The Circle of Comic Book Life
I've been reading and collecting comic books on and off for about 30 years now. Each cycle begins with a title that really piques my interest in some fashion, and ends when every magazine on the shelf starts to resemble the one that first caught my eye, thus killing off my desire for a year or two.
My first jones was induced by ingesting massive amounts of controlled comic-book substances like Jack Kirby's hallucinogenic Fourth World universe, along with a myriad of underground titles that included Zap Comix, Vaughn Bode and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. After drying out in comic rehab for a couple of years, I got hooked once more by Frank Miller's revolutionary re-working of Batman as a psychotic vigilante. That eventually gave way to another period of comic-lessness, then in the early Nineties, I was blown away by Dan Clowes' Eightball. After I kicked that filthy habit, I eschewed all graphic novels for a period of about 5 years, but last week that all changed.
I began stumbling across entries in various weblogs that talked about a radical reworking of Superman; they spoke of a retelling of the Superman myth that turned the Big Blue Boy Scout into the Big Red Comrade. Supes a damn Com'nist? Excellent! I hate him, always have; he's such a drag with all that Truth, Justice, and Amurrican Way crap. I clearly had to check this out.
So yesterday I toddled on over to our local Comic Book Guy store, picked up all 3 issues of Superman: Red Son, and read them in a single sitting last night (big deal, it's not like I was reading Tolstoy or anything).
I have to say that I was quite impressed by the way that author Mark Millar took all of Superman's attributes, his virtue, his power, his desire to serve humanity, and extended them all out to their logical conclusions.
You could view this story as a thinly-veiled swipe at America's relationship with the rest of the world, and that may indeed be one of the lesser analogies to be drawn, but you'd be missing out on the much bigger picture that Millar's trying to paint for us here...Superman is a god...a savior...and like all messiahs, humanity simultaneously loves him and hates him. Unlike the Christian God who is so often cursed for allowing evil to persist in our world, this is a deity who largely succeeds in correcting injustice, feeding the hungry, and curing the sick (albeit while doing so under the auspices of Soviet-style communism).
The irony is that despite his intervention in human affairs, which are always in the interest of the common good, he is still resisted and despised. By robbing humanity of its free will, he takes away our ability to choose; the net effect is a sort of moral ennui that stifles our ability to choose to do the right thing. I was put in mind of this very prescient quote by C.S. Lewis:
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
In summation, I found this to be an [ahem] revolutionary approach to a character that's been stale and dead to me for many, many years. It touched on some philisophical and spiritual themes that are very important to me and the way that I view the world. Most importantly, I was still thinking about it 5 minutes after I put down the final issue.
Oh, and Bats kicks Supe's ass again, so even without all the heavy stuff I just listed, I still would've bought it just for that.