Welcome

So a long time ago (the mid-1990s), the greatest writer in comics agreed to take over the writing duties for Image Comics' Supreme. He would radically reshape the character, the book, and due to forces beyond his control, a whole comic book universe. And it led to an award-winning run of comics, three additional titles (among several proposed) and ultimately led to the genesis of Moore's much better known America's Best Comics. And then it all went out of print and was forgotten by way too many.

Having gathered quite a bit of information about Moore's Supreme and Awesome runs, I decided to create a home for the forgotten Awesome. Over the course of a year, I put it all together here.

Each week I did a main "Weekly Reading" post that was a read-through of that issue. I followed that up with a couple of other posts about topics from that Weekly Reading or whatever else I came up with to talk about. You'll find the lost Youngbloods in the Youngblood section and the fan-edit of the last Supreme in After Awesome.

Below is the archive of posts broken up by book. Thanks for checking the site out!

Book 1: Supreme: The Story of the Year

Book 1: Judgment Day

Book 3: Supreme: The Return

Book 4: Youngblood

Book 5: Glory

Book 6: After Awesome

Book 7: 1963

Book 8: Night Raven

Book 9: A Small Killing

Monday, July 31, 2017

Weekly Reading: Supreme #47

Supreme #47

Published by Maximum Press in March 1997


The cover:


Title: The Finest of all possible Worlds

(As always: Supreme is currently out of print. There are a number of ways to read it, which can be found on the How do I read Moore's Awesome works page.)

We've got another great issue this week, which launches off an important three-part tale. Not only do we get to meet the Batman analog for the Awesome Universe, we also get our first taste of Idea Space, the metaphysical underpinning for the entire universe.

Before we get too far, we need to sort out the latest tangle of the modern-story artists. We have J. Morrigan returning and J.J. Bennett (whoever he is) from issue 45 back, working together. That's a lot of Js! At least one of them must have stood for jumbled, right?

The issue starts with a wonderful little scene as some bank robbers find themselves confronted by the returned-to-action Suprema and Radar. When the bank robber threatens to kill "this bitch," Radar replies: "Then you are a bad pup. Did your dame and sire not train you in obedience? Also, that is a lady, not a bitch, and I should know. My mother was a bitch."

Why there was never a Radar miniseries, I'll never know. This pup is gold.

And then there's Suprema, who doesn't take lightly to swearing at all: "Language like that isn't big, it isn't clever, and it isn't funny! It's just immature!"

Do you think Moore was commenting on the state of writing for comics in the 1990s?

The Maid of Might makes short work of the bank robbers and we learn that Ethan has gone off to Star City to look for something. That being Kendal Manor and it's residents, Taylor and Linda Kendal along with their manservant Pratap. Only Pratap seems to be at home, until he takes Ethan through the Sinking Salon (a whole room that descends like an elevator) to the Halls of Night, where they find Taylor and Linda in a state of suspended animation. The Kendals are in their costumes as Professor Night and Twilight, the girl marvel.

We get to see another trophy room (always appreciated), but few signs big enough to read, so we see a cane and a giant shoe and several owls, which is a bit of a symbol for Professor Night. And several statues I can't place. Maybe the annotations will have more ideas.

Pratap tells Ethan that Professor Night and Twilight had been visiting the Fisherman and Skipper in early 1970 when they returned agitated and later collapsed. Pratap doesn't think it was Professor Night's rogues Jack-a-Dandy, Fakeface or Evening Primrose. Pratap can't think who would have done it, but he's glad Taylor's friend Ethan is here to help.

Then we get our Rick Veitch flashback: The Turnabout Trap of the Terrible Two! It's a story of Supreme with Professor Night and Twilight "Together in one story!" This is a play on the World's Finest series at DC, which featured stories of Superman and Batman (and Robin) teaming up, many drawn by Dick Sprang (keep all juvenile jokes about his name to yourself). Batman would often get superpowers so he wasn't overshadowed by Superman, and they often fought the team of Lex Luther and the Joker.

In our story Star City criminal Jack-a-Dandy, who seems to be a British dandy sort of gentleman villain maybe along the lines of the Penguin, meets up with Darius Dax, who has come up with a transferratron that can help rid both of them of their superhero problems. The device can swap the life energies of one person for another. Dax proposes using this on the heroes, which would leave Supreme powerless and Prof. Night unable to control his newfound powers. They agree to challenge the heroes.

When the heroes show up they find the villains. ">Gasp!< Our most deadly Foes!" says Professor Night in a way that only could work in a Rick Veitch flashback. The villains reverse the heroes life forces and as expected, Supreme bounces powerlessly off the villains' truck, while Professor Night goes bounding into the sky, uncontrollably.

Twilight quickly takes charge of the situation, driving the villains off and getting the heroes back to the Halls of Night in the Night-Wagon. Thanks to Rick Veitch, we actually get to see more of the Halls of Night, including the giant shoe, killer oysters used by the Walrus and the Carpenter, a hypnotic music box confiscated from Evening Primrose and false countenances sloughed off by Fake Face. You can see a nice pinup of the Halls of Night on Rick Veitch's blog. How did DC comics forget that fans actually enjoy this stuff?

Twilight consults the Night Files. Supreme is impressed by, "your ultra-modern computer that can deliver dozens of facts within minutes." Nothing like a good computer joke, eh Alan?

She deduces that Jack left a clue in a list of Star City businesses, namely the Knave & Toff Gentlemen's Magazine: "A knave is the same as a jack, while toff is another word for dandy." And she's got a plan for how to confront the villains, despite the heroes' weaknesses.

Soon the heroes are bursting into the gentlemen's magazine headquarters, with it's oversized whisky bottle and dice. But Supreme has his strength and invulnerability back. So Dax switches them again, but they reveal that it was just Supreme dressed up as Professor Night and Professor Night dyed his hair white to fool the villains.

What's great is that this is completely ridiculous. Only in comics would heroes look and sound alike so as not to fool the villains. And Professor Night just revealed his face. But instead, what we get is Dax saying, ">Gasp!< They tricked us!" It works because it's ridiculous, but it isn't played for laughs. It lets the readers laugh without it feeling forced. It's hard to write retro comedy like that because it's such a fine line, but Moore and Veitch nail it.

Meanwhile, Twilight gets on the transferratron and switches the lifeforces of Dax and Jack, leaving one's brain bursting with schemes and the other feeling bored and in the need of a manicure.

One thing I want to note before we get back to the modern story is how much I like the plucky character Moore developed in Twilight. I know she's basically just a girl Robin, but she comes up with the plan and she switches the villains. She's smart and capable, and that's something we'll see more of from her as we get into Youngblood. It's telling that two of the best characters in this universe are women who were originally created and treated as sidekicks.

Back to the modern story. Supreme goes to the Citadel to get his ideo-spatial imaging helmet - basically, a helmet that lets him enter the unreal realms of his imaginary zoo. While there, S-1 tells him that the prism world of Amalynth has reported that Billy Friday ticked off Szazs, the sprite supreme, and has been transported to the ninth dimension. The journey of Billy Friday will be a nice little running joke for a while.

Supreme returns to the Halls of Night and uses the helmet to enter imaginary space to try to enter Professor Night's mind space. First he leaves his own individual consciousness, littered with the images of ideas that make up his mind. He presses on into the communal space, with archetypes and cultural symbols before finding the dual mind of Professor Night/Taylor Kendal.

Inside he finds the landscape created by Taylor's psyche, including the doctors who told him he suffered Porphyria's Complaint - forcing him to avoid daylight. He moves on to Taylor's emotions, seeing those he loves and those he fears before getting to Taylor's soul, where all he finds is a symbol. But one he recognizes.

Just a note, this is our first look at Idea Space, a Moore concept that he actually believes in. But there's a lot to it, so I'll save that for another post this week.

Supreme sees the Night Files left open for the last 30 years and finds the file for Hulver Damik, the slaver of souls. (Gosh Supreme, why didn't you look there first?) Damik was a foe of the 1960s group The Allies, who would steal souls to sell.

Ethan, in his apartment, calls Diana to tell her that he might not be able to work with her on the Omniman comic script for a while, because he has some friends who dropped by. Those friends are The Allies (Glory, Mighty Man, Die Hard, Roman and Super Patriot), wondering what Supreme has in store for them now.

But we'll have to find out about The Allies next week.

In the continuing misadventures in Awesome promotions, in the back pages of this issue, we find our first advertisement for the upcoming Judgment Day three(ish)-issue series:


If you look, it lists two issues: Omega and Final Judgment. What it doesn't list is the first issue of the series, the one numbered Alpha. Why did Awesome's publicity people only advertise issues two and three?

Guys, I think this might be a bad omen.

Anyway, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for all of the details that I completely missed.

Friday, July 28, 2017

Moore on Supreme 41-46

I came across this interview a while back. I used some of it to talk about Moore's ideas for Supreme and when Moore was talking about his WildStorm series that would eventually become the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But in the full interview, Moore also outlined his plans for the first twelve issues of Supreme, going into detail on his first six, so I'm reprinting it all here. If for some reason anyone has a problem with me reprinting it here, please just let me know and I'll remove it.

MOORE IS ALWAYS BETTER

by Joseph P. Rybandt


SUPERMAN VERSUS SUPREME: ROUND ONE

Since the inception of Supreme, or any other-worldly do-gooder for that matter, comparisons have been made to Superman. This is an idea that Moore is not backing away from, "The way I figure it, there's an archetypal superhero that is probably mostly built around Superman, the big guy in the cape basically. I guess Supreme was intended to be Image's version of Superman done right." This notion of Superman was part of the appeal to put some much needed zip into the character, "Superman himself seems to have been a bit lost for a number of years, it's not the character I remember. What made the character appealing to me seems to have been stripped away in a tide of revisionism. Given that I was somebody who sort of helped bring in the trend of revisionism in comics, I've got to take some of the blame for that. But it seems to me that there might have been a case of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater with the original Superman."

With Supreme, Moore is looking back to what Superman was to him, pure wonder and awe. "What it was with Superman was the incredible range of imagination on display with that original character. A lot of those concepts that were attached to Superman, which may seem corny and dated now, were wonderful at the time. The idea of the Bottled City of Kandor, Krypto the Superdog, Bizarro, all of it. These are fantastic ideas, and it was that which kept me going back each month to Superman when I was ten. I wanted to find out more about this incredible world with all of these fascinating details."

Flash forward to 1996 and enter Supreme, "What I decided to do was recreate that sense of richness, something that had the same range and splendor as the original Superman mythos." Moore is not here to retell old Superman stories, but to start something new. "In the original Superman mythology you had Brainiac, who was wandering around shrinking cities and saving them in bottles for no apparent purpose, other than some sort of collector mania. [With Supreme] we have a villain called Optilux who transforms whole worlds into a form of coherent light which he stores in prisms. He's on almost a religious mission to transform everything material in the universe into light. It's reminiscent of the Brainiac concept, but there's something different to it. There's perhaps more of a chance for poetry with it."

THE FIRST TWELVE ISSUES

As of right now, Alan is planning on doing twelve issues of Supreme, but he hinted to me that there could be more. He also assured me that fans of Supreme will get a whole new look at the character. "These first twelve issues will mainly be a retelling of the revised history of Supreme. Once you've read them, you will know everything about every aspect of Supreme's past." In order to do this, Alan will be using a great deal of flashback to set up the story. "Each of the issues features a story done in the style of the period that we're talking about. For example, in my second issue, there's two flashback stories: a 1940s retelling of the origin of Supreme, and a kind of 60s Superboy-type of story, featuring a group not entirely dissimilar to the early Legion of Superheroes. So you've got two 8-page stories along with the overall 24-page story, which features Supreme in the present day. We've got these nostalgic flashback stories running parallel. The two are interwoven in ways that won't become apparent until the end of my 12-issue run, when I start to pull some of the facts together."

As for the issues themselves, here's a quick look at the first six from the fantastically wonderful mind of Alan Moore:
  • SUPREME #41: "My first issue sets it all up and introduces us to The Supremacy, which is sort of like Krypton, Asgard, and Oa [planet of the Guardians from Green Lantern]. It serves those functions."
  • SUPREME #42: "We visit Littlehaven, the small town where Supreme grew up in the 1930s as Kid Supreme. In this issue, we introduce the League of Infinity, who are a group of young superheroes from different time periods."
  • SUPREME #43: "Here we find out what happened to the Citadel Supreme, which is the Supreme headquarters. It's a gigantic techno-island in a permanent storm cloud. We have this adventure where he revisits the Citadel Supreme."
  • SUPREME #44: "We look at the Allied Supermen of America that Supreme, along with Glory and a few other Extreme characters, belonged to in the 1940s. I created about a half-dozen new members for the group, because if you've got something like the Justice Society, you've got to have about fifteen members."
  • SUPREME #45: "We deal with the 1950s and Supremium, which is this strange, white mineral that has got a lot to do with the whole concept of Supreme."
  • SUPREME #46: "The re-introduction of Suprema, not that she's ever been introduced before, but we re-introduce her anyway. She's a female Supreme, and she'll be interesting."
I think it's safe to say that this whole thing is going to be pretty interesting and a whole lot of fun. Alan takes the challenge of Supreme very seriously, "I'm trying to be straight as possible. Not a hint of parody. There's humorous stuff in there, but I want to do it absolutely straight."

ALAN'S RELATIONSHIP WITH IMAGE

Contrary to what some may believe, Alan's continuing work with Image is not just for the money. While talking with Alan, the sense that he's doing this for the better of the industry is prevalent. Alan echoes this feeling with his own words, "At least for the foreseeable future, superhero comics will probably dominate the comic book marketplace. They will be mainly for kids around the thirteen-year-old bracket. As more of those kids want more superhero books, they'll get superhero books. It would be better however, if those superhero books had more content, more charm. So while I'm not claiming it's my mission from God or anything, if I can attempt work that does try to reintroduce elements that I think are important to superhero comics, in the current Image style, that would satisfy me." Of course the money doesn't hurt either, "The money that comes from WildC.A.T.S or Supreme, that's very handy. It's useful to have a source of income that enables me to carry on doing the projects that are dearest to my heart like From Hell, Lost Girls, the CDs that I'm doing; the more obscure and marginal projects, which is where my real interests lie."