(Super Comics 027, 1940)
Pirate Captain Death comes into conflict with Jim Ellis and his brother Bud when the former, a dead ringer for Death, is shanghaied by the slightly less villainous Captain "Iron" Shard in an attempt to bluff his way onto Death's Forbidden Island headquarters and steal his treasure.
This "identical hero/villain duo" situation is hardly unprecedented in fiction, and there are broadly two ways that it plays out. In the first, the villain is not so bad as their reputation might suggest, and things play out like a classic comedy of errors. This is the other way, in which the villain is so over the top and evil that looking like him is almost a moral challenge to the hero.
After being talked up as an evil dude for a fair number of issues, our first look at Captain Death is when he sails into the comic just as Jim Ellis and Captain Shard have come to terms and are about to leave for less perilous climes. Captain Death sets the tone by immediately sinking Shard's ship and picking off the swimming survivors with a rifle. Evil stuff! Of course Jim and Bud manage to make their way to land and over the course of the next few issues Jim takes a tremendous amount of abuse but eventually switches places with Death and he and Bud skip town at the next available port. Weirdly Captain Death never returns, as far as I can tell. Maybe he's not as big on vengeance as other pirates.
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