KILLAR MILLAR STORIES: Superman Red Son
This series produced by the Flipgeeks Crew picks one Mark Millar story and dissect, nitpick it for all the comic book geeks in preparation for the arrival of the Scottish writer – the KILLAR MILLAR STORIES !
In this part, we would like to focus on Mark Millar’s “Superman Red Son“.
This in my opinion has got to be the book that defined how accomplished a writer Mark Millar is. In this elseworlds tale we get to see a completely different Superman. How different? Well you can say that he no longer subscribes to “Truth, Justice and the American Way”. Instead this iteration of Superman as written by Millar fully supports Communism and the Warsaw Pact.
This tale is bittersweet but its definitely digestible. The art was awesome thanks to Dave Johnson and Killian Plunkett whose art styles for the two halves of the story paints a better picture of the world in thrown into turmoil because the Russians won the Cold War.
While it might seem like just another Superman story from the outside, its still important to note that Millar played up to the strengths of each character that makes an appearance. There’s the never-happened romance between Lois Lane (Luthor) and Superman. There’s the classic battle between brains and brawn in the form of Superman and Lex Luthor’s rivalry and then for fanfic lovers, there’s also a “never-happened” romance between Wonder Woman and the Soviet Superman.
And then this book also gave rise to the “Russian Batman”
It’s got a lot of brilliant character moments with some characters experiencing a slightly skewered origin such as the Batman. In other characters we get to see a twisted version of themselves. This book showed and will continue to show readers that the concept of “good” and “bad” were very relative. Superman with all his dictator-ish musings and actions truly believed that he was doing good the same as Luthor who actually managed to have the last laugh in the book.
I also noticed in this 3-issue prestige format book that it was quite easy to show the core characteristics of each DC hero. Peel away the soviet/communist indoctrination and we see that this version of Supes is still the big blue boyscout we all grew up and loved. Wonder Woman still preaches peace but always keeps a weapon by her side. Batman is still the dark hero for the Russian cities only this time, were not really sure if it was Bruce Wayne under the cowl.
Check out other KILLAR MILLAR STORIES here.
