Marvel has unveiled all five of David Aja’s covers for the Red Skull: Incarnate miniseries, which debuts in May.  Written by Greg Pak with interior art by Mirko Colak, the Red Skull miniseries provides the definitive origin story for Johann Schmidt, the Third Reich’s own demented super-soldier and the Faustian bargain he made to obtain super powers.

 

The Red Skull is of course the primary villain in Marvel’s Captain America film, which debuts in July.  Captain America: The First Avenger is set during World War II, and this Red Skull miniseries, which tells the story of Johann Schmidt’s transformation is also set firmly in the 1930s and 1940s with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and the epic worldwide conflict that followed.

 

Aja does a brilliant job of capturing the graphic essence of the era that was characterized by the highly stylized poster art adopted by both the Nazis in Germany and the Soviets in Russia who took elements of Futurism, Expressionism, and the avant garde and put them in the service of the state.  His designs directly evoke the posters created for Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.

 

Aja explained his decision to create cover art that is unique in its look and uncompromising graphic and historical in its approach: “Due to the nature of the story, I wanted to portray the historical aspects on the covers. In so doing, I approached the covers as if they were real posters, newspapers, and Nazi propaganda from that time, kind of in a documentary style.”

 

One of the fascinating aspects of the covers is their varied typography, which Aja explained required a certain sort of uniformity in the other graphic elements: “To make it work. I utilized different typographic techniques for each issue, emulating typefaces in real work; so I needed a uniform tone, technique, and color in the finished art to identify all the covers as a whole collection.”