Bleeding Fiction

I have a deep and abiding love of Communism. Not the practice, of course; Communism in practice has been a terrible, totalitatian thing responsible, at least in part, for some of the worst offenses of the twentieth century. It's not even the theory behind Communism that I love. While the spirit of societal responsibility that Socialism theoretically engenders is something that I value and try (in some way) to cling to, I have a deep and abiding mistrust of the mass of humanity that prevents me from really being comfortable with the idea of Marx's proletariat as a means of accomplishing anything. In other words, nothing worthwhile has ever been accomplished by a committee.

So, given that I pretty much hate people, you'd think that Communism wouldn't appeal to me at all. And yet it gets me on a visceral level, enough that an old friend once told me that I was "too much of a Socialist to be any good at Monopoly." Certainly I'd have done my mother's father proud. He was, literally, a card-carrying member of the American Communist party, in an age when that sort of thing could get you in a lot of trouble with certain people. He was a labor organizer in the Jimmy Hoffa tradition and he sat on the Board of Aldermen of the city in which he lived.

But there has to be more to this than family tradition, especially as my grandfather died before I was born. What, then? I've wracked my brains trying to come up with something, and the best I can figure is I love the visuals. There's something visceral about the huge swaths of bright red, something powerful in the square outlines, almost block-cuts, of men steadfastly at their labors. I am interested, I guess, in the iconography that surrounds the proletariat. It's an iconography that's thick indeed, the very core of Marxist philosophy built up and sold to a people whole-cloth as a social platform. It had to manifest itself in art, or else it would have died as it was being born. Communism had to create for itself a visual mythology, and I love mythology.

So it was with no surprise that, along with my afore-mentioned book on Soviet political posters, I snatched up two books that come close to the core of the Communist mythology: two comic books. Comic books are, in many ways, our modern mythology. It's not an accident that the greatest heroes of the DC Universe map fairly perfectly over the Greek gods. The mythology of Communism is vastly different, but no less familiar, and in the two comic books I bought that mythology gets explored in different ways.

First is Red Star, a fairly straight-forward mythologising of the history of Soviet Russia. The first collection recounts the Soviet Union's long, old war to sieze Afghanistan and Russia's current problems with Chechnyan seperatists - a fight I still don't know enough about to feel comfortable commenting on - all through the eyes of an unlikely group of heroes who, of course, represent something of a Communist ideal (the proud soldier, the strong engineer, etc.). Throw magi-tech, spirit beings and spiffy computer-generated images into the mix and you get a book that's both visually and creatively stunning.

The second book is Red Son, which takes one of the ultimate American myths - Superman - and asks what the world would be like if his ship had landed in a farm not in Kansas but in the Ukraine. What if Superman didn't stand for Truth, Justice and the American way but instead stood for Stalin, Socialism and the Warsaw Pact? This book I've yet to read, but from all I've heard it should live up to expectations.

So, with these books in hand I continue my love affair with Soviet art and Communist mythology. It's a strange sort of itch and I'm outlining a writing project now (of course) to help me scratch it. But it's one that won't see the light of day for a long, long time. Very back burner. But it's fun to dream.