Red Skull: Incarnate - A Moment That Could Have Changed the Marvel Universe

[espanolbot]

I posted scene earlier in which a chance meeting had a massive impact on the DCU, but today I'll post a moment from the Marvel Universe that COULD have had a massive impact on the future but didn't.

From Issue 4 of the series, where a teenage Johann Schmidt has joined the SA, and after feeling disatisfied that they weren't allowed to be violent thugs like they where before he joined, he goes to the group of Nazis that are still allowed to behave in the manner he wants.

Johann is... not a nice person.

Comments

[shadowpsykie]

Max.... is that the doctor that created Captain America?

[darkknightjrk]

Makes sense--if the gun was load, that would have changed the whole Marvel universe.

[cyberghostface]

I think it's Magneto given that he was revealed to be named Max Eisenhardt in Greg Pak's Magneto miniseries.

[auggie18]

Is that still in canon? It was a good story, but it seems weird how much Mags keeps name-hopping. (Or why he wouldn't go back to his original name instead sticking with Erik.)

[cyberghostface]

I think so but I don't know what's canon and what's not these days. :/

[salinea]

why would he go back to his original name when he hasn't been using it for decades?

[zechs80]

That's what I first thought too.

[eyz]

I also thought it was Mags, why are people saying it was that "Captain America serum" scientist?

[espanolbot]

Because no one read the Greg Pak series Testament, which went into detail about Magneto's childhood, him meeting his later life etc.

From what I saw a lot of people complained that it was too depressing and that Holocaust stories "have been done"... which is an odd way of looking at it. It's like a kid at the school I used to work at refused to attend any lessons that brought it up during Holocaust Memorial Day because he said that "It was a bad, sad thing that happened in the past, so why can't we just forget it?". Tried to explain that it was so it won't happen again, but he didn't really get what I was talking about.

[stolisomancer]

It's Magneto.

[cyberghostface]

Nice to see Red Skull being an actual Nazi again given how the Captain America pretty much downplayed it.

[mrstatham]

In movie terms? I can see why they pretty much removed the 'Nazi' element from the Red Skull. It served the purpose of not exposing an audience to things some of them might be too young for, and it was a nice nod to Brubaker's take on the Skull. As for the contemporary comics? Again, Brubaker's take works. I think after a point, even the fanatical Skull would have to see that his current ideology wasn't working out, and yet he kept going, hence he declared he was becoming 'bigger than fascism', I think it was? But.. Yeah. I think certain things are more appropriate for particular takes and others are not.

[cyberghostface]

I know it's different movies and companies producing them but I just remember how X-Men: First Class not only didn't shy away from the Nazi/Holocaust origins of Magneto but actually made them a major plot point with him getting revenge on Shaw who was basically the mutant equivalent of Josef Mengele.

I guess I could see the potential parental outrage over selling merchandise of a Nazi but he's still someone who's affiliated with them at one point or another, so...*shrugs*

[mrstatham]

Well, yeah. I can see your point, but.. Well, I think it's a hell of a lot easier to sell a figure of the Red Skull without the Nazi paraphernalia plastered on him than it is with. Plus, you're a hell of a lot more likely to sell more Red Skull figures than Sebastian Shaw figures.

As it is, I think it's a hell of a lot easier to put across a Red Skull already losing faith in a faltering Reich and deciding to take HYDRA as his own than it would be to present a Magneto without the holocaust origin. Plus, First Class and Captain America were really very different films. In some ways, Cap was more of a simple adventure film, whereas First Class was, in some ways, more attached to Bryan Singer's more mature two X-Men films.

[mrosa]

Wait, people are now too young for Nazism? What, someone fears the audience may not have heard of them, even though they're pretty much a solid foundation of so much pop culture and entertainment?

Also, it wasn't Brubaker who made Red Skull grow out of Nazism, it was Mark Gruenwald in the '80s.

[lonewolf23k]

I don't the movie version of Red Skull stopped being a Nazi, so much as he took the Nazi philosophy and went one step further. "Master Race? I AM THE MASTER RACE!"

[ensiform]

I get a totally different slant from this. He's *not* a die-hard Nazi. He just wants to be with "the ones with guns." He'll kill anyone who stands in his way to power, harmless Jewish boy or (if he could) that SS man insulting him. I don't see this at all as making the Red Skull a zealot. Just a power-monger. The kind of guy who'd happily kill Hitler if he could become Fuhrer.

[espanolbot]

That's pretty much how the series depicts him. In this version he was born in 1914 or so, and raised in an orphanage by a man who was incredibly bitter over the fact that Germany lost the First World War, and went along with the fashion of the time by blaming Jewish people and communists for his country's defeat. This coupled by other factors, build up his personality over the course of the series, where he starts off as being a little off and just gets worse, and worse as the years go by.

The elements are there for him to possibly genuinely believe in the Nazi's dogma... but he's really more a guy who has come to see people as things after one too many disappointments, who is ready to manipulate them to get more power over anyone else.

[espanolbot]

It's kind of more along the lines of he joined up with them because he saw them as a legitimate means of being as violent and thuggish as he likes without repercussions. He first tried the SA, only to do so just as they were being phased out, so he tried to have a go at joining the SS as he saw them as being the kind of guys he wanted to be.

[silverzeo]

The art is good... but... seems a little too clean. It's Nazi Germany and the origin of Red SKull, I was kinda expecting something with some more grit or poorly lit scenery...

[raisedbymoogles]

I don't know, I thought the yellow lighting was plenty creepy. And making everything grittydark would have been missing the point. The horror of Nazi Germany was that all the ugly was tucked away, leaving a bright clean surface for ordinary citizens to see. (Kind of like Disneyland.)

[md84]

Didn't Walt Disney have some anti-semitic leanings too?

[mrosa]

For a Red Skull origin, I can't see anything horrifyingly worthy of him here. I see no genuine hatred, just an apparent mindless willingness to join the guys with the guns, and he'll do anything to join them. I'm sure people like that are a dime a dozen in times of crisis. Nothing here makes his evil look unique or bigger than your average Nazi collaborator without a consciousness.

I just re-read J.M. DeMatteis' origin from Captain America #298, and it's really better - he hates his family, himself, the world, the doctor who saved his life, his daughter. It's a wonderful parade of hatred. I'll have it posted.

[espanolbot]

The writer behind this series based it on a combination of what things it would have taken someone to wholeheartedly join the Nazis, and the backgrounds of some of the serial killers that appeared in Germany during the same time period.

So it's more a case of him having antisocial personality disorder of some variation opposed to turning internal loathing to eternal violence, or something similar.

[mrosa]

Bah, psychoanalytical bullshit, in other words, robbing fictional characters of all their irrational grandeur by too much explaning way.

Just put up DeMatteis' version by the way, for comparison.