Superman: Red Son finally arrives! I’ve been waiting for this book a long time, as have many of you. So I raced over to Fourth Rail and was a bit offended by Randy Lander’s review, specifically this sentence:

While we all wait anxiously for the next issue of The Ultimates, DC has given readers the first issue of the long-rumored Superman: Red Son, an Elseworlds that sounds like a potentially cliched “What if Superman were a Russkie?” but instead winds up as a pretty interesting character study, and one of those things only a non-American (or someone on the extreme left of American politics) would ever dare to write, where the communist character isn’t evil by default.

[Yes, that was all one sentence.]

For your information, Randy, Americans all over the political spectrum have known that the average Russian was not “evil”. Indeed, I would say those on my side of the aisle were more concerned for the suffering of the average Russkie while those on the “extreme left” (that you consider so fair-minded) were contending that sacrifices must be made for The Great Experiment. (About 25 million “sacrifices” either executed, exiled to wastelands or forced to starve, according to The Black Book of Communism.)

Well, much to the surprise of people like Randy, I’m looking forward to this book. It is interesting that Superman maintains his moral code, although to contend otherwise would be to say that he couldn’t find moral adoptive parents in Russia. (He could, I’m sure. Plenty of moral people in Russia.) Unless he is raised entirely by the state, in which case “who knows?”. But there was a four-issue prestige mini-series a few years ago called “Superman / Wonder Woman: Whom Gods Destroy” that took place in a reality where the Nazis won…and Superman was a good man in that world, too.

The big question about Red Son, at least for me: does it say anything about the atrocities in the U.S.S.R., or is the Cold War simply a grudge match in the eyes of Mark Millar?

Enough of this. I’m going to go find something fun to talk about. (See? This is why I haven’t visited Fourth Rail since Randy’s astoundingly wrong-headed rant about the war that caused me to put him in the Dixie Chicks doghouse.)

[Please note that this has been corrected from earlier today when I misattributed the article to Fourth Rail’s other columnist, Don McPherson, whose reviews I’ll still read. Many apologies to Don. I hadn’t noticed that I had clicked on a Randy article.]