Red Son

[selenak]

Following a recommendation from londonkds, I've read Mark Millar's Red Son, aka the Superman AU in which his pod crashes in the Soviet Union instead of Kansas. Which was interesting to read and shared several elements with JMS' more recent Supreme Power, notably of course the idea of the Superman character raised to love the state and being driven towards

Comments

[londonkds]

I think that Millar's idea is that both Superman and Lex in this are absolutely mind-blowingly super-intelligent to the point of near-infallibility, so can get past the economic calculation problem and make a planned economy work (Lex's USA by the end is arguably a fascist rather than socialist planned economy).

I really do think the best things about it are the central characterisation of Superman and the very thoughtful and amusing variations on standard DC canon. I think the origin story of Batman is the absolute high-point, because of the perfect ideological inversion of someone who remains exactly the same character - standard Batman sees his parents murdered by a random criminal and becomes one of the most law 'n' order obsessed of superheroes, to the point of sometimes being actually written as an authoritarian Conservative, Red Son Batman sees his parents murdered by the secret police and becomes an extreme right-libertarian.

What does give me problems in Red Son is, what exactly, is meant by the ending, because it does seem to argue that Lex can bring utopia to the Earth despite being a brutal totalitarian bastard. But Millar's political beliefs as expressed in his work seem more shallow the more I read or read about his work - he often seems incapable of portraying anyone to the right of Old Labour as anything other than a consciously-evil monster who rapes little children before breakfast. Red Son is the only work of his I'd really recommend to anyone, as it's a rare occasion when he's forced to write for an all-ages audience and as such isn't tempted by his flippant extreme violence and icky half-jokey-half-fascinated portrayal of sexual violence, especially male on male rape.

You may be interested to know, by the way, that Grant Morrison reportedly suggested the final time-loop twist, after Millar felt that his original ending was too low-key.

[selenak]

I think the origin story of Batman is the absolute high-point, because of the perfect ideological inversion of someone who remains exactly the same character -

Agreed. The most clever thing about the comic.

What does give me problems in Red Son is, what exactly, is meant by the ending, because it does seem to argue that Lex can bring utopia to the Earth despite being a brutal totalitarian bastard

Same here. As I said, it seemed to negate the main point. Though perhaps Millar just loved the irony "Lex Luthor by defeating Superman creates paradise on Earth" and didn't bother to think about the implication or politics at all...