Marvel Comics not only created groups formed by heroes from around the world to protect the world from all evil, it also invented different organizations and groups of villains that are responsible for seeking evil in order to satisfy their needs, no matter what they have to do to achieve it, and one of the oldest groups that have existed in comic strips is the Hellfire Club.
All those Marvel fans will be aware that group of mutant villains first appeared in Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 No.129, introduced by Chris Claremont and John Byrne in 1980, but, if we tell them that this was not the first Hellfire Club that existed in history, what would they think?
Above: Peter in one of his most iconic roles as Sir John Cleverly Cartney in the Avengers episode, ‘Epic’
No, Marvel Comics did not commit any plagiarism or anything like that, what it did was take as inspiration the Hellfire Club that the 1960s, in the television series Avengers, showed for the first time, to be specific in 1966 in the episode A Touch of Brimstone, where Peter Wyngarde himself had a great participation as the Honorable John Cleverly Cartney within this underground club.
When this series was broadcast, Chris Claremont and John Byrne were teenagers who could quietly enjoy this, probably not even in their minds that one day they could work for Marvel Comics, but they did and that chapter in the Avengers series was so engraved in them that they decided to capture it in the pages of the most famous mutants in the world or, probably, it was only the stunning silhouette of Diana Rigg with that big corset that prompted them to do it, we don’t know.
Once they started working with Marvel Comics they couldn’t miss the opportunity to have their own Hellfire Club, so they did, and these were the first images we had about the underground club of villains.
But Peter’s inspiration for the Hellfire Club did not end there, in 1969 the actor was hired to get his own series, with the obvious leading role, called Department S, since the role he played in the Avengers series, where he was always a guest actor, was so good that he was given the privilege of playing Jason King.
Precisely the image and name of Jason King served as inspiration for Mastermind in the Hellfire Club, since, visually, the character is identical to Wyngarde in the series Department S, while the name of this in the comic was the combination of Jason King and Peter Wyngarde, that is, Jason Wyngarde.
Read more about Peter Wyngarde-inspired comicbook characters…
