Trade Tales! - Superman: Secret Identity

Next on the list of stories is one I’ve heard good things about. Superman: Secret Identity was a mini-series that was released in 2004. It's an Elseworlds while not actually being labelled as that. Kurt Busiek took inspiration from the Superboy of Earth-Prime to make this story. For those uninformed, Earth-Prime was supposed to be the real world and it had no superheroes except for “PRIME”. It was destroyed during Crisis on Infinite Earths.  Busiek’s story more or less asks what if the Crisis never happened and Clark kept on living on that world. I doubt he even knew that the character who I call “PRIME” for really no reason would come back the way he did.

I never really sought it out until a few months ago though. My thing about some stories is that if I see it and it’s really cheap, my curiosity monkey will start to itch.  That was how it was for this one.  Busiek, who wasn’t a stranger to comics, wrote all four issues. Reading this made me see why he was ultimately brought onto the Superman books a couple of years later. All of the artwork (pencils, inks, and even colors) were handled by Stuart Immonen. Immonen’s no stranger to comics nor Superman. He drew and even wrote the character for DC in the 1990’s.

Superman: Secret Identity

Writer: Kurt Busiek

Artist: Stuart Immonen

Letters: Todd Klein

Graphic Novels - Superman: Red Son

There is a place that sits beyond the normal DC Universe and it's only known to few... or many. It's a plane of existence where virtually anything can happen to our favorite characters. On one world, one single nail kept Kal-El from being raised by the Kents. In another world, we see a dark future where superhumans are running rampant and judgement is coming. In another, the Sentinel of Liberty meets the Dark Knight in World War 2. All of these worlds have something in common... they are known as Elseworlds.

By the way, yes, I like The Twilight Zone.

Welcome back to the Month of Superman where I will be looking at a miniseries from the 2000's called Superman: Red Son. It was printed under the Elseworlds imprint. If my description above didn't help you, Elseworlds were modern versions of "Imaginary Stories." They mostly stood alone and in their own timeline. I really own about a few of them like Kingdom Come, a Flash Annual, and this one. Anyway, back to this story. I watched the motion comic version of this story on YouTube a couple of years ago. Since it is an acclaimed story, I decided that this would be one I would look at here.

The writer for this book is someone we've seen before: Mark Millar. While he's known for things like Wanted and The Ultimates, he's not a stranger to Superman. He was a writer on Superman Adventures, a book that looked at the adventures of the animated Superman from the 90's. He was also one of the writers who pitched an idea called Superman 2000 back in 2000, I believe. The pencillers are Dave Johnson and Kilan Plunkett. Johnson is mostly known for his artwork on 100 Bullets and Plunkett is mostly known for  his work on Star Wars comics. The inkers are Andrew Robinson and Walden Wong. With all of that said, let's look at the man who stands for "Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact"... just give me a second to laugh at that.

When trying to write out a detailed synopsis, I realized something: this thing is dense. It may even be a little too dense to do a synopsis on, so I'll just do the main points and fill in some detail.