Premise
In 1938, a rocket ship carrying an infant crashlanded in the Ukraine. Now the alien child has grown up into a superhero who flies around the world saving people, capitalist and communist alike. His archenemy is American supergenius Lex Luthor, who claims to want to stop Soviet domination of the world but really just wants to prove himself superior to this last son of a dead planet.

Evaluation
First of all, Red Son is very well drawn. When I write about comics I generally focus on the narrative elements, but I would say that more than half the enjoyment I get from them comes from the art. No matter how intrigued I am by a premise, if I go into a comic shop and flip open the book and don't like the art at first glance, I ain't gettin' it. So big ups to the art here.

Secondly, this is an entertaining Superman story that I enjoyed reading, which surprised me because I don't generally like Mark Millar. (Later I learned that the best part was written by Grant Morrison, so my surprise was lessened.)

But it has nothing to do with the putative premise! The big what-if of Red Son is "what if Superman's rocket had landed in the USSR instead of the USA," and the answer is that he would be groomed by the government instead of growing up without state interference in Kansas... but this story has already been done, using Kansas and the American government, in Supreme Power. Millar doesn't establish the USSR as being different from the US in an non-cosmetic way: yeah, so Batman wears a furry hat, and the eagle on Wonder Woman's breastplate has two heads. Otherwise, Millar really makes no use of the idea of a communist Superman. His story is about other things: chiefly about Lex Luthor, really, portrayed here with typical DC overkill. Over at Marvel, you've got the Hulk, who can throw trucks around; at DC, Superman could juggle planets. Similarly, at Marvel, the smartest guy on earth is Reed Richards, who invents rocket ships and dimensional portals; but this is DC, and so Luthor has to be able to cure cancer on his lunch break and learns a new language by browsing a dictionary every time he goes to the toilet. But I suppose this sort of thing is really the only way to make Luthor remotely interesting and credible as a threat to Superman, so I'll let it go — it's even interesting, once. But again, it has nothing to do with the idea of Superman wearing a hammer and sickle.

I later read an interview in which Millar said that his big point was that any superpower left unchecked is a problem, and the USSR was just a stand-in for the US. So if it seemed as though the USSR of the book was curiously interchangeable with the US, it was deliberate! Okay, fine. But it's still a waste.

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