YOU SHALL RUE THE DAY YOU CROSSED..... THE HATE-MONGER!

The Ronin here,

Every now and again, while reading webpages, or digging through old comic books of mine or my father's or just from general word of mouth on the internet I come across a character so outlandish, so bat-shit insane I just sort of let the old 'WTF' slip out. Now this is not always A bad thing, super-villains are themselves kind of a crazy idea. You have to be pretty out there to think to your self, "Wow I can bench press two thousand pounds... I should dress up as a hippo and rob banks in the same neighborhood the effective heroes work out of."

However the super-villain itself is so ingrained into popular culture we don't pay it to much mind. The super-villain is also a successful tool in story telling, as they are often the only kind of characters that can really threaten the hero.

That said there are some crazy super-villains out there. Any character that has a rogue's gallery of twenty-plus villains is bound to have some silly, ineffective and crazy ones among them, but that isn't what this post is about. This is about a really out there villain. So let us get into it and focus on a Fantastic Four antagonist, The Hate-Monger.

The Hate-Monger goes all back to "Fantastic Four" #21, He is a man who dressed in what looks like a purple KKK uniform, (The Klan apparently used to be FABULOUS!) oh and there was a giant H on his hat, you know... for subtlety. The Hate-Monger fought the Fantastic Four with a ray gun that made people hate things when shot with it. It raises the question, why didn't he just bring a real gun and shoot them, since he had no problem hitting them. I don't know maybe he figured Mr. Fantastic and The Thing were bullet proof or something and they could kill each other with, like, Hate?

This is all pretty tame, silly but tame, so what makes Hate-Monger such a bat-shit insane idea? The WTF factor with Hate-Monger is his secret identity. The cover of FF #21 warns the reader to "Don't dare reveal his true identity after reading this tale!!" (The extra exclamation mark makes it more threatening.). So who is Hate-Monger? Richard Nixon? Your racist Grampa? Archie Bunker? (I don't know who that is, but my dad probably found it amusing.) No you see, Hate-Monger is none of these.

Hate-Monger is Adolf Hitler.

I am going to repeat that so it will sink it better.

The Hate-Monger is Adolf Hitler.

Now that sounds like an insane idea. But, hey it was '62 or '63, and both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were Jewish, The war was still relatively recent then, so having their beloved new heroes beat up on Adolf Hitler probably seemed fun. The story gets even weirder though. Once Marvel began to incorporate the old Timely Comics golden age characters (Captain America, the original android Human Torch... just roll with it, the Sub Mariner etc..) things changed a bit. Someone must of been reading old comics because they learned that in the Marvel Universe Adolf Hitler was killed by the original (Android) Human Torch during the second world war (A classy story I am sure). So they later retconned Hate-Monger as just being a clone of Hitler... with the original brain of Hitler in it. So  you know par for the course in comic books.

(After this I would think Hitler would attack one of the teams that didn't have a 'Human Torch' on it.)

That is right, they used the Hate-Monger more then once, and to the best of my knowledge he is still floating around the Marvel Universe. A grown man, who was not a young Jewish kid in the 40s sat down and went “Hmm... the Marvel Universe needs more Hate-Monger.” A real person sat down and thought this. Not just one either, but several from what I can tell.

If you don't find this odd then just remember comic fans, Jack Kirby created both Darkseid.... and Hate-Monger. let that sink in for a bit.