Arnim Zola

Arnim Zola was a Swiss geneticist recruited by the Third Reich who solved the problem of his own mortality by transferring his consciousness into an artificial body, with his face displayed on a television screen set into its chest. It is one of Jack Kirby's most gloriously deranged designs, and it functions as a thesis statement: Zola does not care what a body looks like, only what it can be made to do.

He is the reason Hydra survives every defeat. Zola pioneered the cloning, consciousness-transfer and genetic engineering that keep the Red Skull returning from the dead, and his own digital consciousness means he can be deleted from one server and rebooted on another. Toby Jones' film version made him the architect of Hydra's infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D., which is entirely faithful to the character's function.

Jack Kirby created Zola during his return to Captain America in 1977, introducing him in issue #208 as the scientist behind the Red Skull's endless resurrections. The design, a headless body with a face on a television in its torso, is pure late-period Kirby and has never been redesigned because it cannot be improved.

Zola has run through nearly every Captain America and Hydra story since, most significantly in Ed Brubaker's run and Rick Remender's Captain America, where Zola's Dimension Z held Steve Rogers captive for over a decade of subjective time and gave him an adopted son.