For every hero as well-known as Spider-Man or Superman, there are hundreds of comic book
characters you've probably never heard of… and there's a good reason for that.
While comics can be a great medium for addressing sensitive issues, they also have a history
of hosting characters that are so offensive or insensitive that many of them have been
buried by their publishers.
Some, however, linger on.
Here are just a few of the most inappropriate comic characters ever created.
Egg Fu
The cultural landscape was decidedly different when the villain Egg Fu was created back in
1965.
First appearing in Wonder Woman #157, Egg Fu hit every single Asian stereotype that
could possibly be attributed to an egg-shaped bad guy.
His face was a straight-up copy of a wartime propaganda poster, and he spoke in an accent
that was straight out of a Charlie Chan parody.
Looking at the comic with today's standards, um.. let's just say there's some colorful
language we don't use anymore.
"Is confusing"
"It!
It is confusing!
Say your damn pronouns!"
In his debut, Egg Fu was a Chinese Communist agent who, for some unexplained reason, was
the size of a house and shaped like an egg.
He didn't have any real powers, was stuck in the ground, and actually briefly killed
Wonder Woman.
To make things especially weird, his mustache had the ability to whip and grab his enemies
… because, y'know, he was an egg without actual arms, so what else was he going to
do?
Throughout his publication history, he's been retconned and reimagined, and his weird relatives
and robot duplicates have shown up, even in video games, but little could be done to mask
his offensive beginnings.
Not only is this character offensive to about 2 billion people on the planet, he's also
offensive to eggs.
That's gotta be a new low.
Snowflame
On the surface, Snowflame is just this guy with super stamina, strength, and something
called Blast Power… which is all because of the wonders of cocaine.
Snowflame has only ever appeared in one comic: 1988's The New Guardians #2, during the height
of bringing the War on Drugs to kids in everything from comics to video games.
So maybe a leader of a drug cartel gaining awesome superpowers from snorting cocaine
wasn't the best idea.
"And it sounds like the solution is more cocaine."
But hey, at least they tried.
His career is incredibly short-lived once he gets thrown into an exploding shed during
his first real fight.
For most comic villains, this would be nothing but a flesh wound, but the drug-addled Snowflame
never came back, except in really creepy fan comics.
The New Guardians series was no stranger to bizarrely offensive characters, either.
The first issue featured Hemo-Goblin, a vampire created by Neo-Nazis who went around spreading
AIDS.
They can't all be winners.
Rawhide Kid
When he was first created, Marvel's Rawhide Kid was just another comic book gunslinger
who faded once space rangers came along and people weren't as interested in westerns anymore.
So he mostly sat in a drawer for decades.
When Marvel finally decided to do something new with the character in 2003, they changed
only one aspect of him: they made him gay.
While that's not necessarily an inappropriate move on its own, apparently the only way Marvel
knew how to do that was to heap just about every stereotype on the character they could
think of and make weiner jokes on his first cover.
And second cover.
And shoehorn his entire tragic history into a single page.
The most obvious alteration was his speech, which focused almost entirely on gossip, fashion,
and innuendo, with absolutely no subtlety.
"Have you got it?"
"Yesssssssssssss."
"Sounds like steam escaping."
Ultimately, it added nothing to the character, since he was already well-established, having
been printed off and on since 1955 in more than 130 books.
No new backstory, no new anything… just more offensive to make cheap gay jokes for
no good reason.
Big Bertha
It's hard to say whether or not Big Bertha is a commentary on the problems within the
fashion industry or the social stigma of being overweight, because Bertha is representative
of both extremes.
She's a mutant who can transform her body into a 600-pound superhero, but she normally
looks like a skinny supermodel.
Now, That's all fine, though.
Because it's not her transformation from skinny to fat that's inappropriate.
Rather, it's when she changes back from big to small...when she literally pukes away the
fat.
Now, it should be mentioned that Big Bertha, as well as the rest of her teammates on the
Great Lakes Avengers, are meant to be joke characters in the first place.
But bulimia as a superpower is a screwed-up message to send, and that's exactly what this
character does, even if you put a happy squirrel giving you positive messages in the corner
of the page.
Marvel could have done anything with her powers, but they went with the "bulimic supermodel
superhero" idea instead.
Barf.
He-She
It's unlikely you've picked up a comic book and read about the misadventures of He-She.
You know, "the most fiendish killer of all time"?
The character only ever appeared in one comic book, 1943's Boy Comics #9.
He-She is literally half man and half woman, and somehow has the superpower of being able
to stand in profile and perfectly mask one side of his-slash-her face, which is how he-slash-she
uses her-slash-his powers of feminine seduction or mighty man-strength against unwitting enemies.
In He-She's one and only adventure, "He" cons a landlady into marrying him while his neatly-placed
fedora masks the villain's feminine features.
When He-She's peculiar nature is discovered, by, uh, Mrs. He-She, the bad guy goes into
a blind rage and kills her, drags her downstairs, and stuffs her body into the wall.
The whole adventure ends with a trip to the electric chair after the murderer is caught
by Crimebuster.
The reasons for this character being inappropriate are pretty clear.
It's not that the character was what we'd consider to be trans today.
No: it's literally half of a man and half of a woman, split lengthwise and stuck together
to create what the comic book's writers considered to be the world's worst monster.
Worse than literal monsters.
"That's not how it works.
That's not how any of this works."
That, and the comic describes anyone even remotely similar as 'circus freaks'.
Keep it classy, Boy Comics!
Hate-Monger
When you look like a KKK inductee whose hood got messed up in the wash, you're off to a
bad start, in many, many ways.
Hate-Monger has been a part of mainstream comics since he debuted in Fantastic Four
#21 in 1963, and his main weapon is something called a Hatred-Ray — can you guess what
it does?
Seriously, one guess.
And it doesn't play Smash Mouth songs at high volume, but it has the same effect.
Give up?
It makes you hate stuff.
When he's first encountered by the Fantastic Four, Hate-Monger is giving a speech about
why we should be intolerant of foreigners.
The Thing doesn't like what he hears, so he smashes the guy's podium to smithereens.
That's when the H-Ray comes out, and the members of the Fantastic Four immediately turn on
each other.
Well, more than usual.
Eventually, the FF agree to continue to fight the good fight, even though they hate one
another, and the whole thing comes to a hateful head when Hate-Monger accidentally blasts
his own goons… and they kill him.
You'll never guess who's under the hood.
Yup, it's Hitler.
Or maybe just e of his duplicates.
But the character didn't die there and then.
He went on to build a supercomputer out of a bunch of old Nazi brains.
His consciousness continued to transfer from one brain to another, prolonging the life
of one of the worst human beings to have ever lived, eventually coming back as a being of
pure energy in 2001.
And even though he was made of pure light, he still decided to keep the world's worst
mustache.
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