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Hooded Justice was a costumed adventurer and the first masked vigilante to appear in the United States. A violent and brutal seeker of justice, he inspired several others to don costumes, masks, and gimmicks, later joining the Minutemen along with them. His real identity was kept secret even from his fellow crimefighters, and remained as such when he vanished in 1955. His real identity is never conclusively revealed but in Hollis Mason's book it is suggested to be circus strongman Rolf Müller.

Biography[]

Origin[]

At some point near the end of the Great Depression, an American man with a German accent decided to become a violent, crime fighting vigilante, donning a hood and cloak to hide his identity. He first made his public appearance in the autumn of 1938 when he violently stopped a gang from assaulting a young couple. A week later, he intervened in an armed robbery at a supermarket. It was his second appearance in which the public gave him his name, Hooded Justice.

Minutemen[]

In 1939, Hooded Justice joined the Minutemen. He was secretly homosexual and in a romantic relationship with Nelson Gardner aka Captain Metropolis. But in order to hide it from the general public, he pretended to be in a relationship with Silk Spectre. He later rescued the Silk Spectre from the Comedian's sexual assault, which led to the Comedian's expulsion from the team.

Hooded Justice was a brutal vigilante who would beat criminals to a bloody pulp, this was suggested by the Comedian to be a part of his sexual fetishes. His controversial talent for brutal treatment made him infamous in local newspapers.

His true identity remained unknown to his fellow Minutemen. Even his lover Nelson Gardner did not know his real name. It is established that he was of German descent with a slightly Bavarian accent.

He held deeply far-right views, and was not afraid to express them around his teammates or the press. HJ made comments in favor of Adolf Hitler's rule in Germany, which greatly offended both Silhouette, a Jewish woman, and Mothman, a staunch socialist.

Disappearance and Legacy[]

In 1955, Hooded Justice mysteriously disappeared. In his book Under the Hood, Hollis Mason reasoned that when the House Un-American Activities Committee began to demand the unmasking of all costumed adventurers Hooded Justice did not wish to and he vanished from the public. Mason noted the similarities of Hooded Justice's history with that of a circus strongman named Rolf Müller, suspecting that they were in fact the same person. Müller had a similar build and he had disappeared at the same time as Hooded Justice.

A year after Hooded Justice's disappearance, Müller was found dead in which his badly decomposed body washed up the coast of Boston with a bullet lodged in the back of his head. An article from The New Frontiersman suggested that Müller, whose family were East German, had been on the run for fear of being uncovered during the Communist witch hunts, and implied that Müller was executed by his Communist superiors. Whatever happened, Hooded Justice's identity remain a mystery to the world, and his disappearance to all but a select few.

Ozymandias investigated Hooded Justice's disappearance when he was researching his masked predecessors. His investigation discovered that The Comedian, a government operative, had tried to unearth Hooded Justice but reported failure to his government superiors. Ozymandias suspected that The Comedian had found and murdered Hooded Justice, but he could not prove this.

Trivia[]

  • The author's notes reveal that the costume for Hooded Justice was originally designed for a character called Brother Night who claimed to have occult powers.

Commentary[]

  • His costume's uncanny resemblance to those worn by members of the Klu Klux Klan, as well as the rope around his neck invoking lynch mob hangings of Black people during the Jim Crow era, echoes references made by Nova Express magazine that allege costumed adventurers are direct descendants of Klansmen, which Hector Godfrey of the New Frontiersmen defended both masks and the supposed Klan similarities. In the article, Godfrey claims that (although not "strictly legal" and what he describes as "what some might view as their later excesses") the group came into existence because of the concerns of "reasonable" citizens who simply wanted to look out for their safety of their people and their property against people from a supposedly "morally unadvanced" culture. Here, Moore seems to connect the concept of superheroes with racist vigilantism and far-right violence.
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