Just for clarification, this isn’t a question about Manga villains. It’s a question about American comic book villains. Specifically, are there any comic supervillains who were supposed to have fought on Japan’s behalf during the Second World War?
There are quite a few German villain characters like that—The Red Skull, for example—and some of them were even created (for the comics) during the war. But I can’t think of any such Japanese villains.
So, were/are there any? A “Rising Skull,” or something?
DC ran a retroactive series called All-Star Squadron in the 1980s, which started with Pearl Harbor and featured just about every Golden-Age character they could find. Among other villians created for the series were Tsunami (a woman would could telekinetically create tidal waves ) and Sumo the Samurai (a skilled swordsman).
Simplfied, to be sure, but a bit better than the grotesque characatures that had appeared in the forties.
There weren’t all that many “super-villains” in the '40s. During the war, most enemy bad-guys were soldiers, spys, saboteurs, mad-scientist etc. The “super-villain” era was in large part caused by the war ending and super-heroes needing someone to fight.
Frankly, even at the time, there weren’t that many WW2 era costumed/super villains. There were a ton created in the '70s and '80, mostly by Roy Thomas, who was a World War II, Golden Age buff.
Um…Baroness Paula Von Gunther from Wonder Woman (and I’m stretching the defintion of “Costumed” by counting her–she ran around in a sort of leather Nazi outfit)
The Red Skull–again, just a Nazi mixed with the Joker. No real powers
Captain Nazi – At last, a real super-villain. Can go one-on-one with Captain Marvel.
Um…Nippo—Also from the pages of Captain Marvel, IIRC, his only “power” was to be a pretty grotesque (even by the standards of the time) racial stereotype.
Off the top of my head, those are the only major ones I can think of (I’m sure there’s more, but those are the key ones).
IIRC, Germans got the spiffy costumes and individual characters, Italians got ignored and Japanese got treated as monsters (nameless, weird-looking and lots of them).
And if there were Japanese villains that Roy Thomas might have revived, they were probably such bad/offensive characters (I mean, “Nippo”? :rolleyes: ) that Thomas couldn’t revive them or didn’t think it worth trying to “fix” them.
During this period, Flash GOrdon was fightring the Monkey Men of Mongo (¿).
There were cast as Japoanese who after the Home Islands were wacked escaped to space and {reverted to type{ (those are quotation marks from this public computer in Panama City, Panama.)
I believe the Black Dragon Society, which the Justice Society of America fought in All-Star Comics # 12 (a story revisited in All-Star Squadron # 30) was a Japanese spy ring.