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When the United Republics of the Red Star invaded Al'istaan to prop up the puppet
government there against a rebellion backed by the Western transnationals, it was
supposed to be easy. They were bringing to bear the forces of a superpower against
a bunch of barbarians with scimitars. But these barbarians don't seem to understand
when they're defeated: they just keep fighting, inspired by the knowledge that to
die in battle is to be transported to the highest heaven, and what was supposed to
be an easy victory turns to a humiliating defeat. A couple of years after pulling
its troops from Al'istaan, the United Republics of the Red Star is no more.
Sound familiar?
The creators of The Red Star could easily have done a better job disguising their source material, but the transparency of the allegory is part of the point: The Red Star is about the Soviet Union. Why bother changing the names at all, then? Because this isn't straight history; it's not about what the Soviet Union did, but what the Soviet Union meant. And like U.S., the great Steve Darnall / Alex Ross collaboration, The Red Star conveys this in large part through the use of symbolic characters — not preexisting ones like U.S.'s Uncle Sam, Brittania and Marianne, but new creations: Kar Dathra, defender of Al'istaan; the Red Woman, spirit of the utopian movement that spawned the revolution; Troika, symbol of the totalitarianism that twisted that movement into a nightmare. There's more to the story than these entities punching each other in the mouth, however. The first Red Star collection, The Battle of Kar Dathra's Gate, begins with a letter, a letter from a woman to her dead husband, killed in the title battle that spelled defeat for the URRS. She does not hold the pencil as she writes. She is Comrade-Sorceress Maya Antares, also a veteran of the war in Al'istaan, and she is on a monorail car looping through the Citadel National Cemetery. A veteran of the Great Patriotic War asks her for a light, she obligingly produces fire from the palm of her hand, they get to talking, and eventually he asks her about the battle.
The bulk of the book is taken up by her story. And now I should say something about the art. The Red Star is big — I was about to say roughly the size of a vinyl LP cover, but I suddenly notice that it's almost exactly the size of the computer I'm typing this on (a Dell notebook that once had a 14.1" screen.) Here I'm only talking about height and width: it's pretty slim and reads even slimmer thanks to all the double-page spreads. But the point of the big art is not just to fill space. Sure, some of it is impact for the sake of impact, dazzling visuals for the sake of dazzling visuals. But the genius of The Red Star is that it's a saga about the Soviet Union told through the medium of Soviet-style art. I've heard a lecture or two on totalitarian art and architecture, about the emphasis on scale, the idealization of the human figure, the overtly inspirational and symbolic nature of the pieces, and about how banal we're all supposed to find it — but when I looked at slides like that of Vera Mukhina's Worker and Farm Woman, I could only think, "Magnificent!" To read The Red Star is to see these figures come to life and play the parts of gods and heroes in a myth woven not from the conflicts of 3500 years ago but of fifteen. Much has been made of the use of 3D in The Red Star's all-Photoshop art, but as impressive as the skyfurnaces are, it's the 2D art seamlessly woven into the 3D that's truly thrilling: the exquisitely rendered perfect yet unique human figures transformed into comets, prostrated before anonymous headstones, defiantly waving flags of revolution. The fact that this glorious imagery is in the service of something more than a thrill ride makes it all the more magnificent.
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