3FIGURES
2MAKERS
2012EARLIEST
2019LATEST
I have seen the future, Captain. There are no flags in it.
THE LEGEND
Every apostle needs a wound to preach from, and Johann Schmidt wears his on his face. Once an ambitious soldier passed over for being too extreme even for his own tyrants, he volunteered for a formula never meant for him. It should have made him a god. Instead it burned his skin away to raw red bone, and he looked in the mirror and decided the face suited the philosophy better than his old one ever had. He took a new name for a new kind of empire: not a man anymore, but an idea. The Red Skull.
Out of his old nation's wreckage he built Hydra, a second army answering to no flag and no failed god, only to strength. He hunted the Cosmic Cube because he understood, better than any general, that wars are won by whoever is willing to hold a universe in one hand. He found it, and it judged him unworthy, casting him past the war he started into a colder exile among the stars. Captain America walked away from that day. The Skull did not, not fully. Somewhere at the edge of a dead world, he still guards a Stone, still certain he was right.
OFF THE PAGE
Red Skull is Marvel's original Nazi supervillain, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for Captain America Comics #1 in March 1941, months before America even entered the war Captain America was drawn to fight. As Johann Schmidt, he gave Steve Rogers his oldest rivalry, and decades later became the public face of HYDRA, the shadow organization introduced in 1965's Strange Tales #135 that has outlived nearly every other Golden Age creation and metastasized into one of the company's most durable metaphors for fascism in disguise.
On screen, Hugo Weaving played him in 2011's Captain America: The First Avenger, the melted, skull-faced result of an early, unstable dose of Abraham Erskine's super soldier serum, before the Tesseract wrote him out of that story entirely. He resurfaced years later as the ghostly Stonekeeper guarding the Soul Stone on Vormir, voiced by Ross Marquand across Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, an afterlife nobody saw coming for a villain first drawn eight decades earlier.
IN SIXTH SCALE
Red Skull doesn't show up on shelves nearly as often as his nemesis, which is exactly the kind of injustice he'd complain about. Hot Toys got there first, sculpting Hugo Weaving's ruined face and officer's coat straight out of the World War II battlefield of Captain America: The First Avenger. Sideshow Collectibles picked up the mantle later, giving the character its own sixth-scale treatment for collectors who want the Skull standing opposite their Marvel Cap and Bucky lineup rather than off in a case by himself.
It's a small, exacting lineup, which suits him. The Red Skull was never meant to be everywhere, only to be unmistakable the moment he is.
THE SCOUTING REPORT
The Archivist's estimates, scribbled between shelf dustings. Not canon, not law, and absolutely worth arguing about in the Courtyard.
25OVR
AUGMENTED CLASS· BRUISER
LIFESPANExtended (Cube-Bound)
ORIGINThe Third Reich
VITALITY24
STRENGTH26
DURABILITY28
SPEED20
BATTLE IQ30
POWER20
ABILITIES & WEAKNESSES
Flawed Super-Soldier SerumElite Military Training
ARMS & ATTIRE
Walther PPKCosmic Cube
RELEASES BY YEAR
1
2
20122019
BY MANUFACTURER
Sideshow Collectibles
2
Hot Toys
1
FRANCHISES
APPEARS IN
EVERY RED SKULL FIGURE
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