Werewolf by Night #9 introduces Tatterdemalion.
“Who?” you ask…Well, Tatterdemalion is basically a hobo armed with gloves that dissolve stuff. That makes him sound stupid, but his look is truly creepy and he’s also got a scarf with weights on it that he swings around as a weapon.
He’s a minor character in the WWBN issues, which focus on a demon-worshipping cult.
Much later, Tatterdemalion becomes a member of Night Shift and fights the West Coast Avengers. He also became a minor Thunderbolt during the first Marvel Civil War.
He doesn’t get the name Tatterdemalion in Werewolf By Night–again, he’s a minor player. It isn’t until Marvel Team-Up #93 that he gets his name, when Spider-Man again teams up with Jack Russell and the character returns, unaligned with a cult, as a robber of the rich/vigilante-defender of the homeless. So I guess he kind of is aligned with a cult–as its leader.
We start with Peter Parker in Los Angeles covering a gala opening of a jazz club that gets interrupted by one of my favorite villains: Tatterdemalion! And this time, he’s much more thought out. He looks like a homeless man (appropriate for L.A., given their homeless problem), and his goal is to destroy wealth—not take it for himself. He enters the room proclaiming proudly how offensive he smells, and then starts burning money.
This was also when he got the weighted scarf. He’s lost the England/1800s look, and was really more of a frightening character. And that was the where I first saw him. For some reason the idea of a homeless dude with a weighted scarf scared the crap out of me when I was ten.
Anyway, at this point, we learn that Shroud happens to be at the club and he uses his darkness power so that fellow clubbers Spider-Man and Werewolf By Night can fight Tatterdemalion without revealing their secret identities.
Of course, instead of taking down the villain, Spidey fights Werewolf (to be fair, he doesn’t know that WbN can now control himself in wolf-form, because Spider-Man didn’t read Spider Woman #19), and this enables the villain to escape.
Eventually, the heroes fight Tatterdemalion together (and he holds his own for a while!).
Tatterdemalion has a horde of homeless people who work for him, and we see him unmasked (or “unscarved”). He’s nasty looking, of course.
Issue #93 ends as a cliffhanger but it’s really hanging you into a brand new story so I’m not covering that last page here.
Infantino’s art wasn’t bad—I’m crediting that to inker Jim Mooney
Len Wein and Gerry Conway (writers), Tom Sutton (art) (WWBN); Steven Grant and Carmine Infantino (MTU)
Grades: C+ (WWBN); B- (MTU)