Gotta Admit I Like The Collar Commie Supes Is Sporting - Blog Posts

That comic is an online goof, but there is an actual official DC comic about a communist Superman. It’s called Superman: Red Son, and it’s one of those Elseworld “what-if” comics DC used to put out on occasion in the 1990s.

The basic premise is that baby Superman’s capsule crashes in one of the less ravaged parts of the Ukraine in the 1930s instead of Kansas, so Superman grows up as an ardent Marxist-Leninist. After doing the superhero thing for a few years, he becomes Stalin’s successor as general secretary in the early 1950s and makes it his mission to make the world a better place. By the middle of the 1960s almost the entire world is united under technocratic socialism, and America is a decaying hermit kingdom wracked by civil unrest and rapidly sinking into geopolitical and historical irrelevance. (Sadly, America ends up winning in the end, because of course it does.) This comic has gotten a fair bit of praise over the years, probably more than it deserves. Still, I have a soft spot for it, if only for the fact that it was the first superhero comic I ever bought, and one of the few I didn’t get rid of later. For something a little grittier, I’d highly recommend looking for The Winter Men, an obscure noir crime story set most in late Yeltsin-era Moscow and dealing with the fate of a number of Soviet-era superhero programs.