Doll Man faced some diabolical yet dapper dandies on this cover:
A closer look:
It's the Three Stooges of not-quite-Nazis!!
Feature Comics #50 was cover dated November 1941, so it probably hit the stands a good three months or so before Pearl Harbor. The comic book companies were loathe to court too much controversy by coming out and blatantly fighting Nazis before we were actually at war with them (except for Timely, of course, which had been vigorously beating the war drums for more than a year.) So we get these ersatz enemies, wearing Flash Gordon helmets with glowing skulls and equipped with bayonets. Snazzy.
Nobody looking anything like this appears inside the issue. Doll Man does fight some "foreign agents" in Java, and they just happen to have German names--but they're never identified as Germans or Nazis. And they wear pith helmets!!
It's just too bad these ensembles never caught on...
That's one cock-eyed skull and crossbones...
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