Superman Red & Blue Special Is Great, But It Shows Us the MCU’s Biggest Crime

Superman Red & Blue 2025 Special is a wonderful, heartwarming one-shot comic that features several stories following the Man of Steel, all with a color palette of red and blue. The stories all focus on different points in Superman’s life, from the average day when Jon was still a baby, to being interviewed by a small town’s only reporter, to working late into the night on a breaking story on his and Lois’s anniversary. Instead of the usual action-focused comics, these stories focus on the human aspects of the Man of Tomorrow, and while they are definitely worth a read for that alone, they also give us a glimpse into what could be a very big problem for all Superman comics that starts with the DCU.

The first story, “Priceless,” saw Superman go on a quest to get the bail required to free Supergirl and Krypto from jail on an alien planet. While a ton of fun and very sweet, every character in this adventure acted much more like their counterparts in James Gunn’s Superman than their comic versions. There’s nothing wrong with having a special where they act like that, especially since the movie just released this summer, but it does make fans worried that DC might fall into Marvel’s biggest crime: movie synergy. 

The Dangers of Movie Synergy

Obviously, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is extremely popular and practically defined pop culture in the 2010s. The MCU reached an audience comics never had, and a huge part of that is how characters and storylines were adapted for film. Some characters made the transition with little differences, but others had to have their entire personality and backstory overhauled to make the jump. This isn’t a bad thing, as concessions are expected in moving between mediums, but it became one when Marvel let the popularity of the MCU affect the comics.

Read Next

Superman’s Oldest Lost Story Was Actually Supposed to Be His Best (And It Would Have Changed Everything)

The best way to illustrate this phenomenon is with an example, and the best person to look to is Star-Lord. Originally, Peter Quill was a far more serious, Flash Gordon-like character. He was a cynical, hardboiled man who was willing to make sacrifices that nobody else was to save the day, and often made people question whether he was a hero at all. In the MCU, however, he was a wisecracking space cowboy who literally saved the galaxy with a dance-off. Whether you prefer one interpretation of the character over the other is not the point. What’s important here is that Star-Lord’s original character was completely gutted and changed to match his MCU counterpart.

Fans of the old Star-Lord character have a legitimate claim to be angry at this change, and he was far from the only one to be altered. Captain America and Bucky’s relationship was shifted from a father-son or older and younger brother dynamic to an equal, brothers-in-arms type relationship. The X-Men are the biggest losers, considering Marvel spent practically the entire decade tearing them down since Fox had the movie rights for the team. The mutants are still picking themselves out of the gutter that they were shoved into, and let’s not even get into the disastrous changes Miss Marvel was put through to match her MCU debut.

Movie Synergy Chokes Comics

Whether characters are improved by movie synergy or not, fans of the character are forced to watch them be changed into something that barely even resembles the hero they loved, and that never feels good. It risks alienating the very people who should be the movie’s most ardent supporters and creates divides in the fandom over which interpretation is better. The last thing comic book fans need is more reasons to be at each other’s throats. A decent number of comic book characters have suffered from movie synergy, and that makes it essential that the DCU avoid it at all costs.

The DCU changed certain aspects of some characters, playing up Supergirl’s party-girl personality and making Krypto into a little menace, which is not a bad thing. However, to ensure that they do not repeat the same mistakes that still haunt the MCU and Marvel Comics to this day, DC should make sure it keeps its comic and movie versions of characters separate. For everyone’s sake. 

Superman Red & Blue 2025 Special is on sale now!

What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!