“Why don’t you just put the whole WORLD in a BOTTLE, Superman?”
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I used to have an imgur album with high quality scans of all three issues in this series. Unfortunately those links are dead now and I can’t find any good replacements. Probably the strongest “elseworlds” / “one-shot” comic I’ve ever read (though I’m not the biggest comic reader).
Just had this great read brought to mind by petey’s recent post on what leftists see in comic books, and thought this could expand the conversation in many ways, as this comic kind of directly touches on the ideas of the thread.
I strongly recommend people find a way to read this comic before reading spoilers, it’s pretty short and will almost certainly make an impact on you
Try here,
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Superman-Red-Son
Isn't this a comic from 20 years ago?
It had a movie of it come out at around covid-19 times.
Has it become relevant again (If was always relevant of course)?
Yes, I watched the animated movie.
Superman is still a good man, but what he defends is evil. It's an interesting look.
The movie I think you are talking about is Brightburn. It deals with if Superman himself was an evil person.
No, there's an animated dc film of this storyline iirc
Ironically Brightburn is more like Irredeemable by Mark Waid than Superman, although Irredeemable is itself a Superman Elseworlds story.
Red Son is the "What if?" where Kal'el lands in rural Russia rather than Kansas but still deals with an adult Superman in an AU Earth.
Brightburn is a "What if?" where a similarly powered alien child lands in the US but is treated with fear and suspicion, however the character is only 12/13 or so in human years, so it's more about the differences in raising the alien child than how and where he tries to influence the world.
What's funny about that movie is that it fails to even commit to the "evil" thing.
Homie is literally just a normal if awkward kid until his ship starts spamming him with schizo messages until he goes mad and realizes he has the power to just "deal with" all the people he thinks are out to get him, in proper kid logic.
Like, I'm not super versed in Superman lore, but I don't think his spaceship was screaming at him "TAKE THE WORLD KILL KILL TAKE THE WORLD" constantly, which is a pretty crucial difference that undermines the comparison.
I mean, they are out to get him, that's part of the problem. The dad tries to shoot him in the back of the head, the mom tries to stab him with space metal.
Both of those are in response to him already killing people and being an obvious issue by the final act of the movie. I doubt mom would have done anything if he hadn't killed dad, and dad only did so because he killed uncle (I think, one of the bodies they found).
But a lot of the prior people are just either dumb kids doing normal kid bullying or normal adults either trying to discipline him or being annoying busybodies. The kind of thing that feels really overwhelmingly bad as a kid and makes you want to "get even" because you don't understand it.
So he uses power he shouldn't have to act on unrestrained kid emotions, and it goes wildly bad. Which is less "omg he is so evil" and more "kids don't react well to having zero limitations."
As good as the story is, and personally I wasn't a fan of the twist at the end, the main issue Superman faces throughout the whole thing is Lex just being a dick, and at times because of things barely related to what Superman is trying to do.
The chess game for example doesn't actually involve Superman, it's the Bizarro stand-in, but Lex takes this as yet another slight against him by Superman who more or less doesn't actually give a shit about Lex.
The whole "What if?" fails at times because Millar paints Superman as bad simply as an extension of "Russia = bad" stemming from lingering Cold War resentment on both sides, accurate or not. If the same character had been trying to reach the same goal but from a different home location the comic would have both likely not as sold as much or caused anywhere near as much discourse except to bring up the point that these are all things any Superman can do but as with most characters set in a near approximation of the real world the status quo shackles them to not making any great changes, because if that actually happened the stories would resolve very quickly and the comic would run out of things to explore.
Personally I also find Millar to be quite overhyped at times and his "big works" like Civil War aren't actually very good once you start applying even a little scrutiny.
CW1 only "worked" because Tony Stark, Reed Richards, and various others on the pro-registration side of things acted very out of character because the anti-reg side needed someone to actually go up again that provided both big names and a credible threat - remember one of the first questions that ever gets asked when multiple superheroes meet is "What would happen if they fight", and the MCU showed this almost immediately in The Avengers when within minutes of arriving Thor is fighting Iron Man and Captain America and then later on The Hulk.
If the entire superhero community united and stood against a non-superpowered individual like AOC then despite whatever retarded tribal-blue/public support the stand-in might have in the end said character would not only be utterly ineffective at actually stopping any of the superhero community, but also start losing PR points very fast if and when the superheroes simply stopped doing anything since various disasters that occur regardless of their presence can only ever be stopped by them.
The same scrutiny can be applied to the rest of his works but is something very evident in his recent "Millar-verse" finale event 'Big Game' which brings together every single comic he's written for Image Comics, Chrononauts, Kick-Ass/Hit-Girl, Kingsman, Night Club, Starlight, Superior, The Ambassadors, The Magic Order, and others, and kills off every hero, just to then use magic/time-travel to undo it all at the end.
Every death is gruesome and over the top because it was never going to matter. But that's more or less Millar's thing, hyperviolent content that may or may not matter or actually have some kind of story going on.
Of those various titles Superior is the one I would recommend the most since it's a short 6 issue run and stand alone from everything else, but then most of Millar's works are like that until the very recent tie-ins. Anyone who does read it will very quickly realise DC lifted the plot to the comic for another live-action adaptation, but the comic does it better in part because of pacing and not being tied to pre-existing story requirements.
For another similar experience JMS' Superman: Earth One is very likely where the Man of Steel movie took it's pointers from, but again was done better and should have been the story the DCU films went with, bringing in Zod later on rather than him off so quick and then going full Doomsday with him. Pacing was always a problem with the DCU, however.
I like that he brought back The Magic Order characters to be a part of this when that’s exactly a summary of their entire book already.
Are there people who actually like civil war? I thought it was pretty universally hated, not to mention the worst Avengers movie.
I can't say there's anything by Millar that I like personally.
I think a fair interpretation would point to the lack of an equivalent to:
A) the Kents
B) following from A, there is no Clark Kent.
In Soviet Russia, Superman doesn’t bother with the pretense of a human identity. I think that’s a statement on the dehumanization of the people who live under such systems. But even without reading that much into things, the lack of his moral guidestones I think cant be understated.
I found the twist neat but it is quite a stretch lol. I think the rest stands on its own regardless and that epilogue can just be taken as a funny wink by Miller y’know, perhaps playing on the popularity of planet of the apes at the time hah
I didn’t read it so much as “Russia Bad, therefore Superman bad” but as “what if you attempted to execute Communism with a good king?” Of course, the ultimate “good king” is someone like Superman—he can’t be bullied, threatened, subverted, or mislead, and he doesn’t really age so you don’t have to worry about the quality of his successors. Superman, if you accept that he’s still fundamentally a good person but you raise him with all the lofty slogans and promises of Communism, actually does have the ability to construct and enforce a mostly-fair system, although not without its flaws.
I do agree that the epilogue seemed to come out of nowhere, and didn’t really add anything.
Thanks. I’ve given up on modern day comics but Superman is one of my favorite characters. Sounds interesting
Read this: https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Superior
And this: https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Superman-Earth-One
Thanks
Surprised you hadn’t already read this a long time ago, (to me atleast) it seems like everything Mark Miller did is considered a golden egg in the comics community
I know. I can’t believe it either. Time to hit up the back issue section or go online
I loved the animated film of this. Superb adapation.