Wednesday, March 20, 2024

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 477: THE DICTATOR'S SHADOW

(Banner Comics 003, 1941)

The Dictator's Shadow is the "head of the fifth column in America" and the major villain of patriotic hero the Lone Warrior and his kid brother Dicky, in the vein of the Red Skull. A notable thing about him is that he is not explicitly a Nazi, which is both unusual for someone whose name is so evocative of Hitler as the capital-D Dictator of the day but also for a character appearing in Banner Comics, where the writers were a little more willing to have Nazi villains than in your DC or your Quality mags.

The Dictator's Shadow's (what an odd thing to type) major trick is his so-called "shadow projecting ring," the function of which is a bit opaque but which allows him to appear to be in one place while actually being in another and with which he was able to escape the Lone Warrior and Dicky in 2/3 of their encounters.

In their final encounter, the Dictator's Shadow employed one of the greatest deathtraps in comics: he essentially had a door with an active volcano behind it and when things got too real he opened that door. This inevitably backfired on him and he ended up dead. He probably would have kept on returning if the Lone Warrior and Dicky weren't second-tier characters at an also-ran company, but them's the breaks in the high-stakes game on intercontinental fascism.

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