Taskmaster

Can YOU

Name This Marvel Villain??

An indispensable underling to the Kingpin, the Answer was an all-purpose operative who seemed to have "the answer" for every situation, every challenge. Tell me you don't want a guy like that working for you. On a fact-finding mission for the Kingpin to assess the abilities of the newly black-garbed Spider-Man, the Answer was able to negate Spidey's main advantages of speed and strength:

The Answer also had a special non-slick material in his costume to deal with Spider-Man's webbing. Spidey was able to get his licks in, though. For all the good it did him:

When he'd learned all he needed to, the Answer left Spider-Man trapped by his own webbing, while he departed to make his report to the Kingpin. Not the most verbose meeting you'd ever see, but it appears all the bases were covered:

Yet things didn't eventually go well for the Answer. In an elaborate story involving Cloak, Dagger, the Kingpin, and an almost robotic Silvermane, the Answer was forced into a situation where the answer to stopping Silvermane was his own death:

Yet the Answer survives, to reappear in one or two later skirmishes involving characters like Doc Ock and the Hood.  I can't say the Answer made much of an impression on me; he seemed to be best used to move the story along at certain points, rather than having much importance in his own right.  (For instance, stopping Silvermane in a round-about way with Dagger rather than taking on Silvermane himself.)  The Answer never really returned to prominence, with Marvel lumping him in elsewhere as one of the many villain "extras" used to pad stories where such groupings were needed. The Kingpin may feel he's lost one heck of an operative, but you and I should manage just fine without him.