WildStorm have spent the last couple of months relaunching their core titles, but their line still includes the sort of oddball superhero titles we've come to expect from them.

Red Menace is a miniseries from the unlikely three-man writing team of Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo and Adam Brody.  Bilson and DeMeo were the co-creators of the Flash TV show (which I've never seen).  Adam Brody is in The OC, alongside Rachel Bilson, whose father is Danny Bilson - presumably the same one.  It's all terribly incestuous.

The year is 1953 and McCarthyism is in full swing.  But this is a superhero world, and so superheroes are being asked to reveal their identities to the government, while unlicensed vigilantes are being shut down.  The acclaimed hero Eagle complies, only to find himself facing ever more unreasonable requests, and stuck on the same side as a government who'll cheerfully hire supervillains simply because they aren't Commies.  Other heroes won't comply, and go rogue.

Is this sounding at all familiar?

Yes, that's right, it's Civil War: The McCarthy Years.  But the contrast in styles is interesting.  Stylistically, this is somewhere between Marvel's mega-crossover and WildStorm's recent American Way.  In Civil War, Mark Millar is really just using some topical ideas as a handy backdrop for a series of cool explosions.  It nominally has a theme, in much the same way that Hollywood action films have a story that's nominally about something.  But really, it's just about the coolness factor.

Red Menace, on the other hand, actually wants to say something about the idea.  It's not saying anything terribly novel - the anti-Communist witchhunts are a bad thing, and good men were dragged down by them.  But in a climate where people are actually debating the most basic civil liberties as if they were somehow open to question, these points are worth revisiting.  Bluntly, McCarthyism is what happens when you claim that the incredible dangers of the unprecedented new world justify throwing the rule book out of the window.  People need reminded.

With Jerry Ordway on art and a calm, unadventurous narrative, this reads as a very conservative story, but also an interesting glimpse of what Civil War might have looked like if they'd done it properly.  (In this version, of course, Captain America plays along with the government.  And then gets screwed for it.  Isn't that more interesting, really?)

Books like this tend to sell abysmally - there's very little market for superhero books featuring new characters, especially so when they're created solely for the purposes of one mildly political story.  In itself, this a good story rather than a great one.  It doesn't seem to be saying anything about McCarthyism that you haven't heard before, and chances are that it'll sell almost exclusively to people who already agree with it anyway.  But it's a good, solid piece of craftsmanship, that has the discipline to follow through properly on its ideas rather than go for the cheap thrills.  As a contrast with Civil War, it offers a definite frisson. 

Somewhere out there, there's a parallel universe where Astro City was the most influential comic of the 1990s, and in that universe, Civil War probably reads like this.

Rating: B+

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