How could a civilized and modern nation resort to mass genocide? It is one of the essential questions of Holocaust studies and Greg Pak’s Red Skull: Incarnate explores that question through an origin story of the fictional Nazi comic book villain of the same name. Gone is the goofy format of old that creates heroes or villains in a few pages of simplistic good and evil formulas. Pak provides us with a five issue miniseries that will delve into how a normal child can grow up to become a monster.

In issue one we see a bit of the answer. A world-wide depression ravages a post World War I Germany in which people wait in breadlines for ridiculously inflated necessities. A government provides no answers and competing ideologies fight it out in the streets. Anti- Semitism, anti-communism and anti-republic sentiment spreads among a demoralized population. Then a beacon of German pride marches in the streets with all the rhetoric and “answers” a scared and desperate people need.

Pak sets up the groundwork for a nuanced origin of a comic book villain that probably up to this point has gotten the broad brush treatment. Such a treatment belittles comic book storytelling and actual human psychology and after reading Magneto Testament I am glad that Pak is at the helm.