Terry Dodson’s art occupies a space between cartoon and cheesecake. His men are muscled and smirking, his woman curvy with cheshire smiles. With his inking wife Rachel adding a slick, bold line on all of his figures his work is positively animated. That makes him a tremendous artist for a prior gig on Wonder Woman, but strange fit for some of the more grounded Marvel titles he’s graced, like Uncanny X-Men and portions of last year’s event flop Axis.
What Dodson hasn’t done much of is creator-owned work – and, why would he with the time restrictions of an artist who is in demand for Marvel’s highest-paying projects!
Yet, here his is, collaborating with French author Xavier Dorison. Together they’re penning a Communist superhero invading America in the late 70s to preserve its hedonism, a take surely inspired by The Americans.
How did it hold up?
Red One, Vol. 1 – Welcome To America 
Written by Xavier Dorison with art by Terry and Rachel Dodson
#140char review: Red One is a misguided mis-mash of 70s-worship and Cold War fetishizing, supposing the commies would win if we stayed Hedonists. Disjointed.
CK Says: Skip It
There’s a very interesting premise here: The Cold War served the ruling class of Russia as much as that of America, and the best way to extend that was to make sure America was a land of increasingly liberal hedonists. What if America was suddenly gripped by an evangelical vigilantism that threatened to plunge the country into a conservative movement bordering on Neo-Fascism? What if Russia was willing to send in their best agent – Black Widow under another name – to disrupt the trend?
If you think that sounds like an amazing concept, you’re not alone – I think so, too! However, Red One never quite gets there. Xavier Dorison’s script and his direction of Terry Dodson’s animated panel work is disjointed, with word balloons that don’t quite make sense and actions that don’t quite track from panel to panel. What should be a rich mythology winds up a flimsy plot that barely keeps the pages turning in this outlandishly oversized tome – it’s the size of a 70s magazine, like the old format of Rolling Stone.
The size serves Dodson’s artwork well. It is bold and beautiful, with Rachel Dodson using a seemingly-slimmer line on her inks. Maybe that’s the size of the format, or Dodson handling his own colors (which are beautiful). Yet, even this beautiful oversized format has some flaws, among them mis-sized letter balloons and badly fit words – completely uncharacteristic of super-pro Clayton Cowles.
The true problem here might not be bad storytelling, but a flawed premise. While setting this book forty years ago gives it a chance to play in a historical context predating the dissolution of the USSR, the present day would be a better fit for the thematic context. A few touches of same sex relationships, sex-positive attitudes, and polyamory come off as lurid rather than thoughful. Even if you can make the leap to root for the Russian disruptors and against the cultish, prudish anti-hero The Carpenter (yeah, really, it’s that subtle), there’s the implication that Russia likes all this hedonism because it’s bad for America. That puts a oily film over all of it, even though Red One is weirdly okay with it all (because it totally makes sense that Russia’s top agent, trained for 21 years of her quarter century of life, would actually be a total party animal).
I don’t mean this to come off as some form of thought-policing. Your superhero book can be about the downfalls of redefinition of morality and still be good. The problem here is that there is just no nuance to Red One’s chauffeuring of a famous porn director while beating up Neo-Cons on her breaks.
Red One is the boring cartoon fairytales The Americans might tell their children before bed, and not one you should spend your time reading unless you are a prohibitive Terry Dodson fan.