Red Skull: Incarnate #2

[cyberghostface]

Comments

[dcbanacek]

I don't understand the point of this whole story.

So they want to show the "origin" of the Red Skull, how he was "driven" to his evil...

The problem is that the atrocities during the War were, by and large, committed by ordinary people. They may have been done under the orders of monsters but the hands were those of the populace.

The "banality of evil" as Hannah Arendt put it: the idea that evil acts are not necessarily perpetrated by evil people. Instead, they can simply be the result of bureaucrats dutifully obeying orders

That's the true horror of everything that happened. No side had clean hands by the end of the War.

[icon_uk]

HIs original origin understood that, when they got around to giving him one, it was almost painfully banal and simple, and horribly plausible.

He was a bellhop in a German hotel where Hitler was staying with his senior staff. A nobody beneath anyone else's attention, except that Hitler noticed him staring at them all with unabashed jealousy and uncontrollable, but powerless, hatred, and felt that here was someone there he could shape and refine into a weapon. And so he made him a project.

That was essentially all they gave him as backstory, and that was all they needed. An ordinary, disempowered nobody who was given a chance to seize as much power as he could, and took it.

[lego_joker]

Eh, even that feels a bit too "Chosen One"-ish to me, a bit too bent on making him "worthy" of being Cap's archnemesis. My preferred take on him has always been the Golden Age origin where the Skull is just a mask passed among any number of Nazi sympathizers and spies on the American home-front; the first one was a business magnate, but the story ended, IIRC, with a warning that anyone could take up the mantle if they wanted to.

IMO, it kind of misses the point for the Skull (and other symbols of institutional evil, like Lex Luthor) to have so much individual mythology. They embody a system, which they have pretty much no worth or power without.

[arilou_skiff]

I mean, the point is that he isnt special. He is just some random dude molded by the system into a monster. It could have been anyone, and Schmidt could have ended up living a relatively blameless life if he hadnt been a tthe right/wrong place at the time.

[lego_joker]

"It could have been anyone" is a point that could be carried across a lot better if, say, they changed his real name every time they retold his origin. Every time you reuse "Johann Schmidt", you build up a little more mythology around this one identity.

(It's the same reason I don't like the mugger who killed Batman's parents getting a (consistent) name. He's supposed to represent Crime in the abstract - unless, of course, you're explicitly going with a "sometimes crimes, even lethal ones, have sympathetic motives!" angle.)

(Come to think of it... I guess this is why Joker (2019) using a completely unprecedented name for his pre-Joker identity never bothered me.)