Red Ghost
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 Cover to Iron Man #83 (feb 1976). Art by Ron Wilson. |
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The Red Ghost and his Super-Apes are a group of Marvel Comics supervillains, who started their career fighting the Fantastic Four, before confronting other Marvel heroes like Iron Man and Spider-Man.
The characters were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in Fantastic Four #13 (April, 1963) and #29 (August, 1964).
[edit] Origins and powers
Before becoming the Red Ghost, Ivan Kragoff was a Soviet scientist bent on beating the Americans to the moon and claiming it for the Communist empire. He assembled a crew of three apes — Mikhlo the Gorilla, Igor the Baboon, and Peotr the Orangutan — which he subjected to specialized training regimens of his own design, then took off on his lunar trip, while on the very next panel, the FF were aiming their own rocket for the same destination.
Kragoff knew enough of the FF's history, and he purposefully designed his rocket in such a way that he and his crew would be heavily exposed to the cosmic rays that would, he expected, give them superpowers. This they did: Kragoff gained the ability to become as intangible and invisible as a "ghost", Mikhlo became super-strong and super-durable, Igor gained the ability to shapeshift and could transform into nearly anything, and Peotor gained the ability to control either gravity (like Graviton) or magnetism (like Magneto) (accounts vary by writer). Additionally the apes became smarter. Probably thanks to the similar origins, these superhuman abilities parallel, and even surpass, the FF's own.
[edit] Super-Apes on their own
The apes later showed up in the pages of the New Warriors series "Reality Check". In the second issue, they had divorced themselves from the Red Ghost and had started a life of crime on their own by taking over a private zoo in Salina, Kansas. They had turned the animals against the local population and captured three members of the New Warriors when they enter the complex. Instead of fighting their way out of the situation, they used their intellects and settled on a peaceful co-existence with the people of the town.
In an issue of Fantastic Four published soon after Heroes Return, the Super-Apes had gained high levels of intelligence and were working on a virus that would take out humans, leaveing simians dominant. The Red Ghost, conversely, had degenerated into a child-like mental state and spent most of the issue interested in a bunny rabbit.
[edit] Latest appearances
The Red Ghost and the Super-Apes resurfaced in the Black Panther/X-Men crossover Wild Kingdom, with the Red Ghost back to his original intelligence level. They attempted to build a new Communist state in the political vacuum of Niganda - the Socialist Simian Republic of Niganda, "A country where a new form of Marxist-Leninist socialism can grow, based on the purity of the ape world."
