Grey Gremlin I (Deceased)

The super-saboteur and criminal David Bane was an American who, under the name the Grey Gremlin or sometimes simply “the Widget,” disabled or bombed targets in the first in United States, and then in the U.K. After the Defenders of Justice came close to capturing him, he relocated the U.K. Bane was a master of demolitions and chemical weapons; he was also rumored to have received dark enchantments from the mystic cabal working for the Nazi’s known as Reichsamt fur die Sicherung volkishcer Kultruguter (Reich’s Office for the Safety and Security of National Cultural Items).

After the Battle of the Bulge, Frank Fatale (aka The Gumshoe) was assigned to the X-2 branch of the OSS. Using intelligence obtained from the German code-cracker ULTRA and in cooperation with British intelligence, Frank’s unit of American and British agents ambushed the Grey Gremlin in a British military hangar in April of 1945. In a pitched battle in which a good friend of Frank’s died horribly from one of Bane’s corrosive grenades, Fatale’s unit captured the Grey Gremilin. Fatale still keeps as a memento the clasp the medal that Bane kept pinned to his cloak, an Iron Cross First Class that was awarded to Bane by Hitler himself.

During the processing of the charges against him, Bane's American nationality came to light, and it seemed that he would have to be acquitted, based not upon innocence of the charges of aiding the Nazi war effort but rather a lack of jurisdiction; he could not be convicted of high treason against a country that was not his own. However, the British Attorney General successfully argued that Bane's possession of a British passport, even though he had mis-stated his nationality in order to get it, entitled him (until it expired) to British diplomatic and military protection, and that he therefore owed allegiance to the King at the time he conducted acts of sabotage and terrorism working for the Germans.

It was on this technicality, confirmed by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords (on a split decision), that Bane was convicted of High Treason and sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging in 1946; in his final moments he made several anti-semitic statements and claimed that his spirit would rise from the grave and exact terrible vengeance against all enemies of the Reich.

His identity was later claimed by Franklin Gray, Grey Gremlin II