Rating:  -
It's not often that you find a comic book with critics' reviews quoted on the back. Right there that means one of two things: that this is a better-than-average comic book, or DC is trying ^way^ too hard.
Fortunitely for my attention span, it's the first. This comic book is good -- no, great. It's only when you take him out of his original setting that you find out what made Superman American, and more intriguingly, what still makes Superman Superman. His dance with Wonder Woman is beautifully surreal -- he wears the uniform of a human, yet makes no effort to hide what he is and they're both actually floating off the ground.
I found that the biggest question "Red Son" raised was, "Would Communism have worked if the Russians had Superman to run it?" Statistically it does work, but somewhere along the line, Superman the Moralist becomes Big Brother, and the "Superman Robots" are disturbing! Of course, it all makes sense -- power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And then the entire thing ends in a quasi Jennifer Paradox. Joy.
Strongly reccommended for anyone who likes escapist literature and wants to stretch the imagination.
Rating: -
This graphic novel is not a parody, it's an alternate history. A most unusual alt-history: an alternate to a fictional reality, rather than an alternate version of our history. (The most popular themes for alternate history are, What if the South won the Civil War?, and What if the Germans won WWII?)
Alternate history is a concept generally more familiar to those who read SF novels rather than comics/graphic novels. Many of us SF novel readers did read a lot of comics when we were younger, though, and I think this particular graphic novel is aimed at us. We read Superman - and Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman - in the 50's, 60's and 70's. So, although we may not have read any other of this particular series of graphic novels, we have quite a bit of background in the Superman mythos - his real parents, where he grew up, girlfriends, enemies, etc.
I think that knowing that background from the original comics may make this book more enjoyable to my middle-aged generation than to people who are used only to the graphic novels. As well, my generation had the advantage of living through most of the history that was really happening from 1950 on. For those who know the history of the Cold War only from school, many of the details wouldn't make sense. It helps a great deal in reading this book if you are familiar with the course of the Cold War, and that you know not only who JFK was, but some of the celebrity gossip about him as well as the official records. (The name Norma Jean should mean something to you.) You should know what the Warsaw Pact was, and something about in what order the Soviet Union took over various countries.
I liked the way the book involved similar alternate twists on Batman, and brought in Wonder Woman and Green Lantern as well. Batman's hat is the funniest thing I've seen in a while!
A couple quibbles: having the artwork done by more than one artist is distracting; a couple times it was hard to recognize Lois Lane as herself. And I do wish that illustrators would STOP trying to use the Cyrillic alphabet incorrectly. If you can't use the letters for what they really are, don't use them, please. The thing that looks like a backwards R is NOT an R. The letter that looks like a backwards N is NOT an N. So stop it already! Just go for English in the signs and titles, or for accurate Russian. (One illustrator did this correctly, but on many pages, and the cover art, these letters are used incorrectly.) OK, that's one of my pet peeves, since I happen to be able to read Russian a little; it may not bother other people as much as it bugs me.
Summary? A graphics novel that may be of more interest to an older generation that doesn't usually read them, in a vein more familiar to SF readers than comics readers.
Rating:  -
Not the best "Elseworlds" Superman title: I have two other 'Elseworlds' titles of Superman - the mediaeval 'Kal' & 'Superman: The Dark Side' (raised by Darkseid) - and they're both FAR better than this one, even the fact that 'Kal' is MUCH shorter doesn't detract from its impact. 'The Dark Side' is definately the best story of the 3 ('Kal' doesn't have much time for a story to develop), but there's something else to it that I can't quite put my finger on.
Don't get me wrong: it's a good story & worth getting if you like Superman graphic novels, it just doesn't have the same kick as 'The Dark Side'. I think it might be that it's so focused on Superman vs Lex Luthor that the other super-heroes mentioned (Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern) get short shrift. There's also no clear 'bad guy' in it which made 'Kal' & 'TDS' enjoyable: who do you get fired up AT if there's no clear bad guy?
I gave it 3 stars because it's "good, as you'd expect" instead of "Wow! that's awesome!"
Rating:  -
Red Son, for those not in the know, is the Elseworlds tale showcasing how the world would have been different should Kal El have landed in Russia during the beginning of the Cold War. What occurs during the three issues is the rise of the Superman, and the fall of the world under his boot. Oh, it's not a tyrannical rule; Superman has made the world a Socialist community, with only a dilapidated America under President Luthor standing up against the alien's involvement.
It's a heady case that Mark Millar brings, but the work stands as one of the best and definite works for Superman. You may ask, `definitive for Superman? How? It's not a real story!" (...)! Millar defines his world using the very paradigm of who and what the Superman character stands for. Oh, our guy is most certainly there. It's just that we get to see how Superman would react given a different lot in life. He is still the highly noble, self-sacrificing hero that we all know and love. There isn't a person on this planet that doesn't know that familiar `S'-shield, and each one can pick up on the familiarity with the character as he and his cast are presented here. After all, it's the classic story of invulnerable alien versus his greatest nemesis-a brilliant mortal flesh and blood human. Ah....but Lex gets it done. In a brilliant way, Lex gets it done.
Art wise, Dave Johnson and Kilian Plunkett share the art chores throughout the telling. Johnson begins the story for the first part, and is joined and later finished by Plunkett. Johnson's work heralds the Superman Fleischer cartoons from the 1940's, where our hero is a broad shouldered man of action, simple in wants and benign in deeds. His work directly expresses the innocence of the years, and it's slow decay as time marches on. Plunkett finishes the tale up, and his style shows a harsher, aged time for the world and Superman. The decay of freedom is complete, and our hero bears that weight in full force. You can clearly perceive the gloom that hangs over all, which is...until....
You read it for yourself. What, you think I was going to tell you? Ha! And ruin it? You're out of your gourd!
Superman: Red Son more than stands out this year as the story that none should miss. It succeeds on all levels as a defining work that grabs your attention and leaves you overwhelmed come story's end. There is nothing more that I can say that the book doesn't say for itself.
Rating:  -
I am a big fan of Marvel's long-lost WHAT IF series, in which one small change in a familiar storyline would result in radically different outcomes for heroes or villains. When DC began their Elseworlds imprint, I took notice, hoping that this would satisfy my craving for more variants on the old standards. I've noticed more and more, however, that Elseworlds is not so much a continuation of the WHAT IF premise, but complete reimaginings of the DC Universe. What's more, they really don't make much sense, and that is no more apparent than with Mark Millar's SUPERMAN: RED SON.
From reading the cover and introduction, the premise of this book appears to be "If Kal-El's rocket was off by a few minutes and landed in the USSR instead of the USA, how would that affect the DCU?". Reading on, however, I realize that the premise instead is "How would the DCU look in a world dominated by the USSR?" That's a whole different ballgame, and not nearly as interesting to me. The reason I say this is that Millar does not make it clear how the effects presented in RED SON are caused by Superman's existence as a communist figurehead. For example, why would Superman's not being in the USA make Jimmy Olsen decide to become a government agent instead of working for the Daily Planet? Why would a Russian boy with murdered dissident parents become Batman instead of Bruce Wayne? Why would Oliver Queen work for the Daily Planet instead of becoming Green Arrow? It seems to me that Superman's existence in the "regular" timeline had no effect on Olsen's desire to work at the Planet, the murder of Bruce Wayne's Parents, or Oliver Queen being stranded on an island; therefore, these characters should remain pretty much the same in this alternate timeline. All I can assume is that Millar wanted to give us more bang for the buck, giving us a quick thrill upon spotting familiar characters in different circumstances, but his cause-and-effect gets sloppy in the process. There are a few well-done moments, such as the creation of Bizarro and the release of the super-villains, but these were overshadowed for me by the little inconsistencies I mentioned before (and others) that just didn't add up. This is not a simple "alternate timeline" caused by a different destination for Kal-El's rocket... this is an complete reinterpretation of the DCU, and not much fun for me.
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