I cannot say that I vouch for the work of Mark Millar these days. He used to be brilliant, though perhaps his brilliance might have been a stroke of stupid luck more than it was an inspired act of great comic writing. I admire his work on Fantastic Four, with artist Bryan Hitch, and while understandably polarizing, I still consider Civil War one of the last great event comics that Marvel has given us in recent years. However, I cannot forgive Millar when he is at his worst (Kick-Ass) or when his frank vulgarity takes center stage and shakes the audience with its offensive storytelling (Kick-Ass 2), to a point where I feel like Millar has no clue how to write dark, sensitive content that resonates. There are some comic book writers who can turn the extreme into the clandestine; Warren Ellis, Joe Casey, even Neil Gaiman at times. Millar is not one of them. Perhaps there is something I am missing from his work, though I like to think that Millar’s interests in the art of comic writing has taken a back seat to his marketability, above everything else.

I tried to follow Millar’s independent work with Image Comics because it was here where I was seeing him at his most inventive. Books like Huck and Jupiter’s Legacy are not extraordinary, but carry with it a lot of idealism born from his repertoire as a comic book reader. It was around the second, or third, issue of his series Reborn (with artist Greg Capullo) that I became weary of his writing approach. I was growing tired from spending four dollars on an issue with less than four panels a page and very little characterization to carry the book forward and what angered me so much was that the books themselves felt lazy, uninspired, and with little to no heart. Not to mention, these books have some exceptional talent to carry them to greatness: Sean Gordon Murphy on Chrononauts, Capullo on Reborn, Rafael Albuquerqe on Huck, J.G. Jones on Wanted, with so many other artists that should draw me into their pages with their work but do nothing to make an impact on me as a reader. For the life of me, I cannot see myself ever giving a single crap about Sharkey or whatever the hell Space Bandits is, because they exist only to be made into Netflix series and feature films that promote the “Millarverse” and all of its mediocre concepts that quickly become abandoned after a single trade paperback is released. I learned about this by reading an editorial in the back of an issue of Reborn, where an open letter to the reader announced the state of his brand and how it was essentially more important to use comics as a marketing ploy to promote movie ideas. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that he is doing well as a creator. But something feels wrong to me about making comics just so they’ll become movies. Yes, they are both a visual medium, but comics work on a much more interpersonal level with its audience than a movie does, because it is being read and to be read is to become literature. Reading should feel personal. It is the most personal artform on our planet. But sometimes it doesn’t feel personal. Sometimes, it just feels hollow and this is what happens when you write your stories with little to no character, when you write your stories just to fill in space before a production company picks it up and decides to do all of the hard work in hopes of making a movie that’s just a little more interesting than its source material.

Believe it or not, Millar used to know how to write books that felt personal. Of all of the brilliant moments in his short Fantastic Four run, one of my favorites is when Reed meets with an imprisoned Doom; both acknowledging one other in a beautiful two-page spread.

Millar, Mark (w). Hitch, Bryan (a). “Requiem”. The Fantastic Four. Vol 1, issue 562. Marvel Comics. 2008. Web.

Only someone who cares about the Fantastic Four could conjure an image that immense. Nothing else needs to be said in that moment because we know, as readers, as fans, the history between the two characters and that history is felt in that little exchange. This was a writer who knew how the comic book medium worked, how it could be used to evoke ideas and sensations in a way that no other artform could. This also leads me to believe that Millar is better at writing superheroes more than he is with anything else because superheroes have an engrained archetypical blueprint to work off of. We can see this in his independent work with books like Superior, Jupiter’s Legacy and—much to my disdain—Kick-Ass which certainly helped in popularizing the deconstructionist view of superheroes as normal, everyday people. We might even look at something like Huck and search for the parallels that might be drawn between the titular character and Clark Kent: a farm boy with extraordinary abilities who mainly tries to keep a low profile. Of course, this is to be expected as Millar has had plenty of experience writing for superhero comics before, but all have been lost in obscurity, apart from one book in particular: a seminal stroke of genius that disseminated his entire writing career and his comprehension of character… until it too was turned into a movie.

Superman: Red Son continues to be one of my favorite Superman stories ever; its exceptional depth and plotting are so thought-provoking and beautifully crafted that it remains one of the best examples of a what if scenario. Yet the concept alone, even as an Elseworld story, is actually rather simple: What if Superman had landed in Soviet Ukraine instead of rural Kansas? Such a synopsis might provoke images of totalitarian war mongering equal to Freedom Fighters, or the obvious being Nineteen Eight-four, and the design of the book itself might certainly allude to this, however the book is actually quite mature in its approach; it waivers the pros and cons of the participating political parties and imagines a realistic narrative that never sacrifices the moralistic integrity of its characters for the density of its storytelling. We can still see Superman acting like Superman: saving people and protecting the innocent, even when they aren’t a part of his community. There’s a lovely scene where he saves a woman and a young boy (along with his balloon) from a plummeting Daily Planet ornament: “Not my people… but I never refuse a cry for help.” So much of the character remains intact, even when he is playing for the other team, so to speak. Apart from a minute lack of compassion there is nothing that separates the Clark Kent of Kansas from the Superman of the Soviet Union. He’s a man of the people; he’s civilized and looks out for his common man as much as he does his country which—to me—was always one of the magical aspects of Superman as a character. I hesitate to say that I grow despondent towards the title that is often attributed to Superman’s character; a harbinger for truth, justice and the American way. A man who can fly around the planet multiple times in a single moment is reserved as an accreditation to American belief, exclusively? I always imagined Superman (really, any superhero) to have a greater heart than to neglect the world outside of the United States and I honestly felt that there was something radical in the assimilation of Superman as a part of another society. It’s even more brilliant when you consider Superman’s history as war propaganda (please see the cover of Superman #18 for an example), because now it makes Superman inclusive. Where he was once exclusive to the American ideal, he can be seen as a Russian symbol just as easily. Plus, he still has his compassion, as he spares the life of the American Superman clone (this world’s version of a Bizarro), even while the people of Moscow tell him to kill the creature.

Evidently, Millar liked the idea of Superman as a socially flexible character as well and incorporated as much of a humanistic presence in the Soviet Superman as he could, though to be fair, all of the characters are written beautifully here. Just as Superman continues to remain Superman, Lex Luthor continues to act as Lex Luthor and Lois Lane continues to act as Lois Lane, though her loyalties lie within the egotism of Luthor as a flawed, but noble, hero of humanity who is destined to change the world. I love that the dynamic between Superman and Lex is one of mutual, if not somewhat critical, appreciation; making trade deals whilst inventing new ways to take down the other if they step out of line. Still, Luthor remains the self-centered, self-righteous leader while Superman’s concerns lie with protecting his people. It’s also not really worth mentioning, but I’ll mention it anyway: the chess motif is brilliant. It defines Luthor and Supes as men of strategy and that the real battle is not fought with fists and heat-vision, but in the arena of the mind. There’s a brilliant understanding of the socialist ideology here as well: Superman does not feel he is above any of Russia’s citizens, yet he still sees it as his responsibility to rescue them as the more capable being. At one point in the narrative, he stops two trains from colliding whilst wearing overalls and a collared shirt; a brilliant visual that calls back to the farm boy origin we are so used to seeing and a grand expression of how Superman is one of us, just with special abilities. Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern make an appearance as well, but it is in a tasteful way: they never steer the attention from the core narrative and this doesn’t become just another Batman book, this is Superman’s story and Millar holds to that paradigm.

Unfortunately, like almost all of Millar’s properties at this point… Red Son eventually got a movie adaptation. The DC Animated Movie, Superman: Red Son, is not good. It’s not the worst thing you will ever watch, but… it’s not good. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised by this, but with the incredible work done on Death of Superman and Reign of the Supermen, I really wanted to believe that this would turn out well enough to at least re-visit every so often. So much falls flat within the first twenty-five minutes of film that it’s kind of incredible: the animation is choppy and sluggish with visuals that try to reach that middle point between the basic post-Flashpoint Paradox design and the original Dave Johnson illustrations but a majority of the time, the settings lack so much texture. Johnson’s style follows in the steps of Kubert (pick one) and only implements definition when necessary; the color and the shadow do the rest of the work, appearing positively noir when not lit up in the day. He’s simple in his layouts, but grand in his reinvented iconography. Every so often, he’ll break the mold to give us a collage image, but it’s a simple style overall. Meanwhile, the film seems to draw a bit from Bruce Timm, with a more geometric shape to the characters’ physiology. I don’t mind this, but the backgrounds are boring and the movements felt cheap and stuttered with the mouths being the most distracting feature; almost as if the dubbing was off somehow. Perhaps one of the greatest issues the film has is that it is primarily stuck in two locations: Metropolis and Moscow. To this end, we don’t really get to see much of how the people are reacting to a communist Superman outside of some key players like Wonder Woman, who is now a man-hating centrist, and Batman who remains a revenge-seeker hoping to defeat Superman for not saving his parents from the Gulag fast enough—a slight diversion from the book, but an understandable one.

Speaking of the Gulag, Superman discovers his childhood friend, Lana Lazerenko, in the Gulag along with a bunch of other prisoners, and confronts Stalin about it before killing him. This does not happen in the book and feels completely out of character for Superman, even as a soviet, to do. Millar kept the relationship between Stalin and Superman close, certainly to promote the humanistic aspect of Superman and his altruism; Stalin was often seen as a brutal tyrant, but apparently even Superman could be friends with him if they reached a common ground. Granted, later when Stalin is poisoned and killed, the culprit is taken to be executed off-page, but I’d like to think that Superman had a sense of what it meant to have one’s father being murdered and, thus, sympathized with Pyotr’s choice to execute his father’s killer. Not to mention, there was a clearly established relationship between Supes and Stalin in the book: “Besides, is there another woman in all the world who could… ah… keep up with our wonderful man of steel?” It isn’t a product of a corrupted ruler that pushes Superman to become leader, but rather a sense of urgency and responsibility that draws him to his role. In the movie, he and Stalin share two scenes before Superman lasers him to ash. Further still is the connection between he and Luthor, who hardly share a word with Superman until the ending climax where the reprogrammed Brainiac decides to turn on Superman because it was his plan all along to be captured, apparently.

The voice-acting is forgettable. We are not blessed with Rainn Wilson as Lex Luthor this time around, though Diedrich Bader isn’t awful. Jason Isaacs, on the other hand, is laughable as our lead with a heavy genuflection in his annunciation, born from the leftovers of Tim Curry. Meanwhile, the script—penned by famous scribe J. M. DeMatteis—is what you come to expect from a film like this: innuendoes and intense violence date the film worse than the actual book and lose all sense of what the characters even stood for while the medium shift negates all opportunity for psychological depth to take precedence, such as Superman’s self-doubt as a politician and as a man of the people, “Perhaps he looked into my eyes and glimpsed a future that he couldn’t bear to see, choosing instead to spare himself the suffering,” or the complicated relationship that he and Luthor shared with one another. Nor are we able to see the poignant ending where Luthor’s later generations continue to thrive until his great family tree branches to his later offspring, Jor-L, who saves his son from a dying earth by launching him back in time, to Soviet Ukraine. How ironic is it, then, that Luthor’s greatest threat, his greatest obstacle, was himself all along (rather, it was the last of his family line, but you get the point)? It’s poetic, really; because in this way Luthor becomes the hero, he gives the world a savior in himself and takes on the form of an adversary in order for that legacy to become real. The film does not end this way, instead the story ends in the wake of Superman’s death (he pushes Brainiac’s ship into the far edge of the solar system before is self-destructs, a plan devised by Luthor to some extent), during the re-election of Lex Luthor as president of the United States. Honestly, it’s a fitting spot to end on. Amidst the half-handed chess references, the weird unwarranted silent moments, the spotty character writing. It only makes sense that the film would end here. It at the very least does not try to force the depth of its ending, it ends on a seemingly happy note where all things are wrapped up nicely.

I’m not incredibly disappointed by this film. That’s the beauty of having an animated film adaptation; if we’re honest with ourselves here, straight-to-video animated films are usually a safe bet because if it flops, it flops. There’s no harm, no foul. But this does not mean that one can lazily resort to making animated films and I would hope that director Sam Liu and J. M. DeMatteis went into this project hoping to pay off a car payment, or something because they are surely better than this. That being said, if there’s any way to make an adaptation of a Mark Millar comic, surely it’s by making it in the tired and wasteful style of a Mark Millar book. I have to repeat myself here: I’m happy that he is doing well as a creator. But one’s complacency can result in a tired output of uninspired content that does not challenge the genre or the creator. It is my belief that this is what happened with the film adaptation of Superman: Red Son. With the success of their recent animated features, the DC animated universe is falling into a comfortable mold; one that does not challenge or promote anything new beyond bringing popular well-known story arcs to a television screen. This is the way of the MCU and I do not wish to see these animated films fall into the same formulaic outcrop of cash-grabbing blockbuster media. Hopefully, the forthcoming Justice League Dark: Apokolips War will set DC animation back on track with regards to quality entertainment. As for Millar, I continue to wish him the best from one writer to another. But I also want him to grow, because if there’s anything that any community of artists can justify, it is that being an artist is a process of never-ending growth. When you grow complacent, you cannot grow; you become sedentary, and when you become sedentary, you become forgotten. But when you make an effort to break out of those restrictive bonds and invent something that lasts, something that people can connect with deeply on a personal level… you come up with something like Superman: Red Son.

Millar, Mark (w). Johnson, Dave (a). Superman: Red Son. DC Comics. 2004. Print.