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Red Skull: Difference between revisions
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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 as We Know It|God help us all.]]''|'''[[Captain America (comics)]]'''}}
The [[Arch Enemy]] of [[Captain America (comics)]] 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).
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]].
Subordinate only to Hitler himself, the young, brilliant and ruthless Schmidt was placed in charge of foreign espionage and terrorist activities, playing a key role in Nazi victories in Europe and spreading fear (his red skull mask was intended to be a symbol of terror while Hitler could remain the popular leader in a national version of [[Good Cop, Bad Cop]]). He eventually moved onto the United States as [[World War II]] continued and sabotaged the top secret Project Rebirth by assassinating Prof. Erksine. Preparing for the inevitable war against Germany, the Americans decided to create their own [[Good Counterpart]] to the Red Skull's evil, the sole successful Super Soldier serum test subject, Steve Rogers, and trained him to become [[Captain America (comics)]], the man who was to become Schmidt's [[Arch Enemy]].
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.
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 (comics)|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.]]
{{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.
* [[A God Am I]]: Has had tendencies of this, especially with his incarnation in ''[[Captain America: The First Avenger]]''.
* [[Arch Enemy]]: One of the oldest in comics.
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* [[Back From the Dead]]
* [[Bad Boss]]: He frequently kills all but his most loyal or competent underlings--and sometimes even them--either [[You Have Failed Me|for failure]] or for [[You Have Outlived Your Usefulness|outliving their usefulness]], but just as often [[For the Evulz]]. He once killed his ''accountant'', for pete's sake, because "she was a bad accountant". And he usually uses his "Dust of Death" poison, one of the most agonising and horrible weapons in his arsenal, when he feels like doing the deed.
* [[Badass Normal]]: Though he may be a thoroughly despicable human being, there is no doubt that the Red Skull is [[Badass]]. He is a highly skilled fighter capable of regularly holding his own against [[Captain America (comics)]], one of the best martial artists in the world. He is an expert marksman and a brilliant and imaginative strategist, and like a true [[Magnificent Bastard]] is unafraid to put himself in harm's way or use himself as his own best chess piece to see his plans come to fruition. He is considered one of the deadliest threats to mankind in a world that has to put up with regular [[Alien Invasion|Alien Invasions]], [[Eldritch Abomination|Eldritch Abominations]], power-mad superhumans and all manner of catastrophes, and he consistently demonstrates why he has that reputation.
* [[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 by 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]]
* [[Cloning Blues]]: He spent quite a while between the late 1980s and the early 2000s inhabiting a cloned body of [[Captain America (comics)]], albeit with a "red skull" disfigurement for most of that time.
* [[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.
** The occasions he has had the Cosmic Cube have given him nigh-omnipotent power; he once used it to hold an apple in front of a starving crowd, [[Evil Is Petty|just so he could deny them it!]]
*** Oh, and shortly after, he ate it in front of a starving ''baby''.
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* [[Evil Redhead]]: Back when he had his original body.
** Technically ''now'', too.
* [[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 (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.
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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 by 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 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.
** 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]]
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* [[Skull for a 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]]
* [[The Spymaster]]: This was basically his job under the Third Reich.
* [[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 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.
* [[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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* [[What Happened to the Mouse?]]: In some issues of [[Peter David|Peter David's.]] 90's [[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.
* [[World Domination]]
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