- "In these grim days there time for nothing that will not serve to accelerate the final victory of the fatherland."
- ―Red Skull
Johann Schmidt AKA The Red Skull is a super-villain and Nazi from Marvel Comics. He is typically portrayed as the nemesis of Captain America.
History
Red Skull seemingly had a similar history as his Marvel Earth-616 counterpart.
Origins
Johann Schmidt was born in a Germany village in 1899, with his birth killing his mother Martha. Johann's father Hermann (who himself was abusive) attempted to drown Johann at a young age only to commit suicide instead, leaving Johann to be raised in an orphanage.
Pathetic and riddled with an inadequacy complex, Johann grew into a bitter and hateful man who chose to use hatred and systemic bigotry to ensure a fragile illusion of superiority. By the time that Adolf Hitler rose to power, Johann was working as a bellboy at a hotel where the hate monger stayed. Here, Hitler recognized a kindred hatred within Johann and decided to take the young man in as his personal apprentice, believing that he would make, "The perfect nazi".
Under Hitler's wing, Johann began wearing a mask made to resemble a red skull in order to make him be more feared than any other in the Third Reich. In addition to this, Johann began using a horrific specialized gas (not unlike Joker Venom) which left the corpses of his victims resembling horrific red skeletons. The Red Skull would answer only to Hitler himself although the dictator came to fear Red Skull more than any other man alive.
At the peak of World War II, Red Skull found himself repeatedly at odds with the allied super-soldier Captain America who foiled and humiliated the nazi at every turn. Ultimately this lead to Red Skull hating Captain America more than any other and be obsessed with destroying him, even after the war ended. Cap would seemingly kill Red Skull by knocking him into a collapsing cave filled with canisters of his own Red Skull gas which would horrifically mummify him alive, putting him in suspended animation.
Decades later, Red Skull would be awoken from his animation by the neo-nazi group known as HYDRA which was founded by many of Red Skull's contemporaries from WW2. Within HYDRA's ranks, Red Skull would rise to a position of leader only to find himself once again at odds with the returned Captain America.
Fat Boy
After learning that the Gotham Project had completed a prototype nuclear bomb, Red Skull manipulated The Joker into stealing it. While in Gotham City, Shmidt used his Dust of Death on some GCPD officers and attempted to kill Batman and Bucky; however, these events allowed Batman, Bucky, Captain America, and Robin to figure out his plans.
When he went to collect the bomb from Joker, he betrayed Skull after learning his true identity. The Nazis responded by knocking out Joker and his minions and taking Joker prisoner. Skull planned to drop the bomb on Washington, D.C., crippling the United States of America and causing mass panic among its citizens. The four heroes took the Batplane to intersect Skull's plane as it left the base. Bruce and Steve broke onto the plane and flew it to the Atlantic Ocean. Shmidt mocked their efforts, as they were still close enough to his target to fulfill his mission. He tried to deploy the bomb, only to find that Joker had betrayed him and damaged the dropping mechanism. Their fight caused the bomb to drop with the two madmen on top of it, exploding over the Atlantic.