The Ugly American Presents: Daredevil Vs. Vapora (1996)• “A Season for Tears”
• Script: Mindy Newell
• Pencils: Mike Harris
Once upon a time, Marvel liked to publish weird little one-off comics that operated like after-school specials. Hulk would teach you to brush your teeth with Aim, or Power Pack might warn you about people trying to inappropriately grab your junk. I think that one was mostly about avoiding Woody Allen, which is pretty sound advice.
Daredevil Vs. Vapora was a comic about the dangers of gasoline, published in conjunction with the good folks at the Gas Appliance Manufacturer’s Association. If anybody knows good comics, it’s them. Let’s foray into this festive feast of fossil fuels, true believers!
The story opens with Daredevil saving a little girl named Angel from a burning building. Angel, huh? We’re already laying it on a little thick, I would say. Angel remembers watching her dad head up to the kitchen earlier that evening with a can of gas and a bunch of old rags. I think I might know how the fire started.
Mandy Sewell’s prose is quite purple. There’s some obligatory tripe about all brave men feeling fear, and there’s a lot of clinical vocab. When DD hands the girl off to the paramedics, one of them orders up an IV of “lactated ringers”. There’s a lot of odd quasi-sexual stuff in this comic, actually. Before Daredevil can pause to wonder if he’s just relinquished his victim to a pack of fetishists feeding a little girl breast milk, he hears a spectral laughing from the top of the burning roof. Radar can’t quite confirm a physical presence up there. It’s all very spooky.
Daredevil then asks one of the firefighters if everyone got out of the building. The guy starts working out some of his stand-up material and says that all the living people escaped. Oh, so none of the dead people walked out there, then? Glad we cleared that up, Louis C.K. Did everybody make it out OK? Well, the folks still alive got out, but I’m sure there’s a stack of burnt, crispy dead people in there, Mr. Daredevil. Thanks, you macabre son of a bitch.Cut to a week later, when intrepid lawyer Matt Murdock is interviewing the landlord of the burnt up apartment. Daredevil wants to know if this dude put a ten-year old girl at risk so he could make some insurance money.
If this comic were published in 2013, that’s exactly how it would have went down. The rich, white building owner would have been evil, and then a bunch of Occupiers would poop into Ziploc bags and throw them at him. After they got done raping a few women, turning over some police cars, and stopping a lot of responsible people from getting to work, of course. Then everybody would cheer about how wonderful “progress” is.
But no, this was 1996, when the world still made a sliver of sense. So instead, Daredevil interrogates the landlord and discovers that in this case, he’s innocent. So then it’s off to the scene of the crime to see if Murdock can piece together what actually did happen.
As he walks the charred husk with an inspector, Daredevil’s keen senses start picking up that phantom vapor demon again. She’s kinda there, but not really, it’s all very creepy, and by creepy I mean slightly arousing. Murdock’s reaction to staring down this vapor demon is a strange tickling of his coccyx. I’m thinking this is a line originally from the Power Pack molestation special that got cut for being gross. It probably should have been cut from this comic as well.
Now, if you’re a respected blind lawyer, and you happen to sense an invisible vapor demon with your superhuman abilities, there’s a couple of ways you can play this.
• You can question your perception, since the radar hit isn’t strong, and keep your mouth shut.
• You can recognize that this ethereal threat is probably out of your league, and again, keep your damn mouth shut. You quickly get yourself and the inspector out, then contact Stephen Strange as soon as possible.
• You can shout idle threats at the invisible creature right in front of the inspector like a schizophrenic, and then ask the guy if he can see the invisible creature that your superhuman radar isn’t really hitting on.
Well, Matt Murdock decided to select option “C”. But then he ups the ante further by inexplicably declaring the creature that isn’t there to be a “vapora”. Now, if you’re the inspector and this lawyer starts rambling on about a vampire in the corner of the room…that’s pretty bad, but at least you have a concept of a vampire. It’s in the shared mythological lexicon. Nobody knows what a vapora is, because there aren’t any. Not just in real life, but in fiction. They just made it up for this comic, and he’s spouting off about it like it’s a thing now.
If you’re the other guy in that room, you pretty much have no choice but to call the appropriate authorities and have Matt Murdock committed. There is zero chance you’d allow this guy to try the case, he’s clearly a lunatic. If I’m that inspector, I’m ringing the sitting judge and putting distance between myself and Mr. Murdock post haste. Instead, he just kind of blows it off. Comics.
In the meantime, Vapora continues to go on a little pyro rampage, and this is where the comic’s message loses me a little. Vapora runs around town and sort of “pushes” people into playing around with gas.
Like this woman here, scrubbing the floor with gas, as we all do approximately six inches from our caged toddler. Again, none of this would appear in a modern comic. That child would be incarcerated in a dolphin-free detention area, and also would be wearing a helmet. In this comic, the mother has several gallons of gasoline parked in front of the child, and then she lights up a cigarette. Heavens to Wertham, can you even imagine it, kids???
Well, folks, don’t worry – they get their just rewards. When mom finally gets her Virginia Slim lit, that baby goes up like a roman candle. Score one for Vapora!
Next she heads over to little Laura’s house. Laura’s brothers are cleaning the family motorcycle with gasoline. Apparently all this time I’ve been using CLR like an asshole. What you really want for that tough grime is some petrol. It strips your floors, makes your motorcycle shine, and if you’re out of vermouth, just go ahead and splash some gas in there, I guess. It’s versatile. We’re learning a lot in this comic, kids.
Well, seconds after these two jackholes wipe down the bike with the world’s most flammable substance, they start it. You can guess how that story ends. And this is the point I was getting to about the point of this comic. In the first place, if you’re stupid enough to smoke around a gas can and your youngest child, I don’t want you around to breed more children. Same thing with the guys and the motorcycle. We need to weed these people out.
Secondly, I don’t want the vapor demon taking people off the hook. People don’t light themselves on fire because a mystical vapor demon talks them into it. They do it because they are aggressively stupid, and the sooner we allow these morons to reduce themselves to a small pile of ash, the better.
Lucky for Laura and her brothers, Daredevil doesn’t share my opinion. He smells some gas fumes from across town and storms in there to save the day. It’s an epic battle, for sure. Daredevil stops, drops, and rolls.
He calculates that opening the garage door will cause a backdraft, and that pouring water on the fire will only make it worse. As “Eye of the Tiger” plays faintly in the background, Daredevil crawls his way to what he prays is a functioning class B extinguisher. I don’t want to ruin the surprise for you or anything, but it all works out. He sprays some fluids on Vapora’s chest and then she disappears. Pretty much business as usual for ol’ Matty Murdock, although usually there isn’t a little girl involved. Maybe she needs to read that Power Pack comic.
The story ends with Murdock winning the case for landlord Abraham Rutkowski. Take that, Zuccotti Park! We find out that little Angel Jusko will require a king’s ransom in medical bills, therapy, and will likely be horribly disfigured. But she’ll live, so….result!
And now dad will know better about peeling up floor tiles with gas. How about next time we rent a power scraper, huh, Mr. Jusko? But maybe not. Maybe he’ll just get conned into using gas again by that pesky Vapora. That’s the final message of Daredevil Vs. Vapora. Good may have triumphed this time, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Whatever you do, pain and misery are coming. It’s always the season for tears, kids. That’s a message the Ugly American fully endorses.
Until next week, you play safe now, y’hear?
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