KINGPIN

Everybody studies Wilson Fisk's hands, his suits, his ledgers. Almost nobody studies the walking stick — which is precisely how he likes it. The Kingpin's diamond-topped cane is a weapon in evening dress: concealed inside it sits a laser that discharges a short pulse of 300 watts, enough energy at close range to vaporize a handgun outright. Reference works list it under a name as subtle as its owner is not: the obliterator cane.

It debuted in the same story that introduced him. In Amazing Spider-Man #50 (1967) — the landmark issue where Peter Parker quits being Spider-Man — Fisk used the cane to obliterate, in a single blast, a gun that mob figure Frederick Foswell had concealed inside his hat. The new crime lord's first storyline literally opened by disarming a rival with a piece of jewellery.

The cane was not his only dressed-up hardware. His ornamental diamond stickpin held a small, highly compressed charge of sleeping gas, kept for spraying into an opponent's face at point-blank distance — and Fisk treated it strictly as a last resort. That restraint is the real trivia: a man who could afford an arsenal preferred fists, fear and paperwork, and as his stories migrated from Spider-Man's pages to Daredevil's, the science-fiction gadgets quietly retired while the cane stayed on as pure silhouette.