In 1941, Captain America’s first comic showed him punching out Adolf Hitler.
It wasn’t a metaphor, an exploration of the complexities of international relations, or a statement: evil exists, and sometimes, you have to face it.
Imagine that cover being pitched today. “But have we considered Hitler’s
Did he? It seems like he was always an emblem of military propaganda. More Americans used to be enlisted in the military, on account of the high demand for conscripts during Korea and Vietnam. But I wouldn’t consider a whitewashed super-soldier to be a good representative of the civilian public.
Green Arrow and The Punisher leap to mind. If you go further back, you’ve got comic book heroes like Dick Tracey and TinTin. Go through The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and you’ve got Allen Quartermane, Captain Nemo, A. J. Raffles, and Ishmael. And nobody in GI Joe had magic powers. Plenty of golden age heroes were just… detectives or kungfu masters or adventurers of some sort.