THIS ARTICLE WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR RED SKULL #1
Chris Claremont was one of the first mainstream superhero writers to give a villain what could be considered a truly sympathetic backstory. In casting Magneto as a survivor of the Holocaust, the horror of which fuels his designs for a mutant utopia, Claremont gave us a badguy that we could still root for, and did it in fairly simple fashion. But he never lost sight of the fact that Magneto WAS still a villain, a tradition carried on by Cullen Bunn when he wrote the character's most recent solo series. RED SKULL #1 asks us exactly how far we're willing to go when it comes time to "root for the badguy" by recasting the Skull as a possibly-dead symbol of chaos and rebellion against the current status quo.
Villains like the Red Skull differ from ones like Magneto in one key way: there's very little to be sympathetic toward them about. Similarly, villains like Deathstroke and Sabretooth, both of whom either have or have had their own series, don't come from a sympathetic backstory, but there's just something compelling about them anyway. Sure there's the rebellious thrill of pulling for "the badguy," but that isn't any kind of foundation to build a long-lasting narrative on. An example of this kind of things done right would be the current run of DARTH VADER where Kieron Gillen pulls no punches in Vader's villainy, but casts him less as pure evil, and more as efficient to the point of disregarding life. We don't want to see Vader fail, but it's strange to want to see him succeed.
One easy way to side-step around it is to cast them against an even greater evil, and while VADER doesn't do that, DEATHSTROKE often does, but is there any evil greater than the Red Skull in the Marvel U? Skull was on the "supply" side of the horrors of World War II rather than the recipient of them and he's remained unrepentant ever since, even engineering Captain America's assassination/trip through time and hijacking a cloned body of his at one point. Even during the Acts of Vengeance event, he was clearly one of the greatest villains recruited into Loki's group, to the point that Magneto only joined to attempt to kill him.
What Joshua Williamson has done is remove morality from the current situation and given the cast of RED SKULL a common cause: survival. This is a clever move as it, obviously, leaves the door open for Skull to get his later in the series, assuming he's even still alive, and it allows the reader to root for the survival of the group as a whole. If the Red Skull IS alive in the Deadlands, it means that he's learnt how to survive in a place thought completely impossible to do so in. So we want to see him alive, but only for as long as is needed to ensure the safety of the people we actually care about.
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