Friday, January 1, 2010

They Might as Well Have Named It Hitler Comics...

(As I have tried to do consistently over the past few weeks, there is post over at my Writing Blog. It's the first guest column there, written by my sister. It is a very verbose tackling of the subject of alien languages.)

The first issue of Daredevil Comics, the comic devoted to possibly the most famous public domain comic book character, has an... interesting distinction.

It is probably the most Hitler-obsessed comic book ever published, and that's saying something.

It features Daredevil teaming up with various other characters from the same publisher's comics and going toe to toe with Hitler on each occasion, usually humiliating him horribly while managing to not quite catch him.

Among the other heroes involved in this series of humiliation congas: Silver Streak (and his bird Whiz), a super-speedster; the Claw, usually one of Hitler's allies, is duped into devastating combined Japanese and Nazi forces; some kind of elephant-riding jungle man named Lance Hale; Dickie Dean, boy inventor; Cloud Curtis, an aviator; and the Pirate Prince, a dude from the golden age of piracy, who shows up randomly in his Age of Sail vessel and overruns a WWII era battleship.

That alone would only make this issue a significantly Hitler-obsessed comic, rather than one of the most obsessed of all time. But this issue gives Hitler his own feature.

It's basically a Hitler biography, and focuses very heavily, WWII propaganda style, on what a cowardly, weaselly, jerky kind of guy Hitler really is.

There's not really much more to say about it; you can take a look at it yourself if you are morbidly curious about it, although its contents are liable to filter out here in bits and dribbles, because it is that goofy.

-Signing off.

No comments: