(Daredevil Comics 006, 1941)
Wolf Carson, gang boss, is in the hospital after being gunned down by his own traitorous associates. Faced with a choice between 1) dying of his wounds or 2) recovering so that the authorities can scoop him up and take him to jail, Carson takes the ever-popular option 3) take the nearby unethical doctor up on his offer to help cheat death via experimental science, in this case a total brain transplant!
True to his word, the never-named doctor digs up Carson's corpse that night and extracts its brain, then in a feat of pure super science (particularly given the state the brain must been in after sitting in a corpse for 12+ hrs) transplants it into...
... A WOLF BODY! Now, just why the doctor chose to do this is never actually stated but I have a couple of theories that boil down to either him doing so as a way to control Carson with the promise of a human body later etc or doing so because he was a terrible guy with a bad sense of humour. Either way, he pays for his choice of donor body with his life. In retrospect, I reckon that his mistake was in leaving Carson unrestrained and then pissing him off severely.
With nothing else to live for, Carson turns to revenge as his motivation and systematically hunts down the members of the gang that betrayed him. Each murder is accompanied by a trademark "death howl," which I am counting as a calling card.
Major complication: Carson has been found, mistaken for a regular dog and taken in by Bart "Daredevil" Hill's fiance Tonia Saunders, which means that a jealous wolf is now after both Bart and the Daredevil and also Tonia once she realizes just where her dog has been sneaking off to at night.
Wolf or not, Carson is no match for the Daredevil and is soon captured. In a rare addendum, we get to see the villain's trial (and please note the use of the term "brain wolf" to describe him in that newspaper headline - I dearly wanted to use that as his villain name but it's clearly being used as a description of what he is rather than a moniker). Bart Hill actually manages to put two and two together and determine that the wolf is Carson, upon which the judge sets what I personally would consider a troubling precedent for a super-hero universe by ordering that the brain wolf be summarily sent to the pound and put down. I mean, I'm not a lawyer but that seems bad - some super-intelligent ape c.1976 is going to have to go to the Supreme Court to argue that he shouldn't be summarily destroyed over a parking ticket.
Revenge Killer Score: 4/7 (counting Bart and Daredevil as two separate targets)
Categorized in: Animals (Wolves), Murder (Revenge Killers), Origin (Human Brain in Animal Body)
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