50 Greatest Super Villains In Comic Book History

7. Red Skull

(Write-up by Nick Tylwalk, Bam Smack Pow Editor)

One of my friends is fond of saying that Nazis make the perfect bad guys when writers are stuck for more creative antagonists, because everyone dislikes them. It’s very true for the Red Skull, as even other villains usually have a distaste for working with someone so associated with a very specific brand of hatred.

As much as Marvel can try to dress it up or explain it away using Hydra as a stand-in for the Nazis, as is the case in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it doesn’t change the fact that the Skull is never going to stop trying to institute his ideas of a world by and for a master race. That’s chilling enough on its own, but it takes on an even deeper dimension in comics thanks to the lengths to which he’s willing to go to pull it off.

You certainly want to keep your cosmic artifacts locked up around Johann Schmidt, because he’s going to try to get his hands on them to remake the world or the entire universe in his own image. For a villain with no super powers, he’s certainly managed to become a serious threat and a frightening number of occasions, most recently by grafting part of the late Professor X’s brain onto his own to benefit from his unmatched mental powers.

To emphasize the timeless nature of his evil, the Red Skull has been killed off only to be resurrected or cloned too many times to count. Captain America would no doubt rest a lot easier knowing his archenemy was gone for good, but that’s unlikely to ever happen. There’s never been a cure for hatred in the human heart, and as long as that remains the case, the most literally named super villain ever is going to persist.

Next: No. 6: The monarch