Red Panzer
1896 - Helmut Streicher is born in Germany.
1915 - 19-year-old Helmut attends officers training during WW1
1919 - 23-year-old Helmut graduates from officer's training after armistice. He swears revenge.
1921 - 25-year-old Helmut is an early member of the Nazi party. He uses his family fortune to fund the organization and to build weaponry.
1930 - 34-year-old Helmut earns the rank of Lieutenant General in the Axis Army, wearing the Red Panzer armor.
1939 - 43-year-old Helmut terrorized the European front as World War II begins.
While there are actually a weirdly large number of Nazi-themed villains in comics, most of them were invented during World War II, so they actually make a little bit more sense. Red Panzer isn't one of them. He's a more modern villain, a c-lister at best, whose whole premise bascially boiled down to "MAN Nazis are evil! Remember them?" It's actually a fairly good schtick. It was also good 13 years earlier in the pages of Marvel's Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandos, when the same character was called Baron Von Strucker.
Still, if we start pointing out every time Marvel and DC copied each other, we'll be here all day.
Still, if we start pointing out every time Marvel and DC copied each other, we'll be here all day.
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Our Helmut Streicher StoryHelmut Streicher was first created in 1977, when making your villains a pastiche of nazis had suddenly hit a new level of popularity thanks to a little movie called Star Wars. Thankfully, unlike a lot of other character with a similar theme that were invented while the war was going on, This character actually had a little bit more going on, being written a little bit more like an actual person with terrible ideas that as a racist characteur. Still, once a person with that name and that face scar starts carrying a cat you are pretty clearly built to be a badguy. There was really only this one appearance of this character, and then a second post-crisis version that was invented more than twenty years later.
He might actually be a character that we would have skipped entirely, but if we're GOING to have a World War II era cat-stroking Nazi supervillain, Helmut is actually a pretty perfect choice thanks to the hindsight involved in his creation. We'll use him as an enemy for our Wartime Hero version of Hippolyta. |