THEY CALLED EACH OTHER — COMRADE!

THEY CALLED EACH OTHER — COMRADE!

Eagle-eyed comic men will have noticed the scary eyes staring out at them from the racks this week - the third and final part of Mark Millar’s RED SON. Millar’s been selling this as some sort of analogy with the state of the world at the moment, but to be brutally frank, the mildly-lame ‘elseworlds’ what-if-Superman-was-a-Supersocialist framework takes a back seat to the hypergrooviness of Superman Done Right.

Dear God! What is that I have written - Superman ‘done right’? Such words are generally spoken by tunnel-visioned freaks who carry extensive notes on the character in their fevered brains and then howl every last detail into the trembling ear of a visibly shaken Joe Casey. Okay, to qualify the statement - Superman hem-hem ‘done right’ is Superman done seemingly by a half-insane hack on some hideous combination of diet pills and ether ramming every mad idea he ever had into a ‘book-length epic’ and then doing it again and again and again until he dies of a Superman-related aneurism, with a smile of pure joy on his withered husk of a face as eyes that have seen too many dreams, hoaxes and imaginary stories burst like super-grapes.

RED SON is that good. Freed from the contraints of however many years of ‘continuity’ - not to mention the pernicious snake of ‘realism’ - Millar and his immaculate little cabal of artists have gone wild with a four-color oddyssey into greatness. People have been toning Superman down for years in an attempt to inject some sort of meagre ‘excitement’ into yet another fight with a giant robot, and all it’s done is make the character so dull they’ve been trying some ever-more-fabulous stunt every year like Coronation Street in a desperate attempt to get people to please pay attention. Millar approaches from first principles. Superman: he knows what’s happening, he can do anything. If you are a million miles away he’ll track you down girl - not eat some brie and muse on how he couldn’t possibly fly a million miles, then have an attack of angst and listen to Jimmy Olsen’s ‘riot grrrl’ ‘friends’ belt out an atrocious song about vampires - a shameful pass for a man who once had Super Taste!

Enough. I don’t know where this is going and neither should you. But get hold of RED SON, and give it to your children so they know all about Superman and how he tried to crush the capitalist dogs. Next week: a review of a bad comic. I promise.