This issue offers a double-page spread by Don Heck diagramming Daredevil’s cane/club.
You can see it better when one page is enlarged…
And as for the story…Steve Gerber resolves plotlines from his failed Shanna the She Devil series by bringing his creation Nekra back, and building up a story that will cross-over with Marvel Two-In-One.
And throws in Beetle for good measure.
He’s the main villain.
After he’s foiled, we get a cliffhanger with Shanna and a prompt to buy Marvel Two-in-One #3.
Y’know, the late Bob Brown wasn’t half-bad in his day, and his 1974 run on ‘Daredevil and the Black Widow’ was actually some of his better stuff! It was better than his stuff on ‘The Champions’, in just a couple of years later, and, even though I was never really a fan of the idea of pairing DD with the Black Widow, ( or Power Man with the inane Iron Fist- these characters are all LONERS by nature, and saddling them with partners whom a lot of the time they have absolutely nothing in common with- as in the case of the aforementioned Power Man and Iron Fist- is simply counterintuitive to who they are ) I cannot deny that the shot of sex appeal that the Widow brought to this series was not entirely unwelcome. I also enjoyed the heavy “adult” nature of their obviously highly-romantically-charged relationship- how, we may be wondering, did the lovely Natasha avoid a visit from Mr. Stork, during her time with the obviously super-virile Stud Without Fear, we may all be wondering-?? El Simplicito, itself- The lovely Madame Natasha is a graduate of the Kremlin’s “Red Room” program, which produces spies, for careers in espionage, just as England’s MI-6 program does the same- the reason why professional spies like 007 and the Widow can trot the world without producing any pesky children in the course of their exciting careers is because these global spy-programs take CARE of that little detail for it’s enrollees- in other words, as a part of “Red Room”/MI-6 espionage training, these ( perhaps fortunate ) people are FIXED!!! And THAT’S why 007’s career as a professional stud-muffin has not produced any heirs, and ditto for the lovely Black Widow!! Class dismissed! I also enjoyed the entire ‘Nekra/Mandrill/Black Spectre’ storyline- it was good, it was intelligent, it was timely for the mid-Seventies, and I found the evil siblings’ sad origin story to be particularly touching. Sometimes, just sometimes, criminals, villains, and supervillains are not born- they are forged into being by their circumstances, as in the case of our evil twins, here. ( Doctor Doom, Tiger Shark, the Mole Man, and Magneto are all very good examples of the syndrome, as well ) Even today, fifty-one years later, re-reading their very sad origin story in ‘DD’#110 just makes me sad. This is, quite unfortunately, how children in this sad world treat other children who are “different”- some things will, apparently, never change. To conclude this review on a happier note, I will point out that this issue segues into ‘Marvel-Two-In-One’s #3, which is, in my humble-yet-somewhat educated estimation, one of the smartest, brightest, and most exciting Marvel Comics ever published. Steve Gerber, one of the undisputed masters of his craft, at the absolute top of his game. ‘DD & the Widow’, and his mid-Seventies work along with his incredible colleague Our Pal Sal Buscema on ‘Marvel Two-In-One’ and ‘The Defenders’, was the State of the Art for comics at the time, and would remain in that capacity until the arrival of Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, and The New X-Men. X-Celsior!!