Superman: Stalinism, repression and the Soviet way
Saturday, March 24, 2001

Edinburgh: Imagine a world where great American heroes are turned on their heads. The probe that brought Superman to Earth from Krypton does not land in Kansas. It drops on a Russian collective farm in 1938. Superman is brought up by peasants and believes in the five-year plan.

He is no longer the all-American champion, but a Stalinist who sends dissenters to the gulag. Batman, by the way, is an international terrorist.

The Incredible Hulk? Too soft: he gets a crew cut, tattoos and a couple of pitbulls to beef up his image. Captain America? Too Wasp: he should be black. This scenario is coming to a comic shop near you.

The impetus behind this corruption of wholesome US culture is a man who works on an industrial estate in Coatbridge - a corner of Lanarkshire, in Scotland, where cultural trends more commonly encompass sectarianism and Buckfast, a cheap fortified wine.

Marvel, the biggest comic publisher in the United States, has just employed Mark Millar, a Scottish comic book writer, to reinvent its superheroes.

Since he began writing storylines professionally more than a decade ago, Millar, 31, has forged a reputation for the unconventional, even within the subversive world of comics - he created the first gay superheroes - and the Christian Right is going to go to town.

"The Superman thing is due out in July, but it has already incurred the wrath of middle America," Millar says, delightedly. "Pat Buchanan [the right-wing politician] says he's disgusted by it."

"Superman is such a simple story - everyone knows what he represents - so I decided to turn it on its head: make Superman a communist, turn Batman into a kind of IRA terrorist and make Wonderwoman a right slapper."

In July, Millar will begin reinventing the key players in Marvel's stable of more than 3,500 characters.

"All I'm trying to do is write superhero comics for the South Park generation, the 21st-century version of things your dad read," he says.

From the moment he bought comics for an older brother too embarrassed to get them himself, Millar knew what he wanted to do.

"I remember going to my careers officer and saying I wanted to be a comic book writer and her saying, 'Shut up', and 'Here's a nice wee Youth Training Scheme'.

"I think comics are the last untouched medium, the last place where you can get away with murder; you can do stuff you would never get away with in films."

Curiously, for a man who is looking forward to being condemned by every right-wing and quasi-religious figure in the US, Millar is a committed Catholic.

He is a lay minister and serves the Eucharist every Sunday. "It gives me a moral framework, which I think is redolent of superhero comics: they're all about morality. Jesus is the first superhero, really."

On SMH.com.au, from The Guardian