Graphic Novel Book Club: Superman Red Son, Mark Millar & Dave Johnson & Kilian Plunkett

Superman Red Son
Mark Millar
Artists:
Dave Johnson & Andrew Robinson (Red Son Rising & Red Son Ascendant)
Kilian Plunkett & Walden Wong (Red Son Ascendant & Red Son Setting)
Colorist: Paul Mounts (seriously good work here)
Letters: Ken Lopez (not so fond of the stylized capitals, but otherwise excellent)
ISBN: 9781401247119 (soft-side trade collecting all three volumes: Red Son Rising, Red Son Ascendant, Red Son Setting, with intro, marginalia, and process art)

Another month, another graphic novel for the club.  This time we went with a well-regarded alt-universe Superman fan-fic: Superman Red Son.  The premise (and a twist at the end) has our Kryptonian ubermensch landing in a Ukrainian communal farm instead of in cornfed central USA.  The idealistic and straightforward hero absorbs and internalizes the ideals of the communist party, and sets the world down a very different path.

This is very much a alternate-universe "what if" scenario, driven almost entirely by plot gears, with only the bare minimum of characterization to flesh out our main cast: Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman (holy hand grenades, Batman!) Lex Luthor, Lois Lane Luthor (still a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist), Bizarro, Brainiac, the Green Lantern Corps, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few here and there.  Before reading this comic, everyone should be familiar with those characters and their basic archetypes, because that's pretty much all you're going to get as they karoom around this inverted world and everyone makes pretty much uniformly bad decisions (often from good intentions) that drive the plot deliciously down an interesting path to destruction and difficult choices for all.  A few well-placed heel-turns, a bit of shoe-horning in of characters (I thought especially Batman was shoveled in by main force and then tragically underutilized), and a bit of hazy plotting (was the somewhat extended Green Lantern diversion really actually necessary to the development of the plot?  Discuss.) the story was overall interesting and fast-paced enough to keep me entertained.  Besides, it's essentially an "elseworlds" story, so even if it was horrid, it's easy enough to fling back into the murk and forget about it.

The art was delicious, the forms and poses were classical and clear and well-defined.  People had faces that aged and changed over decades of time, and even through the change of artists, the characters looked like themselves all the way through.  A special shout-out to Paul Mounts for some really stellar coloring work here.  There was a lot of black and a lot of grey and a lot of red, plus loads of stark contrasts that very easily could have slid into melodrama or cartoon, and he held the line excellently.

Overall, a fun excercise in "what if" that stands well clear of politics or economic realities to focus on the fun story potentials in a world only slightly different from our own.