OK, for those who don’t know, Superman: Red Son was a graphic novel made last year. It’s a story that tells us what would have happened to Superman (and all the people he’s associated with) if his spaceship crashed in the Ukraine, not America, in the 1930’s, and thus, is a full grown man during the cold war era.
Now, what has me confused as all Hell is the ending.
Basically, at the end, we find out that the story is being told by Lex Luthor’s great, great, great, etc… grandson, and that the Luthor name is now super famous, akin to an elite class of citizens, who now just use the first letter of the last name, ‘l’. In this distant future, due to some catastrophic event of some kind, the Earth’s sun is dying. So, this distant relative of Luthor’s, after in vain trying to warn everyone the sun (now red) will blow up, manages to save one baby by placing it into a spacecraft. The relatives name? Yup…Jor-L. The son? Kal-L. The idea being that the resulting explosion of the sun causes a time rift of some kind that Kal-L goes into to wind up back on Earth in the 1930’s. Krypton winds up just being the far distant future Earth.
My question is this: is this normally part of Superman continuity? Or did they make it up for this one special graphic novel?
*Red Son * was one of the DC Elseworlds series – a string of graphic novels (and graphic novels that were originally miniseries, like Red Son) that take place outside the usual DC Comics continuity, for the purpose of exploring interesting new story permutations… usually involving “what if” scenarios involving the usual DC characters.
*Red Son * has nothing to do with the Superman you routinely see in the monthly series. For that matter, *Batman: The Dark Knight Returns * (and its sequel) are technically Elseworlds stories, due to the fact that they happen in an alternate possible future.
“Imaginary Stories” or “Worlds Of If” stuff dates back to the fifties and sixties, when editor Mort Weisinger encouraged writers to do them as an alternative to the usual stuff… “What if Superman finally married Lois Lane?” “What if Luthor finally managed to kill Superman?” and many others. The Elseworlds series started being published back in the eighties, with *Batman: Holy Terror * (aka “What if the U.S. was a Puritan Theocracy, and Bruce Wayne were to discover that the government had murdered his parents…?”)
I thought it was being narrated by Kal-L himself. Luthor had miscalculated, or did not realize that Kal’s powers increased over time, and the final trap failed. Kal was then able to give up the reigns of power, and live through all the ages to come, watching the House of Luthor create the earthly paradise.
I love alternative stories. Luthor’s answer to the question of his greatest achievement was perfect. BUT, I had a little trouble believing that Kal would grow up as morally straight as he did with Stalin as his sponsor…
One thing that kinda bothered me about the story (I’m not spoiling, cause it’s not a crucial plot point.)
Luthor created several “villians” from the normal DC universe, including Dommsday. How come Doomsday kills Supes in the normal universe, but not this one? In addition, I seem to remember a scene where Luthor send out ALL of the “villians” he created at once (well, recreations of them, that is.) Now, I’m willing to believe that he could have killed Doomsday and not died, but how in the Hell could he kill Doomsday AND every other major villian he ever faced that nearly killed him at the same time?
That’s my one beef, is that they seemed to imply (or say outright) that by being in Russia, he somehow was more powerful.
In regular DCU continuity, Supes is only thirty-ish. In this Elseworlds, Supes is, at the climax of the series, in his late 60s and a powerhouse with decades of experience behind him at near-pre-Crisis power levels. Also, he’s far more ruthless than our Supes (lobotomizing his enemies-- WTF!) as world dictator used to running over his opposition.
Superman died fighting Doomsday because all they did was stand around and punch each other to death. Stupid, stupid, stupid wasted opportunity! If you’re going to kill off Superman temporarily there were wwaaAAAaay more interesting ways to show those two powerhouses go at it, and at least a dozen ways Superman could have shut Doomsday down and still be alive if he were willing to kill from the get-go.
Because despite being a genius with all the resources of the United States behind him, Luthor could not build a counter-threat as powerful as Superman? His ersatz superbeings were defective in one way or another. He couldn’t even get Brainiac to shrink the right city to contain Kal-L.
I did like that the members of the Green Lantern Marine Corps contained a lot of familiar names, and be sure to check out the name tags on the scientists working to defend the US.
(I don’t have my copy handy, but I don’t recall seeing a Doomsday replica. I do remember that Bizarro was prominent.)