Dave Johnson (1) (1966–)

Ah, Mark Millar...one of those comic book writers who, along with Brian Michael Bendis, Alan Moore, Dave Sim, and Donny Cates, used to be really good, but then...I don't know...maybe started believing their own press? But somehow, some way, they just started pumping out less than stellar product.

I cannot and will not read anything Millar puts out now, but I thought going back a couple of decades might be a safe bet. Turns out I was wrong. Maybe this is where the problems started.

I know most people absolutely love this graphic novel and, to be fair, there's a lot to love. It's Millar's What If...? take and there's some cool stuff here, including the actual underlying idea. The art is fantastic.

But my biggest problem with Millar is that he writes like a hyperactive child with no attention span, and this book reads like a horribly hacked up abridged version of a much longer and much better story.

Millar, it seems, has given up on stories with any sort of build up, or nuance, and instead writes a series of set pieces that look cool. He introduces and throws away characters in the span of a couple of pages. Instead of a narrative, there's just a few familiar faces that go through their motions to get to the big build up and pay off at the end.

And Lex Luthor? While Millar takes liberties (as he should, in this what if scenario he's sketching—and it's all sketch, not painting) with all the pre-existing characters, it's Lex that's so stupidly over the top. Millar's basically mashed Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, and Tony Stark from Iron Man into this frenetic, stupidly obsessed anti-hero.

If only Millar had a fraction of his obsessiveness to detail, this graphic novel would have been longer, paced better, and would have been far more satisfying.

As it is, it feels like it was a quickly babbled out joke just to get to his three-or-four page punchline at the very end.… (more)

Red Son is an elseworlds story positing what might have happened if the pod carrying the infant Superman would have crash landed on a farm in the Soviet Union under Stalin's rule. It's a pretty awesome idea for an elseworlds story, but I thought it could have been much better than it was. I suppose I can cut some slack for the fact that it was only three issues long.

The idea behind the overarching plot, though it comes at it from an entirely different setup, is that superheroes have the ability to change the world and help humanity - but should they? It’s sort of another riff on the "With great power comes great responsibility" idea - or maybe more along the lines of "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The questions of this nature explored in Red Son are very similar to the questions asked in Kingdom Come. But where Kingdom Come posits that Superman is ultimately sort of more human than human, and would never forget his roots even if he got a little distracted in a quest to make the world a better place, Red Son seems to be saying that just being born and raised in Communist Russia would take things to an entirely different and necessarily bad end, that his desire to help humanity would inadvertently lead to his becoming a dictator.

In a way this makes sense; Clark Kent is so inherent to Superman's character, and the very concept of him. It's interesting to think about what Superman would be like if Clark Kent were not the really good guy we know and love, but someone else entirely - 'born' somewhere else, and raised by different people in a different environment. But I think it's a little insulting to say that, even without changing much else in his upbringing - still growing up among hard working farm folk, even if they aren't gone into in any detail - just growing up in Communist Russia would take away all the goodness in Superman that would keep him from becoming the controlling leader of a totalitarian regime. It also portrays the perfect society Superman builds as being inherently flawed, while the virtually identical one Luther replaces it with is somehow happier and more stable, which just seems like rhetoric to me.

That being said, the book is in many ways equally as critical of both anarchist martyrs and capitalist demi-gods. It seems to highlight the goods and ills of all three main political dogmas. And truthfully, it is only all the people opposed to Superman in the book who seem to think he is power mad and selfish. Superman is actually portrayed more as being caught up in the whirlwind and just wanting to help, which seems more natural to me.

I suppose in a way, because he is so perfect, and because of his unfailing black and white morals, Superman always leans toward the line of Fascism - like Captain America, perhaps. That's something that gets to be explored more in this book, and I appreciate that.

As far as form goes, the story is a bit rushed. A lot happens very fast, and for all the major player cameos that are given space (there's even an elseworlds communist Batman origin story and an unresolved revenge plot going along with that) there are other things not gone into enough or completely left out. Superman's childhood is pretty much glossed over - if the book is supposedly positing that a different origin/upbringing would change who Superman is (something I agree with and find fascinating) it would be nice if they focused on all aspects of that. I don't know very many (or any!) people whose entire personalities are formed more by their national climate and surrounding political dogma than by their parents and childhood experiences. I also think other books set around the cold war have given a better feel of what that time was like. Red Son, for all its emphasis on the Soviet Union and the competition with the United States, doesn't portray that period with any weight or realistic feeling. I also think the tone and voice of Superman are all wrong; he doesn't read like Superman at all - which is maybe to be understood, given the changes made to his character - but he doesn't seem much like a Stalinist either. He doesn't even sound Russian, in tone or mannerism. (I'm glad they avoided giving him some kind of dialect accent, though.) And finally, the book has an interesting looping effect in the story that I'm not sure I like... I think it's a bit cheesy. I also thought that the way Luthor finally 'defeats' Superman was a bit lame.

Overall Red Son has a really cool concept, and despite all the little things that I found to be disappointing in the execution of story, it is interesting and entertaining this is probably one of the better Superman stories around. It can be hard to relate to the ever perfect man of steel, and sometimes his character is about as interesting or accessible as a cement wall. He seems to flourish in elseworlds stories, though, and Red Son is an excellent example of that.
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