Sprite Stuff: Ultimate Red Skull

Oh "Ultimate Marvel".... you had such promise once. Now bits and pieces of you are being absorbed into the main Marvel universe. For me things kinda went sideways sometime after "Ultimates 3", where the usually solid continuity of this Universe was suddenly on shakey ground following a big fight between the Ultimates and Magneto's Brotherhood... with a sudden interruption by this world's Ultron. AND this begot the 'Ultimatum' event... which basically took a promising universe, a neat concept with neat spins on established characters... and broke it over it's knee. There were a few noteworthy attempts to keep the ship afloat... some REALLY good ones... but it just kinda kept sinking. It was as if Marvel was trying to purposefully kill it.

One of the neater concepts to come out during that time, IMHO, was the idea that this world's Captain America had unknowingly fathered a child during WW2... a child who inherited his enhanced abilities... and tried to take over where he left off when he came of age. But somewhere along the line, while he trained... something in him just... snapped. Maybe he collapsed under the pressure of trying to live up to his father's example/peoples' expectations? Maybe he grew bitter about being nothing more than a pet project of the Military? Or maybe he was crazy all along? All that's known is after whatever happened to him, it left an entire camp of soldiers and personnel dead and Steve's son MIA.

He then took a knife to his skin... and began cutting into his face, peeling it off in a rejection of his father's legacy. His enhanced physiology helped him survive... but he now sported what would become his codename... The Red Skull.

Yep... in the Ultimate Marvel Universe, the Red Skull was Cap's bastard son. Steve already had a nemesis in this world during World War 2, the alien Nazi collaborator Herr Kleiser. So they clearly went in a different direction when it came to the Skull.

Like some deadly combination of mainstream Skull and Bucky Barnes, the "Winter Soldier"... this version of the red-faced bastard became a sought after assassin/hitman/etc. He made this career choice even more abundantly clear when he shot President Kennedy. His enhanced biology kept him in top notch form in the following decades, as he carved a path of death in his wake. It also slowed the aging process... so when he finally meets up with his dad (post-Ultimatum), he's more than a match for his old man.

But like alot of the cooler stories to come out during this time, it was too little too late... the damage had been done and whatever faith fans had in the franchise was clearly diminished to a major degree. 


So anyway... I made this sprite of this incarnation of the Red Skull. Used Cap's body, Guile's boots, and the head belongs to Ax & ajrenalin's 'Red Skull' sprites. Hope it looks good.