20 Best Comics Hitlers

Comics love themselves some of the evil Nazi dictator.

Obviously, saying any Hitler is "best" or even "good" is pretty problematic. Hitler was bad! Hitler was so bad that Godwin's Law states that you can't even really compare any other badness to his badness. But we're not talking about Hitler the person, we're talking about Hitler the comics character. He was unquestionably the #1 real-life bad guy in the popular imagination when superheroes got their start in the early 1940s and for many years thereafter, rivaled only by Stalin, Nixon and Osama. And he died at just the right time and in just the right way to be even more useful as a villain. Early comics audiences just wanted simple wish fulfillment, so when Captain America #1 (1940) featured Star-Spangled Steve Rogers punching Adolf in the face, it sold like wartime-rationed hotcakes. By the 1960s, audiences were a little too savvy to think we could win the Vietnam War by punching Ho Chi Minh really hard. But Hitler could still make a great villain. Maybe he faked his death, maybe he was cloned, but he always seemed to be lurking in sci-fi universes, laughing maniacally as he prepared to kill millions more with his Fourth Reich. Such tradition can become cliche. But good writers and artists can subvert a cliche back into tradition. Dozens of versions of Hitler have appeared in comics, 23 in Marvel books alone. And some are a lot more interesting than a ready-made "generic evil dictator."

In this post: 
Adolf Hitler
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

T Campbell has written quite a few online comics series and selected work for Marvel, Archie and Tokyopop. His longest-running works are Fans, Penny and Aggie-- and his current project with co-writer Phil Kahn, Guilded Age.