Professor hugo strange comic book appearances

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On the final page of this story, Batman is rendered unconscious by a snakebite and then awakens to discover that, during his nap, Hugo Strange has yanked off the cowl to discover that Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, whom he now has at his mercy! Keeping Bruce confined and heavily sedated, Hugo Strange amuses himself by wearing a mask and changing his voice to create what is evidently a brilliant impersonation of Bruce Wayne.

He shows up at Bruce's office each day and begins looting the Wayne financial empire. Then he decides to sell Batman's secret identity to the highest bidder -- but please don't ask me why he needs to bother when he already has all of Bruce Wayne's material assets at his fingertips! At any rate, Hugo puts out feelers through an underworld grapevine to get well-heeled interested parties to show up at a certain time and place to discuss an auction.

Hugo announces the rules of the game -- chiefly, that he expects each serious bidder to pay ten thousand dollars in cold cash right now in order to stay in the running and they all comply! Hugo's faith in three cold-blooded villains' willingness to slavishly abide by his rules and patiently wait until tomorrow night for an "honest" auction is truly remarkable.

You also might call it " breathtakingly naive," but that still qualifies as "truly remarkable! Hugo stubbornly refuses to talk, and finally the thugs announce he's died under their fists. Note: At the start of the next issue, they have already stuffed his body into a weighted barrel and they toss it into the river as we watch. I won't bother giving that its own listing, though.

Mainly because we didn't even see the body; we were merely told it was inside the barrel! In the last few issues, since that barrel got tossed into the river, Boss Thorne has occasionally thought he saw and heard the ghostly figure of Hugo Strange menacing him. On at least one such occasion, there were a couple of other people in the vicinity who didn't seem to see or hear anything out of the ordinary!

Professor hugo strange comic book appearances: Hugo Strange is the only

Now Thorne is driving down a highway alone when he suddenly thinks he sees Hugo's ghost out in front of the car, and then it seems to come through the windshield at Thorne without actually damaging the windshield, you understand and grabs him by the throat. This scene ends at that point, but later on we see Batman get the news that Boss Thorne has been found, apparently gone loony, raving about how he killed Hugo Strange and then the ghost came back to persecute him, et cetera.

So "Detective Comics " was the last we saw of Hugo aliveand is the last we see of Hugo as a ghostat least for the next four years or so. This long gap may have something to do with the fact that Steve Englehart's run on 'Tec ended with this story. If he had stuck around for a few more years, who knows what sort of follow-up he might have provided?

We get some follow-up information on the Earth-2 Hugo Strange, whose only previous appearances had been the first three stories summarized on this timeline. Basically: He somehow survived the fall at the end of his last appearance, but was crippled and deformed by the massive damage his body suffered. For the next 40 years or so, the Batman and Robin of Earth-2 along with anyone else who cared had heard nothing more from Hugo and assumed he was long dead.

At the end of this story, he dies for real -- by his own professor hugo strange comic book appearances, having decided he has nothing left to live for. That makes just four stories, to the best of my knowledge, which ever featured the "original" version of Hugo Strange. Remember, though, that his three "Golden Age" stories apparently had also happened, in much the same way, to the Earth-1 versions of Batman and Hugo Strange, many years later -- but without the Earth-1 Hugo having suffered any lasting injuries from a nasty fall.

Note: The Earth-1 Batman is involved in this tale, and mentions in passing that the Hugo Strange of his Earth has been dead for over a year. Boss Thorne seems to be sitting on top of the world. He has already been back in the center of Gotham politics unbeknownst to the public for awhile at this point. After being released from a sanitarium, he started working behind the scenes as a puppet master, and used some dirty tricks to get a man named Hamilton Hill elected as Gotham's new mayor.

Thorne basically owns Hill, body and soul; he is obviously confident that Mayor Hill will do anything Thorne pleases. One example is firing Commissioner Gordon and replacing him with a man named Pauling who just happens to be another of Thorne's stooges. For our purposes, the most important thing about this issue is that Thorne suddenly looks at a drinking glass in his hand and thinks he sees a miniature image of Hugo Strange's face staring back at him and saying some mocking words.

This sort of thing will happen again and again to Thorne over the next several months as a running subplot. Well, "several months" from the viewpoint of anyone in the real world who was buying the issues as they came out. It probably happened faster from Rupert Thorne's point of view. In a previous issue of "Detective Comics," Boss Thorne made an astute decision.

He hired Terrence Thirteen also known as "Doctor Thirteen, the ghostbreaker" to investigate the way Thorne's been haunted recently by visions of Hugo Strange. Now Thirteen is ready to deliver a report. Just before this issue began, he examined Graytowers reportedly abandoned and uninhabited since the days of the Englehart stories and found sophisticated machinery set up to project a ghostly hologram of Hugo Strange, while simultaneously activating a tape player with a spooky, threatening message which mentions Thorne by name.

If you open the door to a certain lab inside the building, and step inside, the ghostly manifestation begins fifteen seconds later. Whoever set this up was obviously "playing the odds" by assuming the most likely person to come poking around in Graytowers in the near future would be Boss Thorne, if he ever worked up the nerve. While explaining all this to Thorne, Doctor Thirteen conjectures correctly, I'm sure that a thorough examination of Thorne's office and townhouse would turn up other such devices concealed in useful places; all part of an elaborate special-effects campaign geared to drive Thorne out of his mind or convince him he had gone out of his mind, which would amount to much the same thing?

However, Doctor Thirteen has not found evidence pointing at any particular person as the unseen mastermind for this scheme, so naturally he asks if Thorne has any enemies who'd like to see him sent back to a sanitarium. Thorne leaps to the conclusion that Hill and Pauling his pet mayor and his pet police commissioner, remember? Tired of being his minions; anxious to shake him off and then run the city as they see fit.

Later in this story Thorne confronts those two, gun in hand, ranting about what he thinks they've been doing to double-cross him.

Professor hugo strange comic book appearances: Professor Hugo Strange first appears

Both men seem very confused by his accusations. Eventually Thorne shoots Pauling dead at the same time that a cop shoots Thorne. Boss Thorne's injury is nonfatal, as it turns out -- presumably he'll end up in a sanitarium all over again, but I don't think he ever gets any further appearances in the Pre-COIE, Earth-1 continuity, so who knows?

Hamilton Hill, however, panics and drops to the floor just in time to dodge the gunfire; he will continue running things at City Hall for many, many issues after this -- no longer under the thumb of Boss Thorne or anyone else, but still corrupt! On the final page of this story, we see a limo parked not far from the scene of the shooting.

Then we find that sitting in the back seat, looking very much alive, is. Professor Hugo Strange, laughing his head off! Evidently he has now managed to drive Boss Thorne into a mental breakdown, twice in a row! Hugo is obviously one of those sadistic villains who really know how to hold a grudge. Not for him anything so quick and merciful as simply shooting Thorne dead and calling it square.

Note: At this moment, Batman and his friends still have no idea of what's really been going on where Boss Thorne's latest mental breakdown is concerned. They are aware that Thorne has been babbling something about the ghost of Hugo Strange, and about Pauling and Hill secretly being out to get him, and so forth -- standard paranoid stuff, you know?

In a variation of what he's already done to Thorne, Hugo Strange spends most of this issue trying to break Batman down psychologically before confronting him physically. The reader knows all along what's happening. Hugo gets off to a good strong start, with Bruce Wayne coming home to the Manor actually an exact replica of the real house -- long story!

Each time he wins a battle and then looks away, their unconscious bodies seem to vanish into thin air before he looks back in that direction again. Then Bruce will see Alfred or Dick approaching him from another direction, seeming quite friendly and looking none the worse for wear. It's surreal enough to make him wonder if he's hallucinating because of all the stress he's been under lately.

After Bruce finally realizes he is just encountering a series of robot doubles of his butler and protege, he figures out exactly what's happening and heads down to the ersatz Batcave where Hugo is waiting, already dressed as Batman -- having recently removed his glasses and shaved off his beard so he'll look the part! Hugo's avowed purpose is to replace Batman in Gotham -- he claims Bruce is "too soft" to deserve the job -- and it appears that Hugo would have moved into the real Wayne Manor to become "Bruce Wayne" as well, after the real Bruce was dead.

We later learn Alfred was also scheduled to die that night, but Hugo's original plan for dealing with Dick Grayson is less clear. He may have thought a quick murder and then a robot double would work there too. How Hugo expected to successfully deceive Superman the next time he dropped by for a chat with his buddy Bruce, or to deceive all the other heroes of the JLA and the Teen Titans for that matter, is never explained.

But since things never go that far, it's an academic point. On the other hand -- just in case you were wondering -- I'll mention that Hugo does take a minute to explain how he cheated death the last time around. It was his mastery of yoga that saved him.

Professor hugo strange comic book appearances: Professor Hugo Strange is

I very much doubt his "mastery of yoga" had ever been mentioned before, but why split hairs? When he found himself hopelessly outnumbered by Thorne's henchmen, Hugo slowed his heart to the point where the thugs who were pounding on him thought he had already died from the cumulative trauma of their blows. After they stuffed him in a barrel and tossed it in a river, he woke up and easily burst out of the wooden barrel; then began plotting his revenge on Boss Thorne twice!

To do him justice, Hugo actually appears to be winning his hand-to-hand fight with Batman at first, until Robin Dick Grayson makes a late arrival, having followed the electronic signal of a device Bruce was carrying. Hugo tries to persuade Dick that he is the real Batman, and fails miserably. Finally, with blood running down his face after Batman and Robin have each punched him around a bit, Hugo seizes a convenient lever and makes a furious speech which ends with the announcement that if he can't be Batman, nobody can!

Then he yanks the lever and the whole place blows up. Fortunately, Batman and Robin saw where this was going as he reached for the lever. Instead of just standing there waiting for him to finish his diatribe, they made it out of the ersatz Batcave in the nick of time. As the story ends, Batman's explanation of recent events delivered to Alfred gives us the distinct professor hugo strange comic book appearances that Bruce and Dick are both convinced that Hugo blew himself up in a bitter rage and has surely been killed by his own blast -- either by the explosives or by the resulting collapse of tons of earth and other debris from the ersatz Manor, I suppose.

However, there is no immediate follow-up, in this issue or anything published in the next couple of years, to confirm that Hugo is really dead this time! You might think that after all those years of superheroics, Bruce and Dick would be a tad skeptical about any "death" which didn't leave behind a corpse to be positively identified. Note: As far as I know, this story was the first time Hugo Strange demonstrated the apparent capability to build and program very convincing robot doubles of real people.

However, the writers at DC apparently still had not committed themselves on just what discipline Hugo had once taught as a professor. But that's just a guess. Someone is trying to ruin Bruce Wayne, psychologically and financially, it appears. Terror tactics are used on various shareholders to make them sell big blocks of stock to a mysterious buyer who uses his newfound leverage to take control of the Wayne Foundation, while causing its stock to plummet, and doing other nasty things which somehow create a situation where Bruce Wayne's liabilities suddenly exceed his assets and he finds himself going broke, while a probably-illegal but superficially correct court order evicts him from his own house, which is promptly put up for auction and bought by some mysterious person.

I have serious trouble with the idea that it would be so easy to achieve this complete stripping of Bruce's personal assets from him, even if you had zillions of dollars to throw around to get the ball rolling and also started out with at least one or two corrupt judges in your pocket, but let's roll with it. Meanwhile, a person dressed as Batman is occasionally reported to have committed various robberies around Gotham.

Someone's trying to smear the image of Bruce's alter-ego as well as impoverishing him! Eventually Batman learns that the mysterious buyer of his house, the same guy who is behind a "consortium" which has been buying up all that stock in the Wayne Foundation, is a man using the name of "Steven Strangways. Of course the bad guy in question is supposed to be dead, but that never stopped him before!

When Batman and Robin the Pre-COIE Jason Todd this time, in his first encounter with this particular villain penetrate the Batcave's defenses and find the mastermind in his new lair, they are treated to a rant from Hugo Strange. Oddly enough, it appears that he has finally abandoned any hope of "replacing" Bruce as the "real Batman" of Gotham City.

Instead, he was prepared to settle for bankrupting Bruce, smearing Batman's image, and finally inviting the television cameras to come through Wayne Manor and down into the Batcave to expose all Bruce's secrets to the world. That last part was only a plan for the future which never materialized, however. Naturally, by the end of this story, Hugo has been captured alive by Batman -- for what was probably just the second time in Hugo's entire career; the first time being his Golden Age debut story!

Incidentally, Hugo claims that the guy with his face who blew himself up in that last tussle with Batman was just another of Hugo's "mandroids," which he says explains why subsequent examination of the scene turned up the smashed remains of several mandroids, but no flesh-and-blood corpse. That part seems plausible. What's a bit less plausible is that Bruce seems astounded by this revelation, as if his keen detective mind had never suspected anything along those lines after Hugo's human remains had stubbornly failed to turn up in the careful excavation of the former ersatz Batcave which we are retroactively being assured did take place!

Be that as it may, a hasty happy ending is thrown at us in the final pages. Later, Batman reveals that "Eli Strange" is actually an alias and that the boy's real name is Elliot Montrose. Strange wears what he terms a "suicide suit" - a near-replica of the Batsuit without the cape and cowl that is rigged to detonate if its wearer is subjected to any physical attack - on the assumption that Batman will have no choice but to surrender the cowl to him as the "true" Batman since he cannot take a life.

Nightwing is able to defeat the final monster - an amalgamation of the previous ones - by literally leaping inside it to inject it with a prepared antidote, while Batman outwits Strange by having his ally Clayface cover the penthouse in an airtight seal prior to the confrontation. Strange, delirious and running out of oxygen, loses consciousness while Batman is still standing, Nightwing musing that Strange failed to realize that Batman's flaws were actually his motivation in protecting Gotham.

This version is a eugenicist who seeks to improve the gene pool by removing those he considers "unclean". However, Dent later betrays Strange and the Penguin to help the Batgirls. Strange flees and later receives funding from the Soviets to research and create clones of Supergirl. Chief among them are Power Girlwho became the Soviet Union 's secret weapon, and Supermanwho he considered a failure.

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Professor hugo strange comic book appearances: First Appearance (Pre-Crisis, Earth-Two). Detective Comics

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