Review of Superman: Red son

     My review is of SuperMan: Red Son, written by Mark Millar. It was first published in 2003 in a single magazine form consisting of Red Son #1-3, and it is 152 pages long. It was done in color and has a fairly realistic style which I like. The medium seems to be a pretty standard pencil, then ink style. The panel layout is fairly standard; for the most part it kept to rectangular panels, occasionally branching out into a full page being a single panel, or a page being split into only two panels.  Lettering took two forms, the standard black and white speech bubble, and a different layout for Superman’s inner thoughts which took the form of a red background with yellow lettering. This was a very good style choice I think, because it gave his thoughts and his speech a vaguely threatening tone. The story was not very visual driven, it possible that it was, but I didn not pick up on that as much. The part that I picked up on the most was the idea behind it.

     The theme of the story is very, very different from what you would think of as the standard Superman fare, with the idea being that Superman’s pod, instead of landing in the US and being raised in the American ideal, was a few hours late and ended up landing in the Ukraine in 1938. So instead of growing up on a farm in Kansas he grew up on a soviet collective farm. Instead of learning about freedom and dedicating himself to that ideal he dedicated himself to Communism and the communist ideals. Some of the highlights are when he works under Stalin and serves the people in that context, working to keep  disasters from occurring, and one of Stalin’s illegitimate children who commanded the then N.K.V.D began to question and plot against him, culminating in his supporting  the anti-Soviet terrorist, Batman, making an attempt on Superman’s life using ultra intense red light supplied by the CIA. The second awesome part of the novel is the rise of Lex Luthor, culminating in his defeat of Superman. In that part he took the US, which was the only country on earth that hadn’t gone over to the soviet side as championed by Superman, and re-made the entire government and country, effectively making the US self –sufficient and making it rise to surpass even the soviet society in terms of standard of living. Eventually he uses an alternate dimension to assemble an army without Superman’s knowledge. Superman then proceeds to run over that army and all of their allies, only to be defeated by one sentence written on a piece of paper given to his wife at the capitol. It sounds really complicated because it builds on itself very well and it’s difficult to explain only a part of it without having to go and explain all of it.  

Superman’s musings are all given in the past tense, for the most part, until in the final pages it is revealed that he survived his downfall at the hands of Lex. Other than that all of the speech is in the first person. There are not actually any flashbacks in the whole thing, but in a surprising move the story ends up being cyclical, with Luthor’s family going on through the ages until, 50 generations removed from Lex, they send their son Kal-L (Superman) back in time where he lands on a soviet collective in the Ukraine.

     I feel like this story was written for me, honestly. The communist aspect of it is amaziong to me, and te alternate take on Superman being a communist is also absolutely amazing. The way that they crafted his dedication to communism as an ideal into the story was amazing, and the way that they talked about communism and the way that they showed it working was also absolutely off the walls amazing. I really liked the story; I loved its sort-of dark tone. It wasn’t a story that changed my life, but I would certainly read more in this vein. I chose it because I have heard of it, and I find communism interesting, and the communist tie-ins were expertly crafted. 

Dialogue

Here is all the dialogue for all of the pages. The finished pages contain slightly modified dialogue, but for the most part this is what I wanted to say.

Title page:

The Martian Vanguard

  

Page 1:

It was a very long day….

  

We were air dropped by the modified cargo haulers half a mile from the lines

  

There weren’t very many of us in my squad.

There weren’t many of us on Mars period.

  

The haulers had to go back to be refitted for clearing the mist, so we had a couple hours to wait before moving in.

  

It was unnatural. The mist that is.

The folks behind the lines weren’t exactly sure why it was there. Evidently there was no meteorological reason for it, but that was never my thing. My family had a background in physics and mechanics, none of that weather stuff.

 Page 2:

Rightly speaking, this story started over 200 years ago, and on earth.

It started as a joke. “why not send our CO₂ to mars?”

But then they thought about it.

So they aimed a massive modified pressure vessel at mars, setting it to crash directly into the southern Ice cap…

…and even though it seemed stupid and ridiculous, they found the money and launched it.

Page 3:

After it did what it was supposed to and thickened the atmosphere, and people started paying attention to it... …They saw that against all expectations it was working.

After some careful monitoring and a couple more ships sent to mars

It became a much, much greener world

And when it became green enough to support life, earth sent out a colony ship

It held all of earth’s best and brightest, sent out into the void to shine.

Page 4:

Except as the Martian colony developed, earth fell into decline. This continued for near on a century, until one day the Martian built interplanetary sensors picked up a massive radiation spike on the planet. Earth died as many had feared, in nuclear fire. But mars moved on, or it tried to at any rate. The loss of humanity’s birthplace hurt many, but what could we do?

Then one day, sectors on the south side of the planet began to literally go dark. The weather satellites picked it up first, showing that cities and transport lines had lost power and been covered by a thick cloud layer that was not responding like any kind of natural formation. Then refugees started showing up, bringing stories of things rising from the ice, things that brought cold death to anything that stood against them.

Page 5:

So now I waiting in trenches dug using modified farming equipment… …watching an unnaturally persistent wall of mist.

My squad is waiting for our angels to soar overhead and clear the cloud cover.

And as we wait the field artillery made by backyard Physicists and Mechies like me and my family set up behind us.

When the ground pounders set up we’ll be ready to set boots into soil that has been taken from us… …taken by something from the ice

Page 6:

I don’t know how it works… … but seeing our angels clear away the clouds and mist and bring in the sun was the best moment of that bloody, bloody day.

Final Project finished pieces

Here are the finished pages I have for the final project. I finished four out of the seven pages I had laid out, I'll post the final colored and ready pages here and I'll post the dialogue for the unfinished pages in another post.

[Cover Page]

[Page 1]

[Page 2]

[Page3]

I apologize for the resolution on these. Blogger only lets me post at certain sizes, so when they resize the image I lose a lot of quality. For native resolutions and sizes, check the links below:
http://rpi.edu/~hodsod/page1.jpg
http://rpi.edu/~hodsod/page2.jpg
http://rpi.edu/~hodsod/page3.jpg
http://rpi.edu/~hodsod/page4.jpg