Early DC was such a mess. It had racism, homophobia, and the promotion of hard drugs. But that doesn’t mean Marvel couldn’t be even worse. In the early days, it seemed like every comic publisher struggled with good representation and fake "wokeness." That being said, it's time to introduce the 1961 supervillain "Hate-Monger" by the beloved comic company Marvel.
Hate-Monger was a character who made his debut in December 1961 in the 21st issue of Fantastic Four. And he might be the most offensive character to date. He was an Adolf Hitler clone who dressed like a KKK member. In his origin story, Hitler's scientists made multiple clones of Hitler to transfer his consciousness into. One of the clones had taken the disguise of Hate-Monger and was gifted a Nazi-designed machine called the Hate Ray. The Hate Ray would fill people with an unreasonable amount of hate towards everything around them. And of course, like every supervillain, he tried to use it to take over the world and fill it with hatred.
Despite him having such a simple story, what he does as a villain is long, complicated, and unpalatable when thought about in depth. Starting with Hate-Monger's debut, he caused a commotion in New York, and begins to draw attention to himself as a threat. In response Nick Fury (CIA agent at this point) is called in to take care of it. However, Nick Fury realizes that he can't deal with it alone and, so he asks the Fantastic Four for help. But he’s met with an issue when he finds out that the Fantastic Four just broke apart as a result of the previous issues event. Nick, through no small effort, eventually convinces them to get back together to stop the Hate-Monger. They don't do too well in the ensuing fight until the Hate-Monger accidentally shoots two backup soldiers with the Hate Ray, and in their fit of rage, they shoot the Hate-Monger, "killing him." This wasn't his actual death, though. As mentioned before, there were multiple Hitler clones, and Hate-Monger's consciousness only got transferred. From there, he continued to make appearances; how many appearances he ended up making is unknown, but he showed up in "Black Panther: Man Without Fear," and he was in multiple Captain America comics.
Although the Hate-Monger is funny in the sense that he's incredibly ludicrous and so insensitive that it's ridiculous, it does need to be mentioned how problematic he was. Regardless of his first physical appearance (he has design changes), looking like a KKK member, he was unkillable. This makes for a perplexing question of why you would make a real-life person who brought devastation to Jewish people and turn him into a virtually unstoppable supervillain. He could never truly be stopped until they eventually ran out of clones, which should be noted as well.
All in all, it's okay to laugh at these sorry excuses for characters if you can recognize what was truly wrong with them. It's funny but disheartening to know that some of the most well-known idles had a part in creating these characters. Hate-Monger was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, two people who have worked on countless comics for Marvel. But these character (all the ones I’ve talked about) would never fly today, and luckily that we can recognize that as a sign of progress.
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