Zyklon - retconned "Golden Age" villain 2021 Appreciation

[Dr. Poison]

For anyone who hasn't read the story with "Seigfried the Speedster" back in 1978, it turned out "Seigfried" was really spoilers:

Golden Age Flash (Jay Garrick), pretending to be a Nazi villain in an effort to have people believe in Wonder Woman again. She had been thought of as a menace because of illusions and manipulations caused by the Duke of Deception.

end of spoilers

Wow....that really throws me for a loop. Perhaps the All-Stars that fought Zyklon forgot his name so Flash had to make up one when he impersonated him to help Wonder Woman? Best explanation I can think of.

[Tzigone]

And I don't think most other people would really go beyond the "Zyklon" = German for "Cyclone" connection, especially with a character that runs really fast.

From the other side - I'm only familiar with "Zyklon" as poison and had no idea it meant "Cyclone." Associated with a nazi villain, that was absolutely my first thought. Especially since in the first panel posted here, I had no idea he was a speedster (he has lightning bolts, but I wasn't looking at his costume).

I will agree that it was in no sense "edgy" given when the comic was published though.

[DrNewGod]

From the other side - I'm only familiar with "Zyklon" as poison and had no idea it meant "Cyclone." Associated with a nazi villain, that was absolutely my first thought. Especially since in the first panel posted here, I had no idea he was a speedster (he has lightning bolts, but I wasn't looking at his costume).

I will agree that it was in no sense "edgy" given when the comic was published though.

It.does, however, make for a sinister coincidence.

[Jim Kelly]

It's hard for me to believe that Roy Thomas wouldn't know about the use of Zyklon B by the Nazis to gas people in the camps.

English and German have a tendency to reverse the sounds of certain consonants and vowels. So the Z, in Zyklon, is more like a "ts"--the y is an ee sound--so it sounds almost like "cyclone" but if you said it like "seaclone." On the other hand the S in Siegfried is a "z" sound.* If you spell it Siegfried, then it sounds like "Zeegfreed." Seigfried isn't a German name, but the way it's spellt that would sound like "Zyge-freed." Siegfried is of course a hero in the Song of the Nibelungs, which Roy adapted for the comics at least twice. Siegfried literally means Victory-Peace.

*Well, really more like halfway between z and s and a shorter sound than in English.

[MajorHoy]

It's hard for me to believe that Roy Thomas wouldn't know about the use of Zyklon B by the Nazis to gas people in the camps.

I wouldn't be surprised if Roy Thomas was aware of that.
But I doubt the average comic book reader would have automatically gone beyond the idea of "Cyclone" = "Zyklon". If the character had been named "Cyclone" (in English), would people automatically assume he was named for a poisonous gas?

[Tzigone]

Nevermind.

[DrNewGod]

It's hard for me to believe that Roy Thomas wouldn't know about the use of Zyklon B by the Nazis to gas people in the camps...

I wouldn't be surprised if Roy Thomas was aware of that.
But I doubt the average comic book reader would have automatically gone beyond the idea of "Cyclone" = "Zyklon". If the character had been named "Cyclone" (in English), would people automatically assume he was named for a poisonous gas?

I agree with you both that Thomas likely knew about the chemical Zyklon, and it's role in the Death Camps. However, Thomas never passed on an opportunity to expound on history and non-obvious references in his writing...at length. If he'd intended to use the name as a reference to the poison, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be having to mine as deep as Jim Kelly did to make the connection.

[Jim Kelly]

Of course, back in the day, you didn't have google--or in my case bing (I don't like to use google if I can help it). When I searched zyklon on bing, the gas used in the Nazi death camps was the first thing that came up.

In Roy's case, he probably didn't want to get too deep into the history of the gas, because it's a chilling subject--and comics were still being Comic Code approved. But he probably knew he could drop in the name and his mature readers would do their own research.

[MajorHoy]

Of course, back in the day, you didn't have google--or in my case bing (I don't like to use google if I can help it). When I searched zyklon on bing, the gas used in the Nazi death camps was the first thing that came up.

In Roy's case, he probably didn't want to get too deep into the history of the gas, because it's a chilling subject--and comics were still being Comic Code approved. But he probably knew he could drop in the name and his mature readers would do their own research.

Then again, back in those days, I really didn't know the exact name of the gas used by the Nazis. That didn't really matter.
The concept of what happened in places like Auschwitz was all we really needed to focus on, not the nuts-and-bolts specific details. And I don't know how many other non-history majors would have been all that familiar with the specific gas used.