Fans have speculated for years that the Red Skull is not dead in the MCU. I personally never believed that he died at the end of Captain America: The First Avengers, and now thanks to an Avengers: Infinity War prelude comic book, we’ve learned that he’s not dead.

ScreenRant pointed out a panel in the comic that features a flashback scene from the film and as you’ll see below, it suggests that Red Skull was not vaporized by an explosion of blue energy from the Tesseract, which contains the Space Stone. Instead, we see a “fooshhhh” of energy transporting him into space! This seems to confirm the big fan theory that the Red Skull is still alive and kicking in the MCU.

Why would a prequel comic to Infinity War make a point of showing us this if Red Skull isn’t being primed to appear in Infinity War? We have no idea where he has been this whole time, but it’s not hard to think or believe that he might actually play a role in Thanos’ big plan of collecting all the Infinity Stones.

Hell, maybe any of the characters that we thought were destroyed by the Infinity Stones aren’t dead at all. Those other characters include Malekith from Thor: The Dark World, Ronan from Guardians of the Galaxy, and Ultron from Avengers: Age of Ultron. It’s very possible that some of these characters might be alive, but Red Skull is the one that would make most sense.

A few months ago, Samuel L. Jackson seemed to let it slip that Red Skull was still alive, saying:

“You didn’t see me in Civil War. I’m still out there trying to figure out what, you know, The Skull is going to…”