Comics that set out to maintain the "goodness" of the "ever-good-saintly" government, weren't of much appeal for children able to read comics amid a very convulsive social and political situation in countries where the governments were most of the time dictatorships or quasi-dictatorships that were only looking out for their reactionary elites and also outright killing generations of youth that were opposing their policies and breaking through against the establishment.
It's in this context (the inability of American super-heroes to capture, I would say, Iberoamerican kids' imaginations and the rebellious, anarchist and anti-establishment attitude of these latter toward their criminal governments) that Fantômas made his entry onto the scene: The elegant, aristocratic nobleman distant from the other wealthies and enforcement institutions (police, detectives, etc.) that were always opposing corruption and solving all the cases on behalf of the average Joe...then disappearing without any trace.
Either way (the original French version and the Mexican comics) he's been portrayed, Fantômas definitely is the man!
Fantômas seems to have definitely become a sort of Robin Hood in Latin America, an aspect that's definitely absent in the French character. The Argentian novelist Julio Cortazar wrote a novella picking up on this aspect of the Latin-American Fantômas. In Fantômas contra los vampiros multinacionales (Fantômas vs. the multinational vampires) Cortazar invokes the aid of Fantômas to help track down the nefarious conspiracy that is destroying the libraries of the world -- and which, it turns out, is also responsible for the "convulsive political situation" in Latin America: the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, the murderous attacks on the student movement in Mexico City, etc. I hope to post some images, and possibly the entire text, from this intriguing novella in the very near future.