Growing up my favorite hero boy was Batman, but its getting really hard to appreciate a character whos main premise is “I’m a billionaire that beats up poor people in a capitalist hellscape because I don’t have a healthy way to deal with my personal trauma”.
Is there any saving him or is there a version of batman that can exist inside of a left narrative? Maybe there’s an existing comic that has tackled this problem, but I’m not really deep into the…ahem…literature.
Yeah the Red Son comics are such a great premise, but absolutely ruined by American anticommunist brain worms.
I honestly don’t know how you would write “Red Son” without anticommunist brainworms, since Superman is a litteral Great Man who can reshape society at a whim, and the people have no serious way to stop him. If you wanted to write a superman story about him being a weapon for the USSR and used for the liberation of Mankind, that would be fun for like a minute, but wouldn’t really allow for any conflict, since, again, Superman is for all intents and purposes a God.
Modern Superman is pretty explicit that Supes doesn’t really have loyalty to the US Government, he just believes in “the American Way”, ie liberal freedoms. There’s one story in particular where Superman rescues a North Korean submarine from sinking, and Americans get pissed off at him, so he has to try and explain that he values all human lives and doesn’t put stock in who the government’s current enemies are. If I did a Superman in the USSR story, it would be like that - Superman is raised as a socialist and believes in the international project, but while he would defend the USSR from capitalist aggression he wouldn’t let himself be used as a “weapon” by it.