History: (Fear Itself: Book of the Skull#1 (fb) - BTS) - Some time after 1942, Johann Shmidt, the Nazi Red Skull, ordered bound a book in the flesh of sacrificed Atlanteans.
THE BOOK OF THE SKULL
Classification: Terrestrial mystic
journal
Creator: The Red Skull (Johann Shmidt)
User/Possessors: The Red Skull (Johann
Shmidt), the Red Skull (Sinthea Shmidt), the Thule Society
First Appearance: Fear Itself: Book of the
Skull#1 (May, 2011)
Powers/Abilities/Functions: The Book of the
Skull was a book containing several mystic spells, some of which were
related to the summoning of Asgardian creatures and weapons.
History:
(Fear Itself: Book of the Skull#1
(fb) - BTS) - Some time after 1942, Johann Shmidt, the Nazi Red
Skull, ordered bound a book in the flesh of sacrificed Atlanteans.
(Fear Itself: The Home Front#4/2 (fb) - BTS) - Inside
a German castle, the Red Skull's Thule Society did as ordered and made
the book for the Red Skull with the skin of tortured Atlanteans.
(Fear Itself: Book of the Skull#1 (fb) - BTS) - In the book housed journals and mystic spells related to the Skull's earlier failed attempts to summon an Asgardian weapon to help win World War II for the Nazis.
(Fear Itself: The Home Front#4/2 (fb) - BTS) - The
Thule Society eventually cast off pages from the book pertaining to the
true identity of the summoned Asgardian weapon.
(Fear Itself: The Home Front#3/2 (fb) - BTS) - Over
time, the existence of the book of spells commissioned by the Red Skull
and written on the skin of tortured Atlanteans became a thing of
legend, with rumors surfacing that the Skull had summoned something
from the book.
(Fear Itself: Book of the Skull#1 (fb) - BTS) - At some point in the modern era, Johann showed the actual book to his daughter Sinthea.
(Fear Itself: The Home Front#2/2 (fb) - BTS) - At some point, Agent Jimmy Woo heard talk of the book of spells, how the Red Skull had commissioned it and how the Skull had bound the book in the flayed skin of tortured Atlanteans. He also heard rumors that the actual book was never found.
(Fear Itself: Book of the
Skull#1) - Following
Johann's death, Sinthea, now the new Red Skull, and her ally Baron
Helmut Zemo sought of the hidden book as part of what Sinthea
considered her
destiny in the wake of her father's death. Locating the book in a room
within Johann's hidden Egyptian desert base, Sinthea admitted she had
never forgotten the book's blue leather and when Baron Zemo asked if
the blue leather was actually flesh, Sinthea replied that part of what
made the spells inside the book work was the skin carved from the backs
of sacrificed Atlanteans. Shocked, Baron Zemo asked what exactly was in
the book and Sinthea responded that the book contained documentation of
Johann's greatest failure. She then related from the book the story of
Johann's attempts to summon as Asgardian weapon in 1942 and the
resulting Asgardian frost giant and immovable hammer that had arrived
on Earth. After Sinthea finished the story, Johann's base began to
quake and both Sinthea (with the book) and Zemo escaped out into the
desert as the entrance to the base collapsed. Sinthea then pulled a gun
on
Zemo, insisting that the task involving the book was hers alone, and
she shot Zemo's personal teleportation device and escaped in Zemo's
hovercraft with the book, leaving Zemo behind in the desert.
(Fear Itself#1) - Sinthea led a squad of her soldiers
to storm the hidden Fortress Null, location of the last surviving
members of Hitler's Thule Society, and once inside the Fortress,
Sinthea consulted the book to find the location of Johann's greatest
weapon. Upon finding the Asgardian hammer that had fallen to Earth in
1942, Sinthea prepared to fulfill what she felt was her destiny and one
of her soldiers consulted Johann's book to match the runes in the book
to the runes on the hammer. The soldier also read the passage "and he
who shall be worthy will wield the hammer of Skadi."
(Fear Itself: The Home
Front#2/2 - BTS) - While his
Agents of Atlas group was searching an old Thule Society castle in
Germany, Jimmy Woo came across a room littered in skeletons and when
his teammate, the
Human
Robot, determined the skeletons to be
Atlantean, Woo revealed how he heard rumors of the Thule's book of
spells that had been bound in tortured Atlantean flesh. The two soon
found Atlantean dermal tissue with some of the book's page text
inscribed on it and Woo ordered the Robot to scan the pages for
translation. Figuring the text were cast off pages from the Red Skull's
book, Woo remarked on how, while he had heard the book had never been
found, they might be able to determine what the Red Skull had
originally been attempting to summon by putting together the cast off
pages.
(Fear Itself: The Home Front#3/2 - BTS) - After
angrily ushering the rest of the Agents of Atlas out of the area before
Namora
could see the Atlantean skeletons, Woo picked up one of the cast
off pages of the book and prepared to work on discerning from the
legends and cast off pages what exactly the Red Skull had once summoned
from the book's pages. The Human Robot explained that it would need to
scan each section of cast off skin in order translate the book's pages
and Woo asked the Human Robot to make it fast, as the sooner they could
get out of the torture chamber, the better. After Woo triggered a booby
trap in the form of a destructive robot, he wondered why the Red
Skull's Thule society didn't simply burn the cast off pages of the book
if the pages' content was so important. The robot proved difficult to
stop in its mission to destroy Woo, the Human Robot and all of the cast
off book pages they had found but the other Agents of Atlas soon
arrived to turn the tide. Once the robot had been dealt with, Namora
noticed the tortured Atlantean skeletons and assumed Woo had earlier
ordered them away so that he could study the Atlantean remains and
prevent their burial. She then demanded Woo leave while she prepared a
funeral for the fallen Asgardians.
A short time later, Namora gathered the skeletal remains as well as the cast off Atlantean skin and lit them all ablaze in a large funeral pyre. Still unwanted by Namora, Woo watched the pyre from the ground alongside the Human Robot and remarked on how all of their answers were now going up in flames. When he wondered what they could have learned if they had more time with the book's cast off pages, the Human Robot informed Woo that it had scanned most of the discarded pages to learn their nature and asked if it should begin the translation of the scanned book pages.
(Fear Itself: The Home Front#4/2 (fb) - BTS) - The Human Robot translated the cast off pages from the book using the scans it had earlier taken.
(Fear Itself: The Home
Front#4/2 (fb)) - Surprised
that the Human Robot could finally provide answers, Woo nearly had the
Human Robot speak the translation but stopped the Robot, wondering if
perhaps the knowledge contained in the book's pages was too dangerous
for one man to possess. Unsure if he himself could be trusted with the
information from the book and what would happen to that intelligence if
the
Atlas Foundation was ever compromised, Woo instead ordered the
Human Robot to erase the translated files, remarking that whatever the
Thule Society wrote in the "evil" book would go no further.
(Fear Itself: The Home Front#4/2 - BTS) - Soon
learning from the Human Robot that the entire base was rigged to
explode within minutes, Jimmy Woo interrupted the funeral pyre where
the cast off book pages and Atlantean skeletons were still burning to
tell Namora about the impending explosion. As the Agents of Atlas
rushed to get out of the base, Namora asked why Woo did not tell them
sooner about the base being rigged to explode and Woo admitted he was
waiting for the right moment since she was already mad at him for
trying to hide the Atlantean corpses and cast off book pages from her.
The Agents made their way out of the base and it subsequently exploded,
destroying any remaining evidence of the book's cast off pages.
Comments: Created by Ed Brubaker, Scot Eaton and Mark Morales.
The book was never actually called "the Book of the Skull" in-story, only in the title of the issue it first appeared in.
In the main Fear Itself mini-series, Sin refers to the Book of the Skull as containing the journals of the Red Skull's greatest failure, that of his summoning Asgardian creatures and an immovable hammer, both of which the Skull failed to discover how to utilize. In other words, the Book was bound together following this failure in 1942. However, in the Fear Itself: The Home Front mini-series, it's mentioned that the Skull summoned an Asgardian frost giant using the book's pages. I think the best way to explain this is that perhaps the Skull had found Asgardian text pages and used them to summon the frost giant then later, when he bound together the journals of his failure, he also had the summoning text pages bound into the book as well, only for the Thule Society to later cast those particular pages related to the summoning from the book.
One has to wonder what became of the Book of the Skull following the Serpent's defeat. When we last saw the actual book, it was in the possession of Sin. In the Fear Itself: The Fearless mini-series that provided an epilogue to the Fear Itself event, Sin was acting mostly on memory to complete her father's original failure. We do see mystic spell text pages during that mini-series but never the book itself. Given that we know that many, many pages were cast off of the book by the Thule Society prior to Sin finding the book in Fear Itself: Book of the Skull#1, one has to assume that the spell pages we see in Fear Itself: The Fearless are the original text pages (especially given that are seen under protective glass) and that these texts were copied onto the flayed Atlantean skin and later placed into the Book of the Skull, only to be even later cast off out of the book, where they were decades later destroyed by the Agents of Atlas. It should be noted that while numerous spell pages were cast out of the book by the Thule Society as they related to the Red Skull's failure, there were apparently still several spell pages left in the book, as noted by Sin when she acquired it. Perhaps Sin dropped it somewhere along the lines after being possessed by Skadi and the book is still out there somewhere...
This profile was completed 04/18/2023 but its publication was delayed, as it was intended for the Appendix's 25th anniversary celebratory event.
Profile by Proto-Man.
CLARIFICATIONS:
The Book of the Skull has no known connections to:
images: (without ads)
Fear Itself#1, p9, pan5 (Book of the Skull, main image)
Fear Itself: Book of the Skull#1, p6, pan3 (Book of the Skull in
Sinthea's hands)
Fear Itself: Book of the Skull#1, p6, pan1 (Book
of the Skull on pedestal)
Fear Itself: The Home Front#2, p24, pan2 (cast off pages from the Book
of the Skull)
Fear Itself: The Home Front#3, p24, pan1 (destruction of the Book's
cast off pages)
Appearances:
Fear Itself: Book of the Skull#1 (May,
2011) - Ed Brubaker (writer), Scot Eaton (pencils), Mark Morales
(inks), Tom Brevoort (editor)
Fear Itself#1 (June, 2011) - Matt Fraction (writer), Stuart Immonen
(art), Tom Brevoort (editor)
Fear Itself: The Home Front#2 (July, 2011) - "The Age of Anxiety, Part 2 of 4" story - Peter Milligan
(writer), Elia Bonetti (art), Rachel Pinnelas (editor)
Fear Itself: The Home Front#3 (August, 2011) - "The Age of Anxiety,
Part 3 of 4" story - Peter Milligan (writer), Elia Bonetti (art),
Rachel Pinnelas (editor)
Fear Itself: The Home Front#4 (September, 2011) - "The Age of
Anxiety, Part 4 of 4"
story - Peter Milligan (writer), Elia Bonetti (art), Rachel Pinnelas
(editor)
First Posted: 09/15/2026
Last updated: 04/18/2023
Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.
Non-Marvel
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