I am not a Superman fan; I have been fairly clear about this. No flaws, no conflicts, no ambiguities, not a single trait that makes me relate to or root for him. Every time he’s facing down a “bad guy,” it’s inevitably some poor shlub who’s just trying to take over Cleveland like you or me; during the climactic face-off, I end up thinking, “Jesus, I just hope he doesn’t hurt the guy too bad.” But of course he doesn’t, because if he did, that would be interesting.

Even Superman, though, even Superman has a good story in him if you know where to look, and it turns out the key to that story is simply taking everything I dislike about the character, just everything essential to the character that is already there, and illuminating it by putting it in another context. Mark Millar, who is currently writing Marvel’s “Civil War” and who normally is no huge hero of mine himself, wrote this story back in 2003. I still smile when I think about it today.
By now, everyone knows the essential Superman story: in the pages of Action Comics back in the thirties, smug alien prettyboy Kal-El’s spaceship crash lands on a patch of Kansas farmland, where he is rescued by the simple, aw-shucks Kents and taught the immutable values of Truth, Justice, and most importantly the American Way. (I believe Superman spent more than a few issues early in his career kicking the s*** out of mortal Japanese soldiers with a big, perfectly-aligned grin on his face.)

Superman: Red Son asks, what if Kal-El’s spaceship had arrived a few hours later in the earth’s rotation and crashed in the middle of a Ukranian collective farm in the USSR? I think it would go something like this:

Tell me, if you dare, that that’s not the greatest f***ing picture of Superman you’ve ever seen. Superman, the Champion of the Worker! “Fighting for Stalin, Socialism, and the Warsaw Pact”! He opposes everything the American Way stands for, yet in many ways he’s the same ol’ Superman; it’s just that, in this context, his noble super-acts suddenly seem vaguely creepy and menacing. It flips everything on its head. (Actually, I imagine it makes everything look a lot like what every other country in the world sees when they look at the normal Superman, assuming that “American Way” part’s been getting translated.)

It even handles Superman’s “villains” in an interesting fashion. It asks, exactly what would be so wrong about wanting to destroy Superman? Isn’t Superman scary as hell? In a world where Superman is Stalin’s right-hand man, Lex Luthor is on the Kennedy administration’s payroll, heading up a kind of cape-killing equivalent of the space race. That is the stuff.
I’m not saying it’s necessarily a great book, but it is a great Superman book. The author has a fondness for some stuff that’s ludicrous even in the context of a flying god-man story; Mark Millar, faced with a choice between grounded and wacky, will often do a running headbutt into wacky before you even have a chance to finish telling him what his choices are. But it works, dammit. Amazon (or my bookshelf) will do you right if you’re really curious. Or you could just take my word for it.