strange.

“As time passed, and with increasing success, more and more characters were added in an inevitable expansion. But that early ‘universe’ of heroes, at that point in time, seemed far more manageably iconic.”