Number 2573: “Hey, Joe...where you go?”

When it comes down to dictators, I think Adolf Hitler gets some sort of recognition for being one who definitely stood out in a crowd. Humanity has put up with a lot of dictators in the past...too many for me to count...but Hitler just steals the thunder from among the rest. Maybe it was that Charlie Chaplin did a splendid satire of Adolf in the movie, The Great Dictator. Hitler was fun to caricature.

This short story from an Atlas horror comic shows a craven Hitler after years in hell. Adolf tries to get some historical figures to vouch for him, telling the devil he was really a good man, so he can get out of hell.

The ending originally puzzled me. He finally calls on someone named “Joe” for help. Who the hell is Joe? I thought perhaps it was Joseph Goebbels, but Goebbels died in 1945 and had probably been stoking the fiery furnaces ever since. Then I hit on Joseph Stalin. That gave me pause. If ever there were true enemies, Stalin and Hitler fit the definition of enemies. I’ll stick with Stalin because it seems right to me, although I am not sure. Stalin died on May 1, 1953, and the date on the comic book is August, 1953. So it was big news that year, and perhaps the writer jumped on the idea. Basically, the last dialogue in the story, for me, that is, seems to point to Joe Stalin. Which only leaves why Hitler would want to implore Stalin to tell the devil that Hitler was a good guy.

The story is from Adventures Into Weird Worlds #21 (1953), with Sam Kweskin's signature for the artwork.