Mark Millar's 'Red Son'

How differently might things have gone had Superman landed in the Soviet Union instead of Kansas?

That's the question explored in Mark Millar's "Red Son," a comic that reimagines Superman as a Soviet superhero rather than an American icon. Elseworlds comics like this one take place outside regular DC continuity and reimagine the characters in a new setting. Precisely because of this changed background, Elseworlds comics can be a lot of fun.

"Red Son" is an interesting take on Superman because he's still an essentially good guy who doesn't want anyone to be hurt, and has unimpeachable moral character. He's still Superman. But because he grew up in communist Russia, he's not the Superman we remember. He still defends truth and justice, but it's no longer the American way he upholds. And in the DC Universe, that's quite a game changer.

In the comic, the adult Superman emerges into the public consciousness during the presidencies of Stalin and Eisenhower. The fear and paranoia of the Red Scare are further inflamed by this superhuman champion of communism and Soviet values. In a compelling section on the reaction in America, the comic shows people in the street terrified at the thought that a superpowered Soviet can him to watch their every move from orbit.

Superman's chief nemesis has always been Lex Luthor, and Millar sticks with the classic characterization of Luthor as a scientist, but not as a mad scientist. This Luthor is in the employ of the U.S. government, giving as a rare scenario where Luthor comes off at least as sympathetically as Superman.

The conflict between the two men continues over the next 40 years or so moves along standard Superman lines, however abridged, as Luthor gets Braniac to put Stalingrad in a bottle, and creates one superpowered patriot after another, like Bizarro and the Parasite, in attempts to destroy his foe.

Other D.C. heroes and world history get reimagined along the way. Wonder Woman arrives on the scene, and declares her support for the Soviet Union rather than for capitalist America, With Superan on the scene, nation after nation joins the Warsaw Pact, and America's fortunes ebb lower and lower. Soon states start to secede, and the U.S. government is unable to stop them.

The most interesing aspect of the story, thematically, is when Superman succeeds Stalin as president of the Soviet Union, and makes the nation run like clockwork. Everyone has absolute security, and everything they need. There is no crime, no hunger, and no freedom. Dissidents are rounded up and given brain surgery to make them compliant with Superman's regime. (There are shades of Doc Savage here, but it also reminds me of Mark Gruenwald's "Squadrom Supreme," a comic where a pastiche of the Justice League assumed total control of society to build a utopia.)

The story breaks down for me in the final act. Batman in this world was left an orphan when the KGB shot his parents for publishing subversive anti-Superman material. When we finally see him as an adult, Batman's absolute obsession is to bring down Superman and his Soviet system. As it continues, the comic fails to maintain the energy it had in its opening pages.

In a rare twist, Luthor does win in the end, and outsmarts not only Braniac but Superman as well. Except Superan survives as well, and manages to live long enough to see the earth's sun grow red, and hear reports from one Lex Luthor's descendants that the Earth is going to blow up because of pressure building beneath the planet's crust.

The comic was all right, but none what I would want to buy. But that's why I didn't buy it. Gotta love library cards.

Mark Millar's 'Wanted' (spoilers)

Imagine a world with supervillains but no superheroes, and you might have an idea of what Mark Millar's "Wanted" collection is like.

No, scratch that. Millar's comic, published in a single volume in 2005 by Top Cow Comics, is something it takes a twisted genius to come up with. While most of the rest of us would imagine a world where supervillains run roughshod over everyone else and decent people struggle to eke out an existence, let alone a resistance, Millar instead has generated a world order run in secret by an Illuminati of supervillains.

Our guide to this hidden world is Wesley Gibson, a cube farm worker trapped in a miserable life until one day he discovers that his lost father has died and made him heir to a piece of that secret world.

This strange order of things arose about 20 years ago when the supervillains in the world united with a plan: Why not team up and get rid of all the world's superheroes once and for all, and proceeded to do so.

It makes sense, once you think about it, since every superhero has a score or more of regular supervillains on their roster, many of whom (for dramatic and storytelling reasons) are more powerful than the hero himself. Batman alone has the Joker, Two-Face, Mr. Freeze, the Riddler, Bane, Poison Ivy, the Penguin, Ra's al Ghul and the entire League of Assassins, Amygdala, the Scarecrow, Mr. Zzazz, the Calendar Man ... and on and on and on. Put them all together, and he wouldn't have a chance. Same goes for Superman and any other hero you can think of.

So that's what the supervillains did, back in 1986. They either killed the superheroes, or altered the timeline so that they weren't superheroes anymore -- they were actors who had played superheroes on TV shows or in the movies, and so on. It would be as though Christopher Reeve actually were from another planet, or Adam West really were the world's greatest detective -- and yet both men were unaware of this.

The supervillains, with their foes out of the way, now ran the world, from the behind the scenes. Any time they committed a crime, they covered it up through their vast network of controls.

Once Wesley Gibson has been fully inducted into this new world, and the readers with him, the action begins. Not every supervillain is content to rule the world if no one knows about it. What's the point in ruling the world if you don't get to frighten people? So a rift emerges between the "good" supervillains and the "bad" ones, as the more psychotic ones step out of the shadows, neutralize their colleagues who have been holding them back, and everything starts to go crazy again.

Best of all is the ending, which I won't ruin for anyone who hasn't read the comic, but it's got a brutal in-your-face message to people who hate their jobs, feel their lives suck, and spend $20 picking up a trade paperback.

It's a great idea for a comic, and there are some genuinely brilliant scenes in the comic, but this isn't one I'll be reading again. It was just too crude: the sexually denigrating remarks, the runaway potty mouth, and the struggle between amoral characters and their nihilistic foes drained the book of a lot of its pleasure.

Even the pleasure and wit that do survive are tainted by the foul language. Naming characters "Fuckwit" and "Shithead" is the sort of locker room humor that schoolyard bullies enjoy; it's not the sort of thing you hope to find in your reading material, either casual or serious. And by the time the comic was over, Millar had dropped so many F-bombs, it was amazing there was anything more than a smoking crater left of the comic.

Perhaps this was meant to show how tough the characters were, or how uncouth; but without some sort of counterweight, all it left me with was a feeling of emptiness -- the story was clever enough that better writing would have made it more memorable and worth reading again.



Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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