so in the original story, world’s finest 192-193, clark flies to Lubania (a fake communist eastern european country, because this was published during the Cold War) to help with a disaster, but ends up depowered and captured by the country’s evil dictator and put in a concentration camp along with batman, who had come by to rescue him. they are starved and put through various interrogations and tortures, and eventually escape by secretly switching places so that bruce sleeps in clark’s kryptonite-irradiated cell, allowing clark to recover and eventually bust them out.
in Superman Red and Blue, john ridley takes this already-whumpy original story and remixes it.
in it, an older clark returns to a post-communist lubania for the first time, ostensibly to interview one of its wealthiest entrepreneurs, but in reality to face his own fears and unaddressed trauma from his original time there. In this story, there was no batman to keep him company- clark endured everything alone.
the wealthy entrepreneur he came to interview turns out to be koslov himself- rehabilitated and made filthy rich in the aftermath of the fall of communism. clark sits down at a restaurant with the man who tortured him, did “things” to him - a man who has no idea who he is - and asks him whether or not he feels remorse.
in the end, clark muses on whether to run his story- an exposé on Koslov’s exploitative labor practices- despite fearing no one would care about it. Koslov himself was able to rise to power, to torture clark, because no one cared, or was brave enough, to stand against him. but clark makes the decision to publish it, because he - Superman - will always care. And in this way, decades later, he makes his own stand against Koslov.
and that’s the story of lubania- how clark was depowered, put into a death camp, starved, tortured, and heavily implied to have been sexually assaulted every day for eight months. and then went back years later to look his demon in the face, because the exposé he was writing, if it helped even one person, was worth reliving one of the worst events of his life. because Superman cares.
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