Dressing a bad-guy up as a good-guy and having him do crime in the hero’s name is a Marvel Trope. But having an army of bad-guys do it at the same time? That’s new.
The idea is the brainchild of Frank Farnum, who by day is Nelson and Murdock’s landlord (seriously?) but who also dons a purple hood and becomes The Masked Marauder.
Spider-Man is tricked at first.
These two issues appear to me to be an excuse to have a Spider-Man cameo in a book that wasn’t selling well, in the hopes that it would promote Daredevil awareness. As a happy coincidence, Stan Lee would soon be looking for someone to take over for Steve Ditko on The Amazing Spider-Man, so this was kind of John Romita’s audition. (Hint: He passed.) That’s why we get this little sequence here, in Daredevil’s own book, which seems to orient readers to the character’s “power set:”
Storywise, it’s lots of extended rooftop fights that kind of go nowhere and at bottom are ridiculous because Spider-Man has both spider-sense and super-strength. It’s ridiculous that Daredevil can go toe-to-toe with him.
Of course, by the end the heroes figure out the truth. The Daredevil army is defeated. Marauder escapes. And Daredevil has some empathy for Spider-Man.
I really, really wanted to like this story but it’s so derivative and such an obvious marketing ploy that it can’t rise above average for Marvel at the time. Sorry.