The Red Star is definitely unique, and assumes one of the more ambitious goals seen in the comics medium, presenting a well thought-out mythologized version of the Soviet Union as it should have been. I think the boldness of this idea is one of the primary reasons that Christian Gossett deserves credit just for tackling something this ambitious. In the years following the dismal collapse of the Soviet empire, it takes a certain amount of balls to base your fictional universe in an idealized version of the worker's paradise that the Soviets always imagined for themselves, and then inject magic and living gods into the mix, in defiance of the "real Soviets" disdain for superstition and religion.

As if all that isn't enough, Gossett and his team up the ante by dressing their highly original story with stunning art and design work, even down to the fonts and lettering - it's all beautiful, visceral, and executed with an astonishing level of control and restraint. Team Red Star is out to wow us, but they know how to use their graphic tools effectively, and the visual side of The Red Star is consistently first-rate.

That said, The Red Star can occasionally descend into melodramatics and a certain infatuation with it's own epic nature. Real people rarely speak exclusively in phrases heavy with the weight of the world, even in times of stress and danger. There is humor in The Red Star, but it's forced and out-of-place, similar to the corny jokes that Peter Jackson et al injected into their film version of The Lord of the Rings to try and prevent the whole thing from suffocating from the weight of high ambition. In the end, The Red Star succeeds simply because the core idea and the visual execution are stunning, but a certain tolerance for the excesses of grand epic narrative is required to read through all the way to the end. ( )