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Review: Red Skull: Incarnate #5

By | December 2nd, 2011
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

Written by Greg Pak
Illustrated by Mirko Colak

History, destiny, and tragedy collide, as young Johann Schmidt reaches his apotheosis and the Third Reich climbs to the regrettable heights of its terrible power. A tremendous evil is unleashed on the world, and humanity will never be the same for it again.

How do you review a book like this — an examination of one of fictional history’s greatest monsters? An attempt to get to the bottom of that is after the jump.

The first question we have to ask when looking at a thing like Red Skull: Incarnate is… well, why? There are a couple answers. One, to cash in on the fact that the Red Skull just appeared in the Captain America movie. Two, as writer Greg Pak put it in the endnotes of the first issue, to use comic-book characters as a framework to understand how it is that Germany could allow Hitler to seduce and bully it in the 1930s. Third, and this is the one no one will admit to, to invoke one of the few enduring taboos of Western society. There is, even amongst upstanding people without a wicked bone in their body, an enduring cultural fascination with — not to put too fine a point on it — evil, the kind that’s made concrete and opaque by historical record. We watch History Channel specials on Hitler being BFFs with Nostradamus because the frankly lunatic ideas it presents allow us an inroad to the horrible concepts of Hitler’s rule; it’s easier to approach a toxic era by taking a fictional road. At least then, we can sleep easier.

That sort of mindset — that we’re able to approach evil without sacrificing our own integrity, by framing it as a fictional bete noire rather than a real one that produced real consequences — might explain why the Red Skull is my favorite comic-book villain. Consider how many Marvel antagonists have been softened up a bit as decades have passed, made into noble or tragic figures. Doctor Doom could change the world, but for what a petty, small man he is. Magneto carries on his back the dignity of unbelievable trauma. Wilson Fisk has always been a doting, emotional husband. I can only think of a couple who have been assigned no redeeming, relatable values: Sabretooth (because he’s a fucking animal), the Mandarin (because they’ve been too busy trying to navigate a way out of Orientalist yellow-menace-dom), the Red Skull. Over the years, the Red Skull has remained rock-solid in his unsympathetic psychopathy; even when he disavowed Nazism, as he did in Mark Gruenwald’s 1980s and 1990s Captain America run, he replaced it with a destructive, hateful brand of misanthropic anarchism.

The concept of the Red Skull, as documented in comics that are not Red Skull: Incarnate — an abused, angry youth named Johann Schmidt was a bellhop who Hitler boasted he could turn into a fearsome leader of men. (The parallels with Captain America’s origin are so unsubtly opposite that it’s not even funny.) Under Hitler’s personal supervision, Schmidt became Nazism’s most fervent advocate, and cruelest soldier. To further instill fear into the populace, he donned a mask that gave him his namesake — the Red Skull. Like his enemy, Captain America, he became a symbol, which is far more powerful and terrifying than a man.

Those superheroic elements are not Incarnate‘s stock in trade. In fact, at no point do we see that signature mask; the series ends with Hitler’s selection of the lowly bellhop. (Well, it actually ends with a bit of text constituting an epilogue — but we’ll get to that in a bit.) This is, for all of the book’s best intentions, its key flaw. All roads in Incarnate point toward the mask, and the idea that a confluence of factors can produce an unreal monster. (Think of another look into what causes villainy, Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke, and its “one bad day” theory.) Instead, the narrative freezes before the equation is complete — stripping the story of its fantastic, unbelievable elements, but also cutting away its consequences. The aesthetic impact of the Red Skull’s mask as a way of showing the dehumanizing effects of corruption — it seems like such an easy lay-up that its omission is actually glaring. Instead, we receive a small, stark notice at the back of the issue, after Johann has manipulated and murdered his way into Hitler’s notice: “Thousands of ordinary Germans opposed Hitler’s dictatorship and genocide. They paid with their lives. But thousands more followed him to the end. They paid with their souls.”

That ending note is troubling in and of itself. When it’s connected back to the mini-series that it closes the door on, though, it raises a kind of chicken-and-the-egg scenario. Did Johann Schmidt fall in with Hitler because he was a soulless psychopath? Or did Johann Schmidt, remorseless murderer and opportunist, only lose his soul once he fell in with Hitler? The tragic fact of Red Skull: Incarnate is that leaving this ambiguous only harms its points. We gain no greater understanding into the condition of Schmidt’s obvious psychopathy, and we gain no greater understanding of the allure of Nazism to Weimar Germany. Instead, one simply tips into the other like dominoes — Schmidt is an abused, mentally ill youth with no particular allegiance to anyone, whose devotion to Hitler is presented as an opportunistic con. He remains unlikable and unrelatable, and that’s to be expected. Where Incarnate fails is in keeping his psyche impenetrable.

I’ve gotten this far without mentioning Mirko Colak’s art, so now’s as good a time as any. His storytelling is clear, and his facial acting is expressive — both ideal traits for a story like this. He draws real people in a decidedly un-fantastic world, whose bodies sag behind rumpled undershirts and whose hairstyles are never quite model-perfect. It does its job, but Colak unwittingly plays up the book’s main problem. The most memorable images in Red Skull: Incarnate are ones like the last image we see, a full-page splash of Johann Schmidt flanking Hitler, his eyes dead above a smug half-leer of a triumphant smirk. Where Incarnate went wrong was failing to actually incarnate what propels the idea of a character like the Red Skull, or the grim power that keeps us returning to the idea of Nazis as villains for our fictions: where men live and die, symbols — like the swastika, the Hugo Boss SS coats, the stern visage of Hitler himself, and the Red Skull’s mask — are more powerful, more insidious, and with enough strength, able to separate themselves from the men who created them and endure forever.


Red Skull: Incarnate is worth reading, but only in that it’s a noble failure — a book that tries to investigate the appeal of swimming in the abyss, but which can only bring itself to dip a toe in.


Patrick Tobin

Patrick Tobin (American) is likely shaming his journalism professors from the University of Glasgow by writing about comic books. Luckily, he's also written about film for The Drouth and The Directory of World Cinema: Great Britain. He can be reached via e-mail right here.

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