The Skull (Reality Z-25 31-H)
A version of the Skull was active in Reality Z-25 31-H, a villainous terrorist who derived his name from his unexplainedly skull-like face and had a long-standing enmity with Kaza and Gwenna.
Description
Physical appearance
The Skull derived his name from his white skull-like face. Though it appeared to be a mask, worn over a black cloth hood, his hands were genuinely chalk-white with dark nails, casting his humanity into question. He wore a long dark-gray coat, a white scarf, and a flat-brimmed hat matching the coat. (COMIC: The Danger, the Diamond, and the Dowager)
Biography
The Skull was active in the early 21st century, and faced Kaza and Gwenna on multiple occasions. Seemingly a solo operator, he had considerable means and a small army of fascist mercenaries at his command.
On what was not his first encounter with the jungle heroes, he came to Buranda with three airships crewed by his mercenaries, also hiring the services of local lowlife Mitchell. He had tracked Lady Catherine Maxwell to Buranda, and believed that she was on the trail of a great treasure to which Solomon's Diamond was the key. While his men set fire to the Koravi village to whom Lady Catherine had been trying to return the gem, he personally dropped in at Kaza and Gwenna's treehouse, taking them prisoners at gunpoint and telling them that they would bear witness to his “triumph”. (COMIC: The Danger, the Diamond, and the Dowager) While he had Kaza placed in the hold of the tank he was using to travel through the jungle, he took Gwenna in his cabin with him, allowing him to gloat to her at length about his plan. He revealed to her that the Diamond was actually the Philosopher's Stone, the key to wondrous powers of immortality and the creation of gold; after awakening its power, he hoped to use it to allow his cult to take over the world and effect the white-supremacist “social reordering” of which he dreamed.
However, soon after he finished explaining all this, also letting slip that his current hideout was the “old Kaitaran Temple”, Kaza managed to get the drop on his guards and knock them out. Hearing the commotion, Gwenna took the Skull by surprise with a kick to the jaw and knocked him out. As the tank veered out of control and into a tree, the jungle-dwellers hopped to safety and made their own way to the Temple, where the Skull's agents Professor Morag and Mitchell had just taken their prisoners who had survived the fire, including Lady Catherine, Smedley, Wimberley and Kiana. (COMIC: Nula! Naked and Alone!)
Behind the scenes
The Skull is a public-domain character, who originated in a Lt. Drake of the U.S. Naval Intelligence comic story published in Fox's Mystery Men Comics #15. There, he was depicted as a Nazi agent; though he did not speak with a German accent unlike the agents under his command, he referred to Germany as his Fatherland. The Skull was described in the opening blurb as a “strange character”, but no further details were given on his identity or nature, with it remaining unclear whether his trademark skull face was a mask or somehow his actual face. This original Skull wielded an “electron-ray gun” capable of melting through a metal lore, and he wore a green suit, red cape, brown fedora hat and yellow gloves, instead of the all-black ensemble he displays in Kaza's Mate, Gwenna. Indeed, Jay Epps's authorial comment upon introducing his version of the Skull in The Danger, the Diamond, and the Dowager clarified that there was no intended continuity with the original Skull.
| Incarnations of the Skull |
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| Reality Z-25 31-H |
