Cover at by Marie Severin
Since Matt Murdock’s love interest Karen Page has moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of becoming an actress, the blind attorney – as well as alter ego Daredevil – has decided to make the trip to Southern California and pay her a visit. Page didn’t have to wait long for her first break, as she was quickly hired in a supporting role on the soap opera Strange Secrets. It also doesn’t take long before tragedy strikes when main star Ross Archer is murdered on set. Daredevil is present but finds himself overpowered by the murderer, who turns out to be Archer’s television character, a demon named Brother Brimstone.
Puzzled by the crime and determined to prevent Karen Page from becoming the next victim, Daredevil sets out to solve the mystery. The trail leads from Ross Archer’s funeral to the Hollywood studio where Strange Secrets is filmed, and then to the La Brea Tar Pits – where the superhero finds himself sinking into the gooey ground just like the woolly mammoths and saber-tooth cats of yesteryear in Daredevil #66.
The real-world tar pits of La Brea arguably contain the most complete record of life during the Ice Age, with hundreds of skeleton remains and fossilized plants – dating between 4,000 and 40,000 years ago – excavated each year. According to the official Rancho La Brea: Treasures of the Tar Pits, the tar itself was once used by the local Chumash and Gabrielino indigenous tribes to mend broken knives and waterproof their baskets and canoes long before the white man every arrived in what is now called Los Angeles.
Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola was the first European to encounter the tar pits in 1769. During the following century, the pits were mined commercially, with the tar sold as asphalt as far away as San Francisco. Any bones uncovered at that time were thought to be from recent victims of the tar pits until Major Henry Hancock – who owned the land – gifted a large canine tooth from a saber-tooth cat to a professor at the Boston Society of Natural History.
Henry Hancock’s son Allan Hancock later allowed the County of Los Angeles to excavate the tar pits over a two year period, resulting in 750,000 bones being unearthed by the Natural History Museum. In 1924, Hancock donated twenty-three acres of Rancho La Brea – where the tar pits are located – to Los Angeles County under the provision that the tar pits and their fossilized deposits be both preserved and exhibited to the public. Close to fifty years later, millionaire businessman George C. Page offered to build a museum at the site, which officially opened on April 13, 1977.
Among the suspects in the murder of Ross Archer is Lester Leroy, the master of special effects for Strange Secrets. The short, shy man has taken an interest in Karen Page and shows her the blueprints for an invention he is working on. “You’re the first person I’ve showed the blueprint to,” he says. “It’s because you’re the only one here who treats me as a person, Miss Page. To everyone else, I’m just a zero – a guy good for spooky effects, and that’s it!”
Daredevil overhears the conversation from the shadows and later does some poking around backstage to have a “look” at the blueprints himself. “Lester’s designed an exoskeleton, and from the feel of things, one that would increase a man’s strength tenfold,” the superhero realizes as her runs his fingers over the blueprint. “Or, fully enough for a little man to become a big man!”
The killer, once again dressed as Brother Brimstone, discovers Daredevil with the blueprints and knocks him unconscious. When he awakens, Daredevil learns that Karen Page received a note from Lester Leroy asking her to meet him at the La Brea Tar Pits.
“Untold ages ago, lumbering mammoths and snarling sabre-tooths roamed the trackless wilds of Southern California, some of them becoming entrapped and sinking to their deaths in treacherous tar pits there,” Daredevil #66 explains. “Today, a modern museum has risen up over those tar pits, and today, at this very hour, a girl named Karen Page keeps a rendezvous therein!”
The George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries – better known as the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum – sits next to the tar pits, a fenced in area that also contains life-size replicas of woolly mammoths and saber-tooth cats. The museum itself features thirty different exhibits of skeletons, murals, and paintings detailing life in the Ice Age in general and the history of the La Brea Tar Pits in particular. A glass-walled laboratory, meanwhile, sits in the middle of the museum, allowing visitors to watch as specimens from the tar pits are cleaned by hand and examined by museum scientists.
Woolly mammoths and saber-tooth cats are arguably the most famous former residents of La Brea. Mammoths were directly related to contemporary elephants still found in Africa and India. Originally from Africa as well, the Indian elephant and woolly mammoth migrated approximately five million years ago, with mammoths making their way to North America.
Although commonly referred to as saber-tooth tigers, the Smilodon californicus – which is also the state fossil of California – has no relation to modern tigers and actually evolved from the ancestors of modern cats. Believed to originate in Eurasia, the various species of saber-tooth cats eventually spread to every continent on Earth with the exception of Antarctica and Australia.
Other species unearthed at the La Brea Tar Pits include large ground sloths that stood six feet tall and weighed 3,500 pounds, prehistoric ancestors of horses and swine, and an assortment of camels and llamas. Unlike the woolly mammoths and saber-tooth cats that migrated from Africa and Eurasia, camels were originally indigenous to North America before migrating to other parts of the planet.
Back in the Marvel Comics Universe, Karen Page is alone at the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, strolling past the skeleton displays of woolly mammoths as she waits for Lester Leroy. After two hours of wandering, closing hour arrives and the lights go out without warning. Unable to find a security guard – as well as anyone else, for that matter – Page finds an unlocked door in the rear of the building and makes a hasty exit.
“This is a little better,” she says to herself. “Still no guard but at least I’m outside. But, the two mammoth models down there… the prehistoric tar pits over which the museum is built… they all make me feel as if I’m leaving the twentieth century… walking into a world of savage, primordial terror!”
Karen Page comes face-to-face with that terror when Brother Brimstone suddenly appears from the shadows. Page faints as a result, and the villain carries her to the edge of the tar pit. “In a way, your fate is to be envied, my dear,” Brother Brimstone tells the unconscious Karen Page. “How many human beings can meet their maker beneath layers of black, clinging tar, secure in the knowledge that another civilization may find their remains a million years hence?”
Although Daredevil arrives in time to rescue Karen Page, the resulting battle between hero and villain – in front of a life-sized woolly mammoth – results in Daredevil sinking into the La Brea Tar Pits himself. Brother Brimstone, who turns out to be Strange Secrets co-star Vince Sterling, likewise falls into the gooey substance. While Daredevil’s agility allows him to escape, the weight of Lester Leroy’s exoskeleton causes Sterling to quickly sink.
The Los Angeles of today is a sprawling city that stretches from the Hollywood Hills to the beaches of Santa Monica and Venice. Forty thousand years ago, however, the region was populated by woolly mammoths, saber-tooth cats, and even camels. The La Brea Tar Pits is a time capsule into that lost world, while the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries serves as a testament to the human quest of understanding and preserving the past.
A past that almost included Daredevil.
Anthony Letizia