Imagine for a moment an alternative twist on the Superman mythology. What if the infant from Krypton had entered Earth’s atmosphere just a few hours earlier – and had landed not in Kansas, but in the Ukraine? And what if that prodigious alien child had been raised by collective farm workers whose values were at odds with “the American way”? How would the arrival of a superhuman being alter a supposedly egalitarian society, and how would it shift the Cold War stalemate of two military super-powers? Would utopian dreams and the power to impose them lead to massive state control?

Published in 2003 as a three-issue mini-series and soon to reappear as a deluxe hardcover volume, Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son delights in such reversals and the questions that arise. In a skewed nod to the 1940s animated series, a Soviet TV broadcast announces: “A strange visitor from another world who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands and who, as the champion of the common worker, fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact.”

Millar develops an intriguing premise with a story spanning geological time, fusing events and figures from real history with those of the comic book’s own. (Stalin figures prominently, as do Eisenhower, JFK, rogue Batmen, the suppression of free speech and anxieties over terrorism.) Millar’s inverted global scenario also features a not-so-United States, in which Georgia, Texas and Detroit are fighting for independence. In a suitably perverse manoeuvre, the fate of American capitalism – and liberty itself – hinges on a brilliant and amoral scientist named Lex Luthor, a man with presidential ambitions and an estranged wife named Lois. The obsessive and brutal Luthor must stop Soviet expansionism and avert the twilight of the West, armed only with a hand-written note and a piece of alien jewellery – found, naturally enough, in Roswell, New Mexico.

The influence of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is detectable in Millar’s neatly symmetrical conclusion, but Moore’s influence is particularly felt in how Millar suggests a superhuman being might inadvertently change his adoptive society and the broader geopolitical world. As Superman deals with an increasingly routine shipping disaster, the man of steel ponders his impact on those he protects: “Sometimes I wonder if Luthor and the Americans are right. Perhaps we do interfere with humanity too much. Nobody wears a seatbelt anymore. Ships have even stopped carrying lifejackets. I don’t like this unhealthy new way people are behaving…”

Millar’s book is in part an elaborate riff on Superman#300, in which the rocket from Krypton lands in neutral waters with both Soviet and American forces eager to claim its contents; but it’s also a character study, albeit one of an alien refugee from a long-dead world. (The book’s title is both a play on our hero’s Communist outlook and a reference to the cause of Krypton’s destruction.) The reversal of political backdrop and inversion of the familiar inevitably raises questions of nature and nurture, and throws into sharp relief both the contradictions of Communism and the comforting assumptions behind this all-American symbol. With its graphic hybrid of Soviet Expressionism and Fifties comic book styling, Red Son is an engaging yarn, and likely to reward long-time comic fans and newcomers alike.

Superman: Red Son is republished by DC on November 17th.

And we’re back, just about. While I get my bearings, here are two items featuring enhanced human anatomy.

First up is Japanese television’s Dogoo Girl with her deadly décolletage.

Posting will be light over the next few days. To ease your suffering, you could always poke about in the archives or rummage through the greatest hits. Oh, and if you missed them first time round, there’s always the deadly disembodied cat’s head and the exploding banana mask. I know. You’re missing me already.

The booze death calculator. // Bomb shelters of note. // Pig candy, bacon buttercrunch and maple bacon lollipops. (h/t. Mr Eugenides) // Carnivorous vegetation. // Sex and magnetic resonance. // Moscow’s sewage system. // Splashes and sound waves. // The evils of pan and scan. (h/t, Coudal) // Make your own Green Lantern power ring. // How Scientology looks to people who aren’t unhinged. (h/t, Dan) // The amazing Spider-Camel. It could happen, people. // A chart of time travel in film and TV. // Flying machines. // When flying machines stop flying. // And, via The Thin man, it’s the return of Ms Liz Brady. 

Germaine Greer shares her thoughts on the impending demise of Big Brother:

Let’s hope the final series has the Man himself dragged out of his hiding place, arraigned by the housemates who are the worse for the experience, and sentenced to condign punishment for perverting the nation’s taste. That I would watch.

Yes, of course, viewers must be the victims of unseen forces they cannot possibly comprehend. At least viewers of popular, commercial television. Viewers of, say, David Starkey programmes, not so much. But viewers of Big Brother? Their tastes have been perverted. Endemol and Channel 4 evidently took something of a risk by spending vast amounts of time and money on a programme for which no popular appetite could conceivably exist – not until the public had been suitably duped and perverted. And presumably Germaine knows this because she knows what popular taste ought to be. I’m sure there’s an irony in there somewhere.

Big Brother was one of those shows, as Friends was in its day, that young people watched in order to find out how to be themselves.

Did they, really? Is that what young people do? How does Germaine know this? Alas, she doesn’t say. She does, however, tell us:

Unfortunately what they learnt from Big Brother was that a girl who is plain or assertive is to be avoided. Any female who fails to hide the fact that she is more intelligent than the people around her is to be reviled. The feistiest girls are tossed out of the house, one by one, until only the meek are left. Of nine Big Brother winners, only three have been female, and that includes Nadia Almada (who had undergone gender reassignment only eight months before). Women get a far rougher ride from both housemates and viewers than do gay men, however waspish and over the top. Big Brother leaves us with a lasting impression that British misogyny is crueller and more pervasive than British homophobia.

This being the Guardian, nothing must divert Germaine from the obligatory victimhood hierarchy – it’s practically contractual – even if this requires some wild extrapolation. (Had the majority of winners been female, this could no doubt be construed as the result of some lascivious patriarchal gaze… and thus more damning evidence of pervasive oppression.) But wait a minute. Isn’t the Big Brother audience – and particularly the voting audience – disproportionately gay and disproportionately female? What then of the alleged homophobia and misogyny? And doesn’t the win by the plain, feisty and assertive Nadia Almada – in one of the series’ most rapturous and popular final nights – suggest something other than bigotry and hatred?

Despite Ms Greer’s own truncated appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, which she described as a “fascist prison,” and despite her grumblings about the series’ morally corrupting effects on those she considers “weaker than [herself],” the Guardian columnist saw fit to make subsequent paid appearances on Big Brother’s Little Brother and Big Brother’s Big Mouth.

Here’s Ms Greer in happier times.