Westerners have had a fascination with ancient Egypt stretching all the way back to the Victorian era, when it was called “Egyptomania.” This interest received a 20th-century boost when Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamen and has been going strong ever since. So it makes perfect sense that mummies, pharaohs, sarcophagi, and other ancient Egyptian paraphernalia show up in superhero comics, especially during the “anything goes” days of the Silver Age. For this list, I’ll only be including actual pharaohs who were ruling in ancient Egypt. Characters like King Tut or the Living Pharaoh, modern-day scholars who come to believe they are pharaohs, don’t count here. Fortunately, actual pharaohs are common enough in superhero comics that I had no trouble populating this list with real ancient Egyptians with fake Egyptian names — and a yen for conquest. I’m not sure why those pharaohs so often turn out to have evil intentions in these comics. I am sure of why they all look suspiciously white. I certainly wouldn’t turn to any of these comics as authoritative sources on what ancient Egypt was really like, but that’s far from the point of them. Instead, they were meant to be silly adventures, and they certainly do provide a fun contrast to the usual slew of modern-day supervillains — fun for us, that is. Our heroes often have trouble figuring out how to handle these cloth-bound criminals, though they always find a way. For example, they can…
Previous #SuperheroProblems
So Your Family Was Erased From RealitySo You’ve Been Retconned into a ScumbagSo You’ve Been De-Aged Against Your WillAnd more. All of Earth’s heroes are mowed down in short order. In the end (ha), it’s the villainous Thanos who takes Akhenaten down by stealing a little godhood for himself. In righting the universe, he erases all but the most powerful beings’ memories of the ex-pharaoh’s attempt at world domination. (And then he rewrote the universe so that all deaths would be permanent. Guess how long that stuck.) The newly-christened Blue Beetle punches Kha-Ef-Re until he shrinks back down to size and then destroys Amenhotep’s army. And, hopefully, his future adventures were less weird. Hatap uses a magic charm to transport him (and Iron Man) into the past to fight his sworn enemy, Cleopatra. Long story short, Iron Man throws in his lot with Cleopatra (she’s prettier anyway), defeats Hatap, and wins Cleopatra’s heart before returning to his own time. Just fifteen minutes later, Rama-Skeet has to hop into another body. Kid Flash quickly (how else?) concludes that the pharaoh isn’t strong enough to dominate a living mind for longer than that. So all Kid Flash has to do is keep Rama-Skeet away from people for a quarter of an hour to make him vanish forever. How does the team break the mind control? They don’t: a happy coincidence allows them to save themselves. Then Rama-Tut escapes back to the future (I guess his time machine is fixed now?), and the FF try and fail to bring back the cure for the Thing’s girlfriend. They didn’t even ask Alicia (that’s the girlfriend) if she wanted to be “cured” before running off. Ultra fail.
