I finally read the TPB of SUPERMAN RED SON on a friend's recommendation. I didn't like it nearly as much as he did, but I must admit that it showed me a side of writer Mark Millar that I hadn't hitherto seen: a degree of simple competence.
This ELSEWORLDS project, originally appearing in three installments and penciled by four separate artists, follows the premise, "What if Superman had been raised in the culture of Soviet Russia?" Unlike the canonical Superman, whose historical era varies according to his audience, this alternate version specifically grows to manhood during the Cold War, so that he's poised to take the place of the atom bomb as the objective correlative of the struggle between the capitalistic U.S. and Communist Russia. Prior to this period, the Soviet Superman apparently foregoes any Superboy-like career, and it's only as an adult that he dons a costume and offers his services to Joseph Stalin.
Nevertheless, Soviet-Man doesn't go around grinding the free world into mulch, as one suspects would have happened had someone given Stalin a weapon of ultimate power. That's because Millar, playing to DC Comics' "Bible of Superman," makes certain that even though he's not farm-bred Clark Kent this time out, Superman is still the same inveterate do-gooder as always. Thus even the Soviet leader can't tell this other "man of steel" what to do, but has to mask his lust for power in seeming benevolence.
To be sure, the narrative is largely free from explicit period politics. The gist of Millar's myth-idea is that Superman acts as a talisman to the fortunes of his adopted country. Without a Kryptonian hero to represent "truth, justice and the American way," the United States falls into disarray, while most of the civilized world falls into step with Russia's designs. The role of the U.S. in Soviet-Man's story is that of military escalation, for they seek to manufacture superhumans as a means of negating Russia's ace in the hole. Lex Luthor, portrayed as a polymath genius in the service of the CIA, is the primary source of super-powered opponents, mostly alternate versions of established Superman-foes, though Millar works in an alternate version of Green Lantern as well. An alternate version of Wonder Woman becomes Superman's ally when he assumes the role of Russia's leader following Stalin's death, while a Russia-born version of Batman becomes one of the hero's most formidable enemies.
Lois Lane is also worked into the mix. She and Superman only meet some time after the intrepid reporter has become the wife of Luthor, and consequently, even though Lois and Luthor eventually divorce, no romance between Lois and Soviet-Man ever transpires. Millar seems to have settled on making his version of DC's iconic hero such a goody-goody that, with Lois out of the picture, he never hooks up with anyone else-- not Wonder Woman, whom he treats like "one of the boys" despite her obvious feelings for him, nor "Lana Lazarenko," Russia's version of Lana Lang. Eventually Millar finds a way to divorce Soviet-Man from his ties to the Communist regime, but he does so in such a way as to make it all about the hero's devotion to doing right in the long view, rather than any particular disenchantment with said regime.
Romance is relegated to a secondary consideration here because Millar's playing to the "Elseworlds" fan who basically wants to see old wine in new bottles, including, besides those already mentioned, revisions of Brainiac, Jimmy Olsen, "Superman robots," and the Phantom Zone. Yet I never got the feeling that Millar or his collaborative artists had any particular feeling for any of the Superman mythology. When Millar's sometime collaborator Grant Morrison did ALL-STAR SUPERMAN, he clearly shared similar motivations in re-fashioning the established myths to please experienced fan-readers. Yet Morrison conveyed a genuine fascination with the power of those myths. With Millar, I don't get any sense that he's doing anything but completing a job.
Still, he certainly does that job, limited as it is, much better than his more uninhibited, but less coherent, works, such as OLD MAN LOGAN and WANTED. Thus I must admit he's not a total incompetent.
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