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Red Skull (view source)

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{{quote|''His eyes, [[Uh-Oh Eyes|unfathomably empty]], devoid of [[Lack of Empathy|all compassion... all humanity]]... No one has eyes like that... no one! All these months I've lived in a fool's paradise, [[Selective Obliviousness|refusing to believe]] his claim to be [[Legacy Character|the real Red Skull]], refusing to believe that my [[Arch Enemy|greatest enemy]] had found a way to [[Not Quite Dead|cheat death]]... but he has. [[Knight of Cerebus|The Red Skull lives]]... [[The End of the World Asas We Know It|God help us all.]]''|'''[[Captain America]]'''}}
 
The [[Arch Enemy]] of [[Captain America]] and one of the oldest villains in comics, and widely regarded as one of the most despicable. Right-hand man of [[Adolf Hitler]] in the Marvel Universe, [[Nebulous Evil Organization|HYDRA]] brought him [[Back From the Dead]] to plague the world once again. There have been at least three major versions of the Skull. Red Skull/George Maxon first appeared in ''"Captain America Comics''" #1 (March, 1941). The better known Red Skull/Johann Schmidt first appeared in ''"Captain America Comics''" #7 (October, 1941). Red Skull/Albert Malik first appeared in ''"Captain America Comics''" #61 (March, 1947). Malik was established as the Communist Red Skull in ''"Young Men''" #24 (December, 1953). Schmidt was revived in ''"Tales of Suspense''" #79 (July, 1966).
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Captain America was revived by [[The Avengers (Comic Book)|The Avengers]], but not long after their enemies HYDRA discovered the Skull and revived him too. The Skull allied with them for as long as they were useful but secretly he was biding his time until he could steal the Cosmic Cube from AIM, the science division of HYDRA, the Cube being an [[Artifact of Doom]] that bestowed upon the user [[Reality Warping]] and [[Physical God|godhood]]. He once again battled Captain America and was once again defeated, but subsequently managed to establish himself as a major and continuous threat to the world, with access to considerable resources.
 
The Red Skull subsequently engaged in numerous more terrorist and mass murder schemes to wreck havoc across the world and kill Captain America, even managing to make himself Secretary of Defence disguised as one [[Significant Anagram|Dell Rusk]], plus more attempts to possess a Cosmic Cube, before finally being assassinated by the Winter Soldier, a [[Brainwashed and Crazy|brainwashed, insane]] and very-much alive Bucky Barnes, but used a weakened Cube to transfer his mind into a Russian general named Lukin, the man who had him killed. Sharing his body, the Skull forced Lukin to go along with his schemes to manipulate the superhero [[Civil War (Comic Book)|Civil War]] so as to get one of his puppet politicians elected as President, and later tried to [[Grand Theft Me|transfer his mind]] into Captain America's unborn child, before it was murdered by an increasingly rebellious Syn. He later allied with [[Norman Osborn]] following his [[Dark Reign (Comic Bookcomics)|rise to power]] and finally managed to take over the body of Captain America himself, but after wrecking further damage was expelled and killed, this time for good.
 
[[Comic Book Death|See how long that lasts.]]
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* [[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.
* [[A God Am I]]: Has had tendencies of this, especially with his incarnation in ''[[Captain America: theThe First Avenger]]''.
* [[Arch Enemy]]: One of the oldest in comics.
* [[Artifact of Doom]]: Cosmic Cubes, in his hands anyway.
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* [[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.
* [[The Bully]]: Terrorizes and often kills his own subordinates [[For the Evulz]], routinely; savagely beat and sadistically abused his girlfriend, one of his most devoted followers; big fan of [[Revenge Byby Proxy]]; tends to laugh like a lunatic when causing the deaths of thousands of innocent people. The Skull is not only [[The Bully]]; he is ''proud'' of being [[The Bully]] and has made it his ''calling''.
* [[Card-Carrying Villain]]
* [[Classic Villain]]
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* [[Even Evil Has Standards]] -- [[Captain Obvious|Not for the Skull himself]], but for the rest of the major villains of the Marvel Universe, most of whom are too disgusted by the Skull to willingly work with him. It doesn't help his case that two of Marvel's heavy hitters, Doctor Doom and Magneto, are a half-gypsy and a Jewish holocaust survivor, respectively. He does however have ''one'' standard: [[Pragmatic Villainy|pragmatism]] - if you are killing people and breaking things on his dime, you'd ''better'' have something to show for it besides craters(even if it's just that he now ''owns'' those craters and they're full of gold or something).
** 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 (Filmfilm)|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.
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** Of course, the same story has him remembering both of his parents, including their faces and behaviour, [[Infallible Narrator|despite both of them being dead before he was a day old]], as well as what it was like to be pulled out of the womb- he says he has an amazing memory. These days, that's largely ignored. His superhuman powers of remembrance either completely justifies his amazing out-of-the-blue ability to learn anything, or suggests he was being less than honest about it.
*** Curiously, [[Doctor Doom]] has made similar claims. Maybe it's just an innate power of [[Marvel Comics]] archvillains?
* [[Hoist Byby His Own Petard]]: After coming [[Back From the Dead]] with the "perfect Aryan" face of his rival, Captain America, his first major scheme ended with him being disfigured with an actual "red skull" for a face after he inhaled his own "dust of death" while trying to kill Cap.
* [[Joker Immunity]]
* [[Kick the Son of Aa 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.
** He had an [[Ignored Epiphany]] moment here too. After being locked in that shelter for days, starving and alone in the dark, he finally resigned himself to his fate and for the first- and only- time in life, he felt remorse for his life of villainy and privately conceded that he deserved this fate. He was rescued shortly after, regained his will to live after seeing Captain America and remembering how much he hated him...and after telling Cap as much (Cap's reaction to this meeting is the page quote, incidentally), began ranting about how he would get revenge on Magneto for putting him in there (though, [[Always a Bigger Fish|tellingly]], he didn't put much effort into that particular scheme).
* [[Lack of Empathy]]
* [[Large Ham]]: Hugo Weaving clearly had fun playing him in ''[[Captain America: theThe First Avenger]]''.
* [[Laughably Evil]]: While he is usually a serious and often pretty angry villain, when he is doing what he loves- [[Unwitting Pawn|outplaying his enemies]], [[Chronic Backstabbing Disorder|screwing over his minions and allies]], [[Cold-Blooded Torture]], mass murder- he'll at least be sporting a good [[Slasher Smile]], and on occasion laugh like a maniac when he is doing something ''really'' evil.
* [[Legacy Character]]: There have been 4 Red Skulls. Technically, Johan Schmidt is actually the second; the original Red Skull was a Nazi spy who was retconned into being one of Schmidt's agents. The third was a [[Dirty Communist]], and the fourth is the Skull's own daughter.
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* [[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.
* [[Reality Is Unrealistic]]: Although none of his creators, Joe Simon and France Herron, could have known in early 1941, and they imagined him as a purely fictional and cartoonish incarnation of evil, the Skull's espionage exploits match those of both [[wikipedia:Reinhard Heydrich|SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich]] and his close colleague [[wikipedia:Walter Schellenberg|SS-Brigadeführer Walther Schellenberg]], while his cruelty, sadism, ruthlessness [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|and physical appearance]] match the lesser known [[wikipedia:Dirlewanger|SS-Oberführer Oskar Dirlewanger]]. It can be said the reality of the Reich surpassed the imagination of Marvel Comics writers.
* [[Skull for Aa Head]]: Used to be a mask, now is a deformity.
* [[The Social Darwinist]]: He has abandoned Nazism (it was "out of date"), but he still believes in a world where the strong rule and bully the weak.
* [[The Sociopath]]
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* [[Start of Darkness]]: The Red Skull miniseries by Greg Pak has shown most of how the Skull spent his childhood in Germany and how he began his path to ruthlessness.
* [[Stupid Jetpack Hitler]]: Turns out the Skull financed the research into a lot of sci-fi technology in the 1940s.
* [[Sympathy for Thethe 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.
* [[Those Wacky Nazis]]
* [[Torture Technician]]: His hobby, apparently. At least on one occasion he even had his own [[Torture Cellar]], which he said was for "recreation".
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* [[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.
* [[What Happened to Thethe Mouse?]]: In some issues of [[Peter David|Peter David's.]] 90's [[Incredible Hulk (Comic Book)|Incredible Hulk]] run, the Red Skull had formed an alliance of criminals called the [[Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy|New World Order.]] in order to prevent infighting, perform negotiations, and foster cooperation. This group appeared in several Hulk issues and even tangled with X-Men villian Apocalpyse! Of course, they haven't appeared or been mentioned since. Later Hulk stories made some vague mentions of the New World Order "collapsing," but we never saw how or why....
* [[Who Is This Guy Again?]]: Nobody from the common folk knew his original name had been Johann Schmidt (specifically chosen by the writers for being among the most common names and surnames in German-speaking people) and his early life is perpetually hidden in a maze of lies, treachery and deceit. Just as his face was perpetually hidden behind a mask, before the moment he ''became'' the mask.
* [[Wicked Cultured]]: His theme tune is [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyFyAqLtHq8 Chopin's Funeral March.] He used to play it whenever he dosed someone with his Dust of Death poisoned gas.
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