Wrong Address; Return To Sender (Avengers: The Initiative 1-2)

imported from older blog
From the series about Germans in comics, commentary on Avengers: The Initiative 1 - Happy Accidents (2007-04) and 2 - Hero Moment (2007-05)

I'm not sure this Baron von Blitzschlag is undead or just old, but he certainly is another Nazi scientist. This is starting to get silly.

"Blitzschlag" translates to "lightning strike". Not a last name I ever encountered. If someone reading this is really curious about the "Baron" bit, you could look into Freiherr.

What's really interesting is the way he talks - not the over the top accent, but the fact that he consistently addresses Doctor Hank Pym as "Herr Pym".
This can come across as a bit of a snub, since he does not address him as "Doctor Pym" (or even "Doktor", if need be).
It's also interesting to see that he knows the address "Mr" (last page of #1), yet chooses to use "Herr" to address Pym.
With both combined, also considering the "I'm your greatest fan" speech in #2, it looks to me like von Blitzschlag is trying to get on Pym's nerves.

Unfortunately we have a "Herr Gyrich" earlier, so it seems like the "Mr. Secetary" might have been a slip, and I might be reading entirely too much into it.

A general note regarding having German characters use "Herr"/"Frau"/"Fräulein" instead of English forms of address: For most characters, it's nonsense.

Apart from the fact that something that common is easy to pick up when you learn a language, you would have to have spent your life alone in a cave to not know Mr and Mrs and Miss. It's all over entertainment.

We get a lot of movies and TV series translated from English. Those are not subtitled, but dubbed. However, even when speaking German, the characters use the English forms of address. (I'm not saying you couldn't find counter-examples, though I can't think of any right now.)

This is not a new trend. Even in the German dub, that pointy-eared guy from Star Trek is called "Mister Spock". The oldest example I could find in a hurry was Gone With The Wind (1953).
This also extends to titles, for exampel right now "Mr. Bean macht Ferien" gets advertised, and off the top of my head I can think of "Mrs. Doubtfire", "Mr. Bill" and an old cartoon show called "Mr. Maggoo".

Considering present day settings, "Fräulein" is particularly inappropriate, because it's obsolete. If someone who was not a senior citizen had addressed me as "Fräulein" when I was a teenager (last decade), I'd have thought they were making fun of me.

So, yeah, quite a few Germans in English comics sound very weird to me.

Back to the comic at hand, there's a small point left: In Avenger: The Initiative #2, von Blitzschlag calls M.V.P. "die Übermensch". That schould be "der Übermensch" (grammatically masculine, rather than feminine).