8. Emperor Palpatine (Star Wars)
Though Ming the Merciless in his most memorable capacity (the hilariously campy 1980 film) came
after the release of Star Wars (even if Palpatine's presence was pretty minimal in the original trilogy), the character has been around for the better part of 8 decades in comic strip form. Ming is an evil interplanetary dictator, and though milked for laughs in the cinematic version (played superbly by Max von Sydow), the character is your prototypical space tyrant, a sci-fi Hitler, if you will. George Lucas has openly admitted that Emperor Palpatine aka Darth Sideous was based on Ming (and to an extent, Darth Vader was as well), but Lucas has pilfered from something so niche that he's been able to get away with it; the fact that the film version of Flash Gordon shifted the tone to pure silliness means that Lucas gets away with the rip-off pretty much scot free (except for with fans of the Gordon comic). Furthermore, Lucas made out of Palpatine a far more terrifying despot than Ming could have ever dreamed of; Palpatine oppresses a whole galaxy and causes millions upon millions of death, whereas Ming just presides over one measly planet.