I, on the other hand, found it almost impossible to celebrate Independence Day three days after the Supreme Court essentially told us that we have a King.  

I think different writers have done different things for sure. At its core, it's a space opera(really Lucas wrote a western in space but it expanded out enough to be space opera).. but some other stuff drifts in now and then.

Also, I generally HATE Kevin Anderson... but honestly I haven't read a thing he's wrote since he was first on the EU, so maybe its not as bad as I remember...we'll see.

Agreed! Hopefully they'll have another big sale soon... though its not bad to buy stuff as it gets a US release (they seems to hit Diamond a couple months after release so I can pre-order new stuff from my LCS)... stuff like that is always fun!

I'm curious about that Peter Parker Spectacular Spider-Man #58 - specifically the Ringer, a villain I remember seeing only once, in I think the David Kraft run of the Defenders? Anyway, my memory says he was an unusual character in that he was given a kind of self-conscious socio-political motivation that you never saw too often in superhero comics, spouting anti-capitalist rhetoric, that kind of thing. Of course it was all over-simplified and he was made to sound pompously self-righteous and misguided, but at least there was some acknowledgment that ideas of this kind existed.

Am I recalling all this accurately? I haven't read that Defenders comic since the 70s, when it came out. Anyway, assuming I'm remembering this right and not mixing him up with some other minor villain, I'm curious whether they kept this aspect of his personality going in this or any other later appearances, or if they dropped it altogether.

I see from the credits this PP #58 was written by Roger Stern. And drawn by John Byrne and inked by Vince Colletta, a combination I don't think I recall seeing anywhere else - how does the artwork look?

Well, as a further argument towards my interpretation of the cane-maneuvering scene, I will note that "ping" itself is onomatopoeia, a word derived from the sound it represents. Everett was depicting sound being reflected back at him, a sound we associate with sonar, not radar. I will further note that electronic echolocation aids for the blind had long been proposed; consider these closing panels from a Dr. Mid-Nite story written and penciled in 1948, published with new inks by Sal Amendola in ADVENTURE COMICS #418, 1972:



Once the radar-sense concept is cemented in the premise, it's depicted with silent waves emanating from Daredevil's head, not sounds bouncing off of obstructions. One could argue that Everett (and Joe Orlando after him) just didn't think of that way of illustrating the idea, and that was the only way he could come up with conveying it. I think my explanation is more convincing, once you divorce yourself from the biases of assuming that the artist had been provided the radar-sense premise, and consider the possibility that he was coming up with a way to explain how Daredevil could navigate pretty much on his own.

Yes, the artists were fallible, but I find it very unlikely that if Bill Everett were instructed to draw a collision between a van and pedestrians that resulted in a cylinder of radioactive goo bursting in one of the pedestrian's faces that he would have drawn a closed van with no obvious means of its contents reaching the front of the van in the event of a crash, and that he would have chosen not to draw the freaking cylinder at all! The only explanation I find convincing is that didn't have any instruction that this element was supposed to be in the story when he drew it. Now this could be because Stan hadn't thought of it when he provided the plot, or it could have been because Bill was coming up with his own origin story that was later tweaked in the scripting. But I think the confirmation bias is working the other direction, and that gets right to the point I was trying to make: when we go in with the assumption that Stan provided the detailed plot, we are biased to overlook evidence that certain aspects were not initially in the mix.

As for Stan's interview, I am absolutely not trying to make him the bad guy or insinuating that he was lying. By all accounts, the development of DAREDEVIL #1 was a messy effort, and after the accumulation of years of lore, it's perfectly understandable that Stan would not recollect at which point the idea of radar-sense got injected into that lore. If he came up with that angle while scripting the pages, it's no sign of duplicitousness to later misremember it as having been there at the conception. The real starting point would be, in retrospect, the time of publication, and from that perspective, the radar-sense was inarguably there "from the beginning."

We know that neither Stan nor many of his prominent co-creators dwelt much on the "sausage-making" in later recollections, with Stan, in particular, very invested in Hollywood-style "mythic tales" which would resonate with his audience rather than the less-interesting real world production process. Consider FANTASTIC FOUR #1, which is quite clearly a Frankenstein merger of the FF origin with an inventory monster short that was heavily chopped up, re-scripted, and highly altered with art revisions and crude non-Kirby art inserts. Neither Stan nor Jack ever appear to have recalled or at least acknowledged that. Instead, they remembered the concept as it eventually saw print, not the construction details. If they didn't recall or at least discuss the remarkable and certainly difficult and complex details behind the production of one of Marvel's two flagship titles, why would we expect Stan to remember a much more mundane detail about when a certain concept found its way into the first issue of one of the company's lower-tier heroes?