In short – this volume of ancillary documentation for Moore’s popular “League of Extraordinary Gentleman” series reads less like a comic book story and more like a collection of the ephemera and ancillary documentation Moore typically includes with each of his exemplary comics.  Included are 3-D glasses for a section riffing on the popular fiction of 1958; a “Compulsory Enjoy!” pornographic comic book from the oeuvre of Orwell; and even a clever “lost” Shakespeare play by the title “Faerie’s Fortune’s Founded.”  Fans of the ongoing series will find scattered bits of character development (most notably Allan Quatermain’s mysterious rejuvenation) that keeps the “League” series alive, but for the most part Moore treats this work like an intellectual playground. 

Having broadened his mandate from the original “Justice League of the 19th century,” with which he conceived the original League comics, Moore now envisions a universe of heroes drawn from all corners of Britain’s literary history (and some from other continents, as well): Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, and from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Prospero, the Duke of Milan.  Moore’s erudition fills the pages to bursting, and Kevin O’Neill’s artwork is evocative and, in places even unnervingly plain and severe.  But Moore’s talents better serve the generation of fresh stories and, to paraphrase a co-contributor to this blog, characters that seem like they existed even before he wrote about them.  Here, his stories only work as a thin scaffold for the volumes of entertaining, but sometimes Byzantine, back matter.

In any case, this reviewer eagerly awaits the League’s next volume, “Century.”

Consider the teenage superhero: underwhelming in looks, anxious, not too popular at school, and suddenly in receipt of fantastic powers with a bug-oriented theme – in response to which our man-boy alternately thrills in his new abilities and cringes under the weight of responsibility they convey.  He must grow into his powers while coping with the usual high-school urgencies of his day: class trips, for one thing, have a way of turning into run-ins with local super-villainy.  (When will these teachers learn not to take their kids to the spaceport?)  And, as is his narrative wont, our hero goes on to rendezvous with, fight, and eventually bond with some of the brighter stars of the comic-book universe in which he lives.

So while the teenage Peter Parker and Jaime Reyes, the third and newest Blue Beetle, may never get together to cram for the physics test, at first blush they seem like kindred spirits.  Both are given to occasional gnashing of the teeth over lost opportunities to save lives.  Both enjoy peppering their enemies with brain-numbing quips along with their knockout punches, although Jaime trips over his words while Peter Parker, as Spidey, never runs out of puns.  Both would love to know why, of all the young would-be superheroes in all the world, these powers had to come to them.

Superficial similarities (including the bug suits) aside, a contrast between the two turns out to be more profitable.  Recall “puny Parker’s” tortured secrecy, his giant unnecessary eyeglasses, his tie-and-vest combo, and his hopeless efforts to fit in at Midtown High.  His modern-day counterpart wears his hair in a casual shag, with a sprout of goatee on his chin; without a steady girlfriend, Jaime Reyes never questions his likability and manages to stumble into romantic connections without trying too hard.  Jaime’s super-heroics are not kept secret, but rather, fashioned into the center of his community.  Family, friends, and Internet acquaintances all know his “secret,” which he fairly rushes around the state of Texas trying to share with people who might help.  In contrast to Spider-Man, who was famously vilified by J. Jonah Jameson and whose closest super-friend might have been the snide, deprecating Human Torch, the Blue Beetle enjoys the respect and occasional attention of the entire DC Universe (which he ostensibly had a hand in saving during the events of “Infinite Crisis”), and even gets challenged by Superman to a friendly race in his spare time.  And while Parker was an unrepentant science nerd, Jaime Reyes appears to be nothing more than an average student — therefore escaping the awesome expository responsibility of inventing any part of his costume.

Looking at the enjoyable and fast-paced “Reach for the Stars,” the third volume in the chronicles of the new Blue Beetle, through the lens of the young Spider-Man yields several insights about the evolution of comics over the past forty-five years.  One finds that our contemporary protagonist isn’t all that different from anybody else — he is both less intellectually exceptional and less underprivileged than his 1963 counterpart.  “Different” heroes like Peter Parker, once seen by teenagers as more identifiable than forbidding icons like Batman, have given way to those with lives that actually resemble real ones.  Perhaps teenagers no longer want to read about a loser.  Or, more likely, perhaps today’s readers can best relate to a hero who has consumed the same popular culture they gorge themselves on.  Joss Whedon, whose “Buffy” could barely slay a vampire without referencing Scooby-Doo, might agree.

Also, the pressures of keeping a “secret identity” may have run their course as story fodder.  Today’s Beetle treats his powers as something that brings family and friends together, a lot like having an enormous new TV.  Since the responsibility accruing to the super-powered alien scarab can be more easily processed with a little help from his community, Jaime doesn’t waste much time hand-wringing, and he lacks the habit of filling giant thought-balloons with operatic self-pity.  (He also doesn’t tend to confront villains who speak only in dire exclamations, which would cripple anyone’s spur-of-the-moment wit.)  Jaime’s identity isn’t secret to his enemies, the alien invaders known as the Reach, either — and no, this doesn’t automatically result in tragedy to his family.  One might even say Jaime has enough respect for and trust in his parents to be honest with them about the dangers the family will face together.

On a broad level, this Blue Beetle collection largely consists of month-to-month storytelling, with sporadic appearances by villains like the Ultra-Humanite and Livewire in addition to an overarching story.  (Ten bonus points for working in Giganta, possibly my favorite villainess, and ten more for playing up her tendency to whine about fairness whenever she loses the upper hand.)  John Rogers’ writing, which manages to be knowing without straying into Whedon territory, has the same light touch of continuity that enlivened Spider-Man’s early days even as it satisfies the usual multi-issue storyline requirements.  Jaime’s team-up with Guy Gardner comes close to unforgettable, and Rogers renders the alien invaders as familiar and new at the same time — principally by granting them a sense of humor.  For this we might even be able to forgive Rogers, a Hollywood screenwriter, for working on Transformers.

And so the hapless yet charming teenage hero still gets out there to fight crime while dressed like a bug.  While the mold may have been set by Peter Parker, the spectacular Spider-Man, but Jaime Reyes, the intrepid beetle boy, breaks it.

(Note: The Blue Beetle has been recently demoted to “co-feature” status, popping out for brief adventures in the back pages of “Booster Gold.”  A character this promising, with a cast this fresh and complex, needs more than ten pages a month to thrive.)

Frankly, I think the comparison to Iron Fist (PS, bend over smart guy) is a little too, let’s say, facile.  Iron Fist — at least, the story arc in question — embarked on a pretty interesting, or at least ambitious, enrichment of the basic Iron Fist story, drawing up a colorful and intricate back story to the Iron Fist legend.  The arc had a nice beginning, middle and end, with some real stakes and interesting characters.  There were some twists — maybe not surprising or untelegraphed, but at least satisfying.  But I found particularly innovative the introduction of previous incarnations of the Iron Fist, particularly the guy who used Colt 45 pistols and had fought in World War I.  (By the by, was Brubaker the writer on that arc?  I thought it was someone else…) Anyhoo… it was a rich, dense story with goofy martial arts action.  Northlanders, on the other hand, was a lazy piece of crap.  It basically read like a successful movie pitch executed by a screenwriter who had cashed the check and really had no idea what story he was telling, other than the vaguely high-concept notion of Vikings who use modern slang.  There’s no real character development — Sven doesn’t seem to go through any development arc or maturation in the course of his adventures — and even his backstory in Constantinople feels superfluous.  Hell, even his reasons for leaving his life of luxury and hot, well-hygiened babes for this northern armpit of civilization are sketchy at best.  And too much of the story seemed to happen more for the author’s convenience than because of any narrative rationale — like the one about that Viking assassin making his way to Constantinople and back with the head of Sven’s girlfriend.  Really.  Like some Nordic hick isn’t going to stand out like a sore thumb in Constantinople, and is actually going to get close enough to this wealthy, assumedly powerful woman to cut her head off?  And as if the journey wouldn’t have taken a couple years at least.  And I take offense at the comparison to a spaghetti western — and by spaghetti western, I’m basically going to focus on the Clint Eastwood oeuvre, or even on the Japanese samurai movies that some of those are based.  Intrinsic to the appeal of those movies is the fact that the antihero/protagonist has no back story, or even a name.  The movies have a sketchy or inverted morality, and it’s this quality, contrasted with the traditionally resolute, virtuous American Western, that makes them resonate.  Northlanders doesn’t have any of that, and it’s not really playing against some established genre.  I don’t totally understand why, at the end, Sven unites the tribes against the Normans (or something, I don’t even really remember what happened), and then just takes off in a tiny boat with his pregnant wife.  I mean, what a great plan.  By the final scenes, Sven is looking somewhat infirm, while his son is still an infant, so I’m guessing he and his wife will die of old age or something by the time the kid is about eight, probably leaving him to die a slow death by starvation, after eating their corpses.  I think Brian Wood is a shitty writer with a talent for the provocative set-up: I disliked his DMZ series, basically an Escape from New York ripoff, for the same reasons.  Cool idea, bewilderingly inept follow-through.  Funny, the simple act of writing this review has made me hate Northlanders more than Iron Man — this comic didn’t even have the saving grace of Robert Downey Jr.

Some time ago I confessed to having read Ed Brubaker’s work on “Iron Fist” with no particular enjoyment. In reply, a wise and learned friend said, “What’s not to like?” (Actually, he also threatened to give me an “iron fisting,” but that’s not relevant here.) And now that I’ve finished reading “Northlanders” just a few days after he told me how little he liked it, I find myself coming back with a similarly flip and unfalsifiable reply.

“Northlanders” is nothing more and nothing less than a spaghetti Western masquerading as a Viking period piece. Here, the violence is served up on the point of a blade, rather than the barrel of a gun, but the other familiar elements are the same. Your hero: a grizzled loner with uncommon death-dealing skill. Your villain: a rich baron who “owns this town.” Draw seemingly clear moral choices and make a few vague gestures at complexity. Don’t stint on the busty frontier babes – er, naked women reclining on bearskin rugs. And use broad, slow takes (panels) to highlight the waning sun on the rough, lonely landscape.

 In “Northlanders,” writer Brian Wood seems to begin his work without a clear idea of where he might go. He introduces two marginally sympathetic female characters and all but tosses a coin to choose between them. He creates a villain, then winds up finding one of his henchmen more interesting. Similarly, Wood’s hero Sven is meant to be a vengeful pariah, but his character gets rather lost amid the gunplay (I mean, swordplay) until he makes a moral compromise that serves as this arc’s dramatic resolution. (Let’s try to ignore the profanity-laced dialogue, which might as well be cut from “Deadwood.”) Apart from the sense of narrative spontaneity, achieved as the story searches for an ending, Wood’s mild achievement in “Northlanders” relies heavily on his artist, Davide Gianfelice. His effortless landscapes and fierce, slashing action scenes carry the read, supporting its redundant action bits.

So then, in case it seems that I’ve said too much… how about “What’s not to like?”

A first look at “Justice,” with its high-falutin’ one-word title, high-profile Alex Ross art, and three highly-promotable trade paperbacks with matching, foil-stamped covers, reveals nothing so much as another comic book “event” release that may or may not live up to its billing. On its back cover, “Justice” features three press quotes, and each one duly touts Alex Ross’s painted artwork. (Ross has been an industry superstar since he teamed up with Mark Waid for “Kingdom Come” in the late 1990s.) His characters are thoroughly well-proportioned, dressed in believably rendered costumes and possessed of faces that are individually modeled. (It’s fun to examine these faces and to guess at which real-world celebrity might have provided the inspiration for each one. I’ll take a stab right now and say that John Stewart, the backup Green Lantern, was drawn to resemble Muhammad Ali. Luthor is easy: Telly Savalas.) However, in contrast to the critics I would argue that Ross’s artwork is not actually a selling point here. He’s a fantastic cover artist, naturally, but cover art and interior artwork differ in one important respect. The art filling individual comic book panels must appear to move. Ross is skilled at musculature, iconic poses, and faces with real superheroic grandeur, but his rich and detailed style makes smooth action storytelling difficult. Is it possible that simple pen-and-ink linework, with colors as flat and ordinary as those produced with an old-fashioned halftone screen, can generate a more dynamic, fluid and clearly rendered story than Ross’s paintings? Think back to Steve Ditko’s early work on Spider-Man: his complex fight sequences were so clear they could have been storyboards for an action movie. And with line work, an artist has the luxury of leaving out unnecessary elements; Ditko wasn’t afraid of blank space. By contrast, Ross and his penciller, Doug Braithwaite, have to complete each panel as if it were a Renaissance landscape, with every detail of the background carefully filled in. Is it any wonder that action sequences taking place against this welter of colors and shapes are so confusing and difficult to parse?

“Justice” is clearly written for readers who grew up on “Challenge of the Super Friends.” His Legion of Doom meets in an updated Hall of Doom, and each one of them is costumed just as they were in the 1970s cartoon. (Even Brainiac, who spends most of these 12 issues in a dignified white lab coat, eventually sheds it in favor of the pink long-sleeve polo tee and Speedo shorts, which always made him look like a pervert at the yacht club.) Some of the character designs receive much-needed updates: Toyman, for instance, is cleverly reworked as a giant robotic marionette, controlled remotely. To look at him, one can almost hear the simpering cackle of his 1970s animated counterpart. And the plot structure is familiar: the Super Friends (ahem, the Justice League) discovers that a Legion of Doom plot is afoot, makes an effort to stop it and is very nearly defeated — just before rallying to save the day. Written by Jim Krueger, the story is a bit attenuated; without quite enough plot to fill 12 issues, he relies on a few too many Alex Ross splash pages to retain reader interest. Aquaman is featured prominently, and readers may smirk as other characters marvel at how impressive he is. This tactic comes across as transparently cross-promotional, intended to shore up a piece of intellectual property that never quite took off the way it should have. Captain Marvel, and his “family” (including the black sheep, Black Adam) receive solid treatment; I’ve never quite figured out what makes Shazam’s facial features so distinctive, but here he is once again, as recognizable as your next-door neighbor. (After many years of disuse Captain Marvel, with his devastating yet self-compromising lightning attacks, may now be more interesting than Superman.)

As in every episode of “Challenge of the Super Friends,” the plot features a late rally in which our heroes make a clean sweep of their foes. “Justice” goes somewhat further than that, with several levels of betrayal within the Hall of Doom. Longtime comic book readers may look askance at the cover for the third issue, on which the Justice League appears wearing individually designed suits of armor. (Whoever told Batman that red, white and black was a good look for him should get what Naomi Wolf got when she dressed Al Gore in earth tones.) After all, aren’t new costume designs almost always a sales gimmick? Does anyone remember the Spider-Armor, from 1995, which of course needed to be featured on a foil-stamped cover of its own? Here, the need for the entire Justice League to suit up in armor reads as a bit shaky, story-wise, but it’s forgivable; Krueger works in several twists based on the armor device as the League cranks up their strategy game. At least (to my knowledge) the third-act armor designs didn’t result in a new fleet of “Justice” action figures, or an “Armored Plastic-Man” spin-off miniseries.

Overall, “Justice” is exactly as advertised on the back cover: a chance for jaded comic book readers to recapture a more innocent spirit. Krueger introduces the third volume candidly, stating outright that “Challenge of the Super Friends” inspired the work. Start from there and you’ll know very well what’s coming, and you may enjoy yourself more for having calibrated your expectations. As for Ross’s art, I’d rather he stick to covers and posters (or, for that matter, t-shirts featuring Obama as Superman).

This series, begun by Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely, works as a quasi-canonical companion piece to Alan Moore’s “Supreme.”  It utilizes Superman in the classic sense: invincible, dignified, and infallible, running off to the Fortress of Solitude to rest up and perform scientific experiments for the benefit of mankind, aided by robots built to resemble his friends and allies.  He comes complete with the bumbling Clark Kent persona, surreptitiously saving lives while making an ass of himself.  (There’s even an issue dedicated to Jimmy Olsen, which ends up partially redeeming this otherwise irritating character.)  As such, Morrison’s Superman pays homage to Christopher Reeve, to the classic Superman stories of the 1950s and 1960s, and even to his own work on DC One Million.  Perhaps nostalgia provides the greatest enjoyment here, as Alan Moore may have wrung more juice from the concept without even using Superman himself, but it’s still fun to watch him declare his secret identity to Lois Lane and interview Lex Luthor in jail as Clark Kent.  Morrison always goes in for overcomplication, and here he throws in multiple future versions of Superman (again, self-consciously referring to his own previous work).  As for the art, Frank Quitely’s characters look more like each other than anything else – is that Lex Luthor or Professor X? – and often carry themselves in a strange, fey manner.  Here, his backgrounds are largely blank and empty, which may be intended to suggest futurism but ends up recalling Rob Liefeld’s lack of imagination.  Overall, the first six issues of All Star Superman are a fairly straightforward evocation of the classic Superman mythos: pleasant, but a bit anodyne in the end.

Posted on behalf of Nurse Flowers:

“I’ve never really connected with Captain America. At best, he seemed something like Superman, a great iconic figure, but as a dramatic character, a bust. Like Superman, he seemed too constrained by his own myth, his own self-proclaimed identification with eternal, unchanging American virtues and values (and thus, an insistent and unchanging American self-regard) to be able to undergo the sort of dynamic transformations required of compelling drama. And in this election season, when the nature of America and the qualities that must be exhibited by “true Americans” are the issues at hand (combined with my first encounter with David Halberstam’s history of Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest), I found myself deliberating the significance of Captain America, and arriving at this conclusion: for all that Captain America is as mummified and irrelevant as our current political discourse, with all its discussion of “who loves America more,” Captain America is not dead. Rather, the true Captain America, in terms of being the embodiment of the national character, and its hopes and fears, is Garth Ennis’s Punisher.

It wasn’t always thus. The original Captain America, rolled out during the lead up to World War II, embodied the spirit of a can-do America, a country that was just beginning to awaken to the possibilities inherent in its extravagant labor force, wealth of natural resources, secure frontiers, and technological innovation. Just as the country was transformed from a quiet, unsophisticated, militarily weak society whose national identity had not yet been crystallized by the external pressures of war (both World War II and the Cold War against “global communism”) into that of a robust, nuclear-tipped superpower, so Steve Rogers was transformed from a spindly specimen rejected by the draft into a super soldier. Even so, the original Captain America, like the nation he served, was a somewhat reluctant warrior. Despite FDR’s efforts to nudge the nation into an alliance with the European allies against Germany, most of the country wanted nothing to do with it, and only with the attack on Pearl Harbor did America enter the war. So just as the country did not see itself as the aggressor, but was merely fighting to defend itself, so Captain America was initially armed only with a shield, a purely defensive tool. It’s interesting to note that as the country’s idea of itself evolved, from reluctant ally to global defender of freedom, willing to use its considerable power not only to defend, but to attack in order to forestall the need for defense, Cap’s shield evolved as well, first adopting a circular shape that allowed it to be used for offense as well as defense. And of course, in the latest version of Captain America, we find that the captain outfitted with a firearm as well as the traditional shield; just as with his country, the shift from to a primarily defensive to a primarily offensive identity, is complete.

However, while Captain America’s equipment has managed to reflect the nation’s true, increasingly aggressive character, the man himself and all he embodies is still, for all practical purposes, entombed in the ice. One can only speculate as to why the 1940s-era hero was thawed out in 1964, directly following Kennedy’s assassination and as the Vietnam War was beginning to gain momentum, but the timing at the very least encourages one to make a connection between the reintroduction of a hero from a simpler time, one who resolutely insists that the true America is one of liberty and justice for all, and the America then experienced by its citizens, a country preoccupied by Cold War paranoia, assassination, racism, and a policy of foreign military intervention against communism. Poor Captain America was plucked from his well-deserved rest, a reanimated artifact of a more noble America, a puppet superhero meant to reassure us that we were still who we said we were, still the America of Jefferson and Lincoln, when in fact, Steve Rogers’s very existence, the stilted, quaint tenor of his adventures and concerns, particularly against the backdrop of Vietnam and Watergate, only served to emphasize how remote his America truly was. And though some writers tried to capitalize on this tension in their storytelling, they were rarely successful, constrained as they were by the need to always resolve this tension in favor of Rogers’s fundamental faith in his country, a faith that became increasingly delusional and untenable the further we got from the high water mark of 1945.

Consider as well the circumstances of Captain America’s renaissance: for example, who was it that found and revived him? None other than Tony Stark, superhero and (more importantly) millionaire arms manufacturer, a living embodiment of the military-industrial complex. So of course, as war profiteers have done since the Civil War, Stark not only found a flag within which to wrap himself, he found the best of all possible flags, the human essence of America, the symbol not only of America but of her military rebirth. And in his lifestyle and adventures, Captain America continue to symbolize America — perhaps not the real thing, the one torn apart by race riots, CIA assassinations, and proxy wars, but certainly a very agreeable illusion. In Steve Rogers’s America, the superhero lives in a mansion (not for him the rent-scrounging of Peter Parker) and fights vague, abstract, but always (we are assured) highly menacing villains obsessed with world domination. More often than not, these villains come in the form of organizations, such as Hydra or AIM, much like the vague shadowy organized Communism that we were purportedly fighting in Vietnam, Latin America, China, and other places. Much like this so-called “global Communism” in which regional political differences were ignored in order to market the Communist threat as a coherent, organized, monolithic entity (as opposed to what it really was, a set of discrete political movements that had nothing to do with each other and were just as suspicious of each other as they were of us), the foes that Captain America faced generally presented global or national threats. Not for him the provincial villains, stuck in their cities, robbing their banks: Captain America’s adversaries generally presented a threat to our very existence, or at least to the country’s existence. Much like America itself, Cap’s job was to be out there making the whole world safe; he was a neocon before the term was coined, a global interventionist, jetting out with the rest of the Avengers while America itself fell apart, foreign policy taking precedence over domestic policy, the citizens of bankrupt 1980s New York resigned to watching Quinjets fly over Bryant Park, its junkies and prostitutes, wondering if one day Captain America will come save them too.”

To be continued…

I am currently reading a compilation of Alan Moore’s work at Wildstorm Comics, with characters like Spawn and WildC.A.T.S. (sic?).  Not much to say yet about the writing, which could still go either way, but I will say beyond a doubt that this is the worst-illustrated set of comics I’ve yet set eyes on.  It literally, and I actually mean literally, made me nauseated to look at.  The women have breasts that seem to depend from their collarbone areas.  Their waists appear to be about six inches in diameter.  The men’s muscles have overwhelmed their bodies to the point where they seem to have giant striated worms writhing beneath their skin.  And not only does everyone look alike, all their eyes are about four inches apart.

I like Alan Moore’s writing as much as you do, but this is the first time I’ve ever had to struggle through the art to read it.

I have to confess, I’m very disappointed in you for your recommendation of The Forsyte Saga — Jessica and I watched not only the first, but the second miniseries as well, and were dismayed to find, rather than a stirring tale of Victorian superheroics, a stirring tale of Victorian family dynamics. The production was nothing more than a series of missed opportunities. For instance, we meet the deliciously villainous Soames Forsyte, and eagerly anticipate his disfigurement (hopefully from a boiling lava pit) and subsequent adoption of an iron mask of some sort, but instead are treated to nothing more than a brilliantly restrained performance of facial twitches and barely repressed longing and self-loathing. And what of Irene? When brutalized by Soames, how could she not suddenly manifest amazing psychokinetic powers, and fling him across the room or make his head explode? Witnessing her quiet dignity in the face of such adversity was small compensation indeed for forgoing such an obvious and welcome plot point. Most cruel was the casting of Ioan Gruffud (Mr. Fantastic himself!) as a dashing young architect, who not once displayed the amazing powers of elasticity for which he is famous (making his death all the more incredible, I might add, as the audience is fully aware of the fact that he could’ve easily stretched his way out of danger!) All in all, a superb Victorian drama, but a really disappointing superhero epic.

(By the way, I’m starting the new semester tomorrow, so not sure how this will affect the frequency of my posts. I’m still working on my Captain America Master’s thesis)

Storytelling that aspires to the epic must always contend with the balance between scope and weight: increasing the breadth of a story tends to diminish its depth.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in DC’s Elseworlds series, and specifically in Superman: Red Son.  The series repeatedly asks the question “what if,” namely, what if such-and-such a superhero were to have grown up under different circumstances.  What if Superman, as an infant in his runaway spacecraft, had landed in the Ukraine and had become a tool and symbol of Mother Russia?  An excellent question, since Superman is so commonly affiliated with “the American Way.”  Take America out of Superman, and what do you get?

Except the Elseworlds series places demands on the story that nearly prevent it from answering this question.  Apparently, in much the manner of Watchmen – where the appearance of Dr. Manhattan and his actual super powers caused American technology, and thus the forces of history, to change direction – an Elseworlds story requires that other characters must also be present, and must appear in a correspondingly different form.  Each Elseworlds story to follow this model seems obligated to present not only one character’s counterfactual history, but an alternative history of the entire DC universe.  Why else would Batman arise as a proletariat terrorist in Soviet Russia, as he does in Red Son?  Superman’s presence in Metropolis had nothing to do with the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents in Gotham City.  Wonder Woman shows up as well, only to end up mysteriously subject to the ravages of age, in a way that requires nothing particularly unique to a Soviet Superman.  Red Son posits that one change – an extra half-rotation of the earth, as one character puts it, resulting in baby Kal-El’s crash-landing in Russia – must result in these many others, and this guiding principle smells of a fanboy-oriented editorial hand.  (Naturally, not every alternate origin is unwelcome: Mark Millar’s depiction of Hal Jordan’s incredible willpower is the best explication of what it means to be strong enough in determination and resolve to join the Green Lantern Corps.)

Apart from this, Red Son also suffers from a have-it-all ending that takes the story even farther from its original concept.  The conflict between America’s gradually balding genius Lex Luthor and Russia’s Superman is strong, consistent and amusing, but when the reader is asked to believe that Lex and Superman planned their entire conflict together, as a way of uniting the planet under good government, Red Son goes utterly off-planet.  It’s a double twist ending: first, the claptrap about the forty-year Lex/Superman collaboration, also echoing Adrian Veidt’s secret plan in Watchmen; second, the fliparound retelling of Superman’s humble origins, in which a descendant of Luthor sends his infant son back in time in addition to across the universe.   This second twist ending would have been sufficient to undergird the story’s strong Lex/Superman dynamic, without applying the contortions of the first twist, or requiring so much suspension of disbelief.

Overall, the question of breadth versus depth in Red Son shows its weaknesses: unnecessary secondary character development and an overcomplicated ending to justify its loose storytelling.  A stronger version of the same story might follow Superman as a young man, growing up on agricultural land in Communist Russia, attracting political attention, and being put to cynical use as a symbol of the state.  As Elseworlds titles go, the only one to truly fulfill its promises of an alternate history is Gotham by Gaslight, in which Batman arises in the late 19th century and winds up locked into pursuit of Jack the Ripper.  In that tale, history and character merged to create something new.  Red Son could have accomplished the same by highlighting the differences in Superman’s character inculcated by a Soviet upbringing, rather than representing him as substantially the same person and requiring him to carry the weight of an overly broad storyline.