Fiends of Friday Week: Vanishing Villains

This week's Friday Fiends were first introduced in Mighty Crusaders #1 (November 1965) and Captain Atom #87 (August 1967). Without further ado, here are a pair of techno-hitmen in their brief silver age debuts..

The Eraser was the explanation behind the disappearance in 1947 of the Original Shield.

The Image (drawn by Jim Aparo) was an adversary of the heroine, Nightshade, when he kidnapped her alter ego, Eve Eden in a gambit to blackmail her father, a U.S. senator.

There was no explanation as to how the Eraser acquired his fantastic technology. Eraser used a metalorion gun to turn his foe into an iron statue, remaining such for decades before his revival. Image apparently acquired his tech from his foreign government, which involved teleportation through mirrors. The Image's gambit was less successful than Eraser's for he was promptly defeated by Eve's "darker side". Eraser himself employed similar dimension traveling technology that allowed him, as had the Image, to cause prey to vanish from sight and from reality.

Nevertheless both baddies ended up in something akin to comic limbo, literally and figuratively, for several decades. While they were pawns sent by powerful organizations (American gangs in the Eraser's case and the aforementioned foreign power in the Image's case) to styme two American patriots to weaken the defenses of the country, it was the Shield and the Senator's heroic offspring that exiled them from Earth. But never fear for they would return in the 1980's.

. The Eraser was the first to reappear, as an adversary of the Fox and a pawn of the Brain Emperor who had freed him from limbo. He then founded the Riot Squad. The Image also found freedom from his own personal purgatory thanks to the other dimensional villain Brainiac. Both hired guns quickly joined entourages of evil which ultimately proved doomed to failure. Although the Eraser appeared again in the 21st Century, the Image apparently got out of the bad biz for good.