(Silver Streak Comics 013, 1941)
The Scarlet Skull was a real surprise to me! Going by cover dates, he debuted about the same time as the second/"real" Red Skull over at Marvel, which means that he was probably created in the window between the death of the original, George Maxon, and the debut of the Red Skull we will eventually know as Johann Shmidt. Obviously the fact that these are now considered to be two separate characters is all retcon nonsense but the idea of Don Rico noticing that the Red Skull was dead and snaffling him for Lev Gleason is a fun one.
That said, here are the similarities between the Scarlet Skull and the Red Skull: they are both a) Nazis who b) wear red skull masks and c) like to dress in green. And that's about all.
Rather than being a fascist mastermind, the Scarlet Skull is instead the muscle. He works for a spy named Sinhart and does what I would call a poor job of keeping super-heroes out of his house.
So bad a job, in fact, that he facilitates the Daredevil's infiltration mission by providing him with a handy all-concealing costume to wear while he does it.
This allows Daredevil to learn Sinhart's plan: to kidnap the President and replace him with a double in order to destabilize the US to generic fascist ends. The Scarlet Skull is supposed to be the one doing the kidnapping, so I guess he must have skills beyond getting beaten up in the wooded section of Sinhart's back yard.
The Scarlet Skull does manage to recover from a super-heroic beating in time to ambush Daredevil's fiance Tonia Saunders and then parley that into a second ambush of Daredevil himself. Is this redemption? Will my opinion of him raise?
It will not, I'm afraid. The Daredevil is more than a match for the Scarlet Skull, even when the former is shackled to a wall. The Skull, Sinhart and the false FDR (who has the unnecessarily cool name of Condor, by the way) are soon captured.
SKULL SCORE: The one place that the Scarlet Skull comes out ahead of his counterpart! Unlike the Red Skull, the Scarlet Skull's mask has no visible eyes, giving him a total score of 4/5, i.e., the best possible without having an actual skull face!
Categorized in: Body (Skull), Colours (Scarlet), Ideologies (Nazis)
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