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Instead of dating Peggy Carter, Ultimate Marvel’s Captain America and his WWII-era girlfriend became the parents of the Red Skull.
The love interest most commonly associated with Steve Rogers’ Captain America is Peggy Carter and his more recent relationship with her niece Sharon Carter (often referred to as Agent 13). However, in the Ultimate Universe, Rogers fell in love with a woman named Gail Richards.
After Steve was frozen in ice during World War II, Gail married, moving on as best she could. Needless to say, Gail was shocked when Steve was pulled out of the ice decades later. By that point, too much time had passed and there would be no saving their relationship, but it did not mean she loved him any less. It was a painful ordeal for Gail, made all the more heartbreaking because she had been pregnant when Steve Rogers disappeared and had borne his child in secret. That child eventually grew to become one of the world’s deadliest terrorists, the Red Skull.
The disappearance and return of Steve Rogers was depicted in The Ultimates by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, a book that updated Marvel’s classic heroes by bringing them into the modern world. With the Ultimates, the sensationalism of government-backed costumed superheroes dining alongside popular celebrities tapped into the zeitgeist of the 2000s, but the Ultimates lacked the discipline and focus of a standard military unit. When Steve was found in the ocean and thawed, he proved to be a natural fit to lead the team.
However, to Steve Rogers, the 1940s felt like just a few weeks ago. Every family member and most of the soldiers he had known were dead. The Super-Soldier Serum that had turned him into Captain America kept him alive and granted him superhuman strength, but it could not protect him from the pain of such loss. Two of the people who meant the most to him were still alive, Gail Richards and his best friend Bucky Barnes. However, the two had married one another after Steve’s apparent death.
Both agreed to meet with Steve, but it was initially too difficult for Gail to come face-to-face with him. After some time, they eventually reconnected. When Captain America began dating his fellow Ultimate teammate, Janet van Dyne, the Wasp, he would bring her over to hang out with Bucky and Gail.
Ultimate Captain America struggled to adapt to the modern world even more than his counterpart in the main Marvel Universe. However, his most shocking revelation came in the series Ultimate Comics: Avengers by Mark Millar and Carlos Pacheco. While fighting against AIM terrorists who were stealing plans for a cosmic cube, he encountered another super-soldier: the Red Skull. The grim-faced terrorist brutally beat Captain America, leaned in close, and whispered that Steve was his father. Then, he threw Steve out of a helicopter.
Hawkeye saved him, but the real damage was done. Captain America hacked into a S.H.I.E.L.D. database and discovered that Gail had been pregnant with his child at the time of his disappearance. The government wanted to preserve Captain America’s pristine legacy, which (due to the attitudes prevalent in the 1940s) they thought would be besmirched by an out-of-wedlock baby. They convinced Gail to give the child up for adoption, which she agreed to. In truth, the boy was raised to be a living weapon, powered by the same Super Soldier Serum his father had possessed.
Red Skull had AIM rebuild a cosmic cube, which he could use to reshape reality. Steve stopped his son, mortally wounding him. As Red Skull lay in a hospital bed, he said he had hoped to use the cube to make a world where he could have grown up with his mother and father. Not only were Steve and Gail denied their chance to be together, but they also lost their chance to be a real family.
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