Red Skull: Difference between revisions

[[File:Red_Skull_Unstretched_1422.png|frame|"When it comes to bad, the Red Skull is in a class all by himself."]]

 

 

 

The established origin of the better known Skull is relatively complex. He was born as Johann Schmidt in a small German village, probably sometime in the [[The Roaring Twenties|1920s]]. The Skull's mother Martha died giving birth to him, causing his drunken lout of a father to [[Offing the Offspring|try and drown him]], saying that the infant had murdered his wife. A doctor managed to prevent him from killing his newborn son. But the father went on to commit suicide. Growing up alone, the rise of the Nazis backdropping his life, young Schmidt eventually found himself living a hard life on the streets. All while nursing a growing anger and frustration towards the rest of the world. As an older teen, Schmidt managed to get a job as a bellhop for a major hotel frequented by [[Adolf Hitler]]. Schmidt was present for one occasion when Hitler was angrily berating the head of the [[Gestapo]] (or just some random German officer) for letting a spy escape, and screamed at the man that he could make even the bellhop into a better Nazi than him. [[Gone Horribly Right|He did]].

 

 

However, as the war dragged on the Skull started to see that Germany was not going to win, and [[Know When to Fold'Em|instead made plans to escape and build a new power base abroad]]. In the meantime he assigned rival Nazi Baron Heinrich Zemo to a secret mission to assassinate Captain America, hoping the two would kill each other off. In the event, Zemo was defeated and Roger's sidekick [[Bucky Barnes]] was (seemingly) killed, but not before Captain America tracked the Skull to his secret bunker and engaged him in battle. Cap won and apparently killed the Skull, but in reality he was merely placed in [[Suspended Animation]], a fate that Cap would shortly suffer too after his battle with Zemo.

 

{{tropelist}}

* [[Abusive Parents]]: His mother died in childbirth, and his alcoholic father tried to ''drown'' him for it. Someone rescued him, but he just got put in an orphanage and things just went downhill from there....

** He's an aboslutely horrible parent to his own daughter, as well. When she was born he originally planned on killing her, ''because she wasn't a boy.'' His first words upon seeing her were literally, "A daughter? Kill It!". And he would have if it wasn't for Mother Night convincing him to let her live.

* [[Arch Enemy]]: One of the oldest in comics.

* [[Artifact of Doom]]: Cosmic Cubes, in his hands anyway.

** [[Almighty Janitor]]?

* [[Ax Crazy]]

* [[Bastard Understudy]]: To Hitler.

* [[Big Bad]]: One of '''the''' major supervillain threats on a planet drowning in them, and one of the most despicably evil.

* [[Card-Carrying Villain]]

* [[Classic Villain]]

* [[Daddy's Little Villain]]: His daughter, Syn.

* [[Dark Messiah]]: There's an Aryan brotherhood gang called "The Skulls" and they worship the Skull as the second coming. Oddly enough the gang and their leader are mainly Wolverine villains. You could also say Crossbones sees the Skull this way.

* [[Diabolical Mastermind]]

* [[The Dreaded]]: Just mentioning his name is a good way to end villain deals, and you'll have to look pretty damn hard if you want to find someone who would willingly work with him.

* [[Dystopia Justifies the Means]]: His ideal world varies between a violent [[Police State]] and a lawless, chaotic hellhole; in either case he believes that the strong could and should brutalise the weak, commits mass murder on a regular basis, and demands absolute power which he wants to use primarily to oppress and torture people, not simply power for its own sake. And he enjoys it, every minute of it.

* [[Evil Redhead]]: Back when he had his original body.

** Technically ''now'', too.

** He notably kicked Viper out for wasting his money and resources on acts of terrorism with no strategic benefit, violence for its own sake.

** In a crossover, he mutually refuses to work with [[The Joker]], not so much for ethical standards as "[[Mad Artist|artistic]]" ones. The Joker glories in psychological torture and poetic death - he finds ''far'' more value in compelling [[The Dark Knight|a good man to kill a child]], or [[Batman (film)|an entire major American city to abandon basic hygiene]], than he does mass(even ''millions-strong'') graves full of indiscriminate victims. So to the Joker, Skull is a talentless hack, and to the Skull, Joker is a useless lunatic.

* [[For Want of a Nail]]: Aside from his father trying to drown him, the night he met Hitler he claims he was contemplating suicide, and may have gone through with it had he not been granted the opportunity.

* [[From Nobody to Nightmare]]: He was just a bitter, angry, psychotic street kid who had somehow managed to get a job as a bellhop at a posh hotel. Then Hitler noticed him, and took him under his wing.

* [[Good Smoking, Evil Smoking]]: Very, very evil, especially given that half the time he isn't actually smoking, because the cigarette actually contains his Dust of Death poison that he'll use on unsuspecting victims.

* [[Gone Horribly Right]]: He was Hitler's attempt to show that he could create the ultimate Nazi Ubermensch. He was such a success that even Hitler started becoming scared of him.

* [[Grand Theft Me]]: He's taken over Captain America's body twice: once in the 1960's, and once more recently. He also spent some time sharing a body with his rival Aleksander Lukin, and in a spare robot body belonging to his underling, Arnim Zola.

*** Curiously, [[Doctor Doom]] has made similar claims. Maybe it's just an innate power of [[Marvel Comics]] archvillains?

* [[Kick the Son of a Bitch]]: Magneto once kidnapped the Skull and locked him in an abandoned fallout shelter, telling him that death would be too good for him and that he wanted the Skull to wish that Magneto ''had'' killed him after the coming ordeal. The shelter was completely empty except for some jugs of water, which Magneto advised the Skull to conserve, and had no light source. So for weeks, the Skull was locked in a dark room with concrete walls, slowly starving to death. He raged, pounded on the walls, tried in vain to reach the exit high above him, sobbed, and eventually began hallucinating. By the time he was found by Crossbones, Mother Night, and Machinesmith, he was utterly broken and wished to die.

* [[Lack of Empathy]]

* [[Large Ham]]: Hugo Weaving clearly had fun playing him in ''[[Captain America: The First Avenger]]''.

** It's actually rather complicated in publishing terms, since the first three versions were originally intended to be the same character, and only a series of [[Retcon]] stories have created the distinctions between them.

* [[Master of Disguise]]: The list of people he's successfully impersonated to run his schemes must be a yard long at this point. And that's not counting the times he's just [[Grand Theft Me|used other folks' bodies]].

* [[Offscreen Villain Dark Matter]]: [[Justified Trope|Justified]] as the Skull not only having access to hidden Nazi caches, but also frequently running organizations like HYDRA and various factions of AIM from whom he takes resources.

* [[Politically-Incorrect Villain]]: Aside from the fact that he's a (former) friggin' ''Nazi'', he's also pretty sexist, to the point of nearly killing his own daughter because she wasn't a ''boy'', though he's expressed a certain level of respect for certain supervillainesses like Madame Hydra, and Syn when she grew up. Doesn't make up for his treatment of Mother Night, though, which was outright and frequent physical abuse, and he loved every minute of it too.

* [[Stupid Jetpack Hitler]]: Turns out the Skull financed the research into a lot of sci-fi technology in the 1940s.

* [[Sympathy for the Devil]]: He claims that his violently abusive father genuinely loved his mother in the same way that Hitler genuinely loved the Jews, the way a victimiser needs victims, without whom there is only madness. He is dead serious and though he never directly links himself to either in the same way, it can be inferred. He relates to the bully more than the bullied, even when the bullying is on a genocidal scale.

* [[Torture Technician]]: His hobby, apparently. At least on one occasion he even had his own [[Torture Cellar]], which he said was for "recreation".

* [[The Ubermensch]]

* [[Ungrateful Bastard]]: He once claimed to have searched for years for the physician who pulled him out of the womb...so he could kill him for dragging him out of the darkness and into the light, and for saving him from his father's attempts to murder him.

* [[Unholy Matrimony]]: When he was with Mother Night. Though Skull was always abusive to her, even if she was completely loyal to him.

** He also tried briefly with Madame HYDRA/the Viper, but she turned out to be too crazy for ''him''.

* [[Unreliable Narrator]]: The Skull's own version of his life story includes the claim that he remembers every detail of his birth, knows in-depth what his parents were like despite never really meeting them (he claimed to "feel the hatred" of his father for him- yes, when he was just born) and some other stuff like being thirty years old when he committed his first murder and met Hitler, despite subsequent versions portraying him as a teenager, not to mention his claim of having completed his Red Skull training in weeks, whilst simultaneously being an uneducated failure at everything in life up to that point. Obviously a lot of these changes are [[Retcon]], but it actually makes sense that they are different because if you read between the lines, the Skull could be taken as just a [[Blatant Lies|blatant liar,]] trying to make himself sound more remarkable than he was.

* [[Villain Exit Stage Left]]: The Red Skull is really slippery when he is making his getaway, with escape routes carefully designed to discourage pursuit.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:The Fifties]]

[[Category:Marvel Comics Characters]]

[[Category:The Forties]]

[[Category:Marvel Universe]]