Zeb Larson reviews Red One #2…
The U.S.S.R.’s top agent, Vera Yelnikov, is working undercover in 1977 Los Angeles as Alabama Jones, a.k.a. RED ONE, America’s greatest hero! Red One takes on her fiercest foe yet, the fascist serial killer THE CARPENTER, in a funky superhero romp by TERRY & RACHEL DODSON (Uncanny X-Men, Wonder Woman, Spider- Man, Harley Quinn) and XAVIER DORISON (Long John Silver, The Third Testament).
Well, after just two issues, Red One is going hiatus for 2015. This whole first arc comes off feeling very odd with limited characterization or even action, and the issues that were a problem for this book before are still a problem. I will be avoiding any spoilers in this review, so read on without concern.
Vera goes to work going after the Carpenter’s supporters, whom she easily proves to be more than a match for. She also slowly assimilates into American society and gets her mostly-unwilling landlord to accept her bad cooking and general awkwardness. Her leaders want her to break the Carpenter movement so that she can come home, and when she goes to a party of actors and pornographers, she’s given a chance to do so.
Better reviewers than myself astutely pointed out that the Soviet Union repressed its LGBT population, and it’s unlikely that a highly-trained operative would be wandering around ‘70s America openly talking about finding a woman to go home with. Yeah, it drives home the “fish out of water” aspect, except that this particular fish would never realistically be that open at home. It’s nice and progressive that Red One spends her time saving people from homophobic lynch mobs, but that doesn’t change the fact that her character is deeply and profoundly ahistorical. Also, it continues to break my suspension of disbelief that you have communist leaders, the vast majority of whom were in their ‘60s by 1977 and had very little contact with the outside world, referring to Bob Marley by name. The fact that this is recycled dialogue from the previous issue is not an endorsement of this issue.
Likewise, other reviewers also pointed out the sexism in the comic, which I had hoped would be improved in this issue. I held out hope that we would get what used to be a familiar Soviet critique of capitalism: that it produced sexualized women that prostitution was an inevitable outgrowth of the commodification of women under capitalism, etc. I’m not saying that any of these claims were true or that sexism didn’t exist in the Soviet Union (it did), but communists certainly made those claims. There’s none of that here, though. Are we confusing sexual liberation with hypersexuality? It certainly feels like it. We’re even being teased with the possibility of a sex scene involving Red One in a porno film, which feels voyeuristic.
Most problematic though are Vera’s motivations. The scene where she goes to the grocery store and marvels at all of the food is meant to be a joke, but in all seriousness, how the hell is Vera not asking questions? She’s clearly not a Marxist ideologue, nor does she appear to be an aggressive Russian nationalist. Why is she doing all of this? Just to smash fascists? Is the Soviet Union supposed to be a great champion of human rights now? I’m sorry, but that’s just too dramatic a revision of history to make sense.
Lastly, the continuation of this book and the new order is baffling. These two issues comprise Book 1, which is all that will be released in 2015. Book 2 will be released in 2016 with another two or three issues, which will be the sum total of that story arc. We’ve barely spent any time with the characters (who’s a character aside from Red One and debatably Lew?). It seems like it will be really difficult to sustain interest in the series, but maybe other people have adored the book. Regardless, this makes for a weird and off-putting cliffhanger.
Zeb Larson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnc360pUDRI&feature=player_embedded&list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5
Originally published April 29, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
