Weekly Reading: Supreme #48

Supreme #48

Published by Maximum Press in May 1997

The cover:

Title: Just Imagine...

(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.)

Welcome to the last issue of Supreme under the Maximum imprint. Starting with issue 49, things get a whole lot more Awesome. This is a great issue for a lot of reasons, but let's get some of the housekeeping out of the way first.

We get a new modern artist this month in Mark Pajarillo. He had worked on some Image titles before this and would go on to work for DC for a bit before leaving the comics industry altogether to go into video game graphics. He's capable enough in this issue and has a few moments of real beauty, though maybe not for long, as we'll see later. Anyway, let's dig in.

We start with the first-person perspective of Glory as she flies to the Citadel and is greeted by one of the suprematons, who escorts her to the gathering of others. There, she finds Supreme, Mighty Man, Super Patriot, Die Hard and Roman, as Supreme is suggesting that The Allies reform to take on Hulver Ramik in order to rescue the souls of Twilight and Professor Night (as we learned last issue).

[As a side note, Moore didn't create The Allies. The Allies first showed up in Youngblood Strikefile #1, but the team only consisted of Die Hard, Glory and Super-Patriot. Later, Supreme was added (as seen in Supreme Glory Days)  and also Battlestone... but he was more just a government operative. Later, Roman was added as well. They planned an Image series to be written by Swamp Thing creator Len Wein, as see from the ad below...

 

...but it never came out. But leave it to Moore to turn them into a full-on Justice League analog. Thanks to Rob Messick and Derek Mont-Ros for the info.]

There are some nice little jokes and details in here, like that Glory flies by riding air currents and that Roman regrets having a mercave lair with a seashell throne. There's also some weird little bits with Super Patriot, who we can see electronically plugged in at one point, and Die Hard, who says, "When you suggested this mission back in Omegaopolis, I was skeptical. Now I feel almost a simulation of enthusiasm." So that's two of them that are cyborgs. Well, it was the '90s.

They then remember their first case from 1960, years after disbanding the Allied Supermen of America, when they battled Florax, a dominating space plant! And then we get our first Rick Veitch flashback...

...but not really. What we get is the cover, an obvious play off of The Brave and the Bold #28 (the first appearance of the Justice League of America), who battled the mind-controlling starfish, Starro!

In the Awesome Universe, The Allies were able to defeat Florax thanks to Space Hunter (a character we haven't met yet). And then we're back to the modern story.

I love this device for quickly flashing back to various points in the group's history. Moore and Veitch couldn't have gotten away with this in the first few issues of their run on Supreme, but now that we understand more about Supreme, his history and how the flashbacks work, they're able to create this shorthand and have the audience understand what's happening.

I remember the covers adding to the debate among fans about whether the characters realize they're comic book characters or not. However, the way that they talk about those flashbacks suggest that it's only the audience who realizes that they're referring to old issues and they just remember it as their pasts. Anyway, I'll look at more of these covers in a post later this week.

The gathered heroes don Supreme's headsets and prepare to enter thought space. The suprematons explain that they will keep a watch on things and report that Billy Friday has been rescued by Emerpus, the reverse Supreme, and is now in the backwards zone. What seems like a running gag will pay off, just wait.

And then the heroes enter idea space. I talked about the importance of idea space in a post last week, so I'll try not to repeat myself here, but I love this image of them entering the realm of thought. The strange mix of space and logos and faces, with the use of negative space is really alien, yet beautiful.

 

As Supreme explains, this is the local neighborhood of mind-space, focused on advertisements and celebrities. As Super Patriot says, "Almost like cyberspace." And yeah, if you thought of how a comic book illustrator might draw cyberspace, this doesn't seem far off.

They head through the area dealing with language, reasoning and numbers and then into a stormy area representing emotions. Super Patriot wonders why he doesn't remember this from when they faced Hulver Ramik before, which Supreme explains that they were pulled straight to Ramik's realm. There's a nice joke about Glory keeping the minutes to their old adventures (because Wonder Woman was initially just the secretary of her old team) that leads to another flashback.

These flashbacks are stuffed with bits of meta humor. I love how the casebook title is the same as the story's title. And Glory complaining about how she always used to get bound up in the 1960s. Anyway, we learn Ramik is a soul slaver, who sells souls to the highest bidder.

And now the heroes are swimming through the realm of archetypes and symbols, where we see plenty of religious symbolism. This is where many of the ideas in Supreme's mythopoeic zoo come from. But they're not the only creatures living here, as the heroes are attacked by some H.P. Lovecraft-inspired old thing. As Supreme explains, there is no time in idea space, so things come from the past, present and future to intermix.

And that brings up a time travel flashback from when The Allies met the Allied Supermen of America (a riff on Justice League of America 21, when the Justice League and the Justice Society met for the first time and proved so popular, they kept meeting).

Back to Idea Space, they find a cloud that starts to mess with their thoughts. They manage to push through the defensive barrier to find a hidden prison of souls of all the missing heroes. There's Professor Night, Twilight, Space Hunter, Janet Planet, Blake Baron - Occult Agent, Polyman, the Stormbirds, the Conquerors of the Uncanny, Jungle Jack Flynn, and the Fisherman, a forgotten member of The Allies.

Flashback to when he joined. The Fisherman was a wealthy playboy and angling champion who took to capturing criminals with his sidekick, Skipper. While an obvious play on the Green Arrow, Moore's love of the ridiculous silver age may have gone too far with the concept of the Fisherman.

The heroes head in to attack Ramik and his mercenary prison guards, but not until we get another flashback. The attack goes well, which infuriates Ramik, as he's just about to sell the superhero souls to his client. And flashback to the oddball case of Prismalo the Painter.

Back to Ramik's prison, the heroes have Ramik on the ropes. And that's when his client shows up: Supreme's longtime foe Optilux. But that will have to wait until next month. I hope you had as much fun with this one as I did.

From the ongoing "Adventures in bad promotion," we get five pages devoted to the upcoming Judgment Day miniseries. Five pages in which they use the same two images over and over again. Probably the most questionable thing they did was run the quote from American Entertainment (not from a review in an unbiased magazine, but from a company that hyped and sold comics directly) that "Judgment Day is Alan Moore's next Watchmen." I'm sure that line sold some comics, but it misrepresented exactly what Judgment Day was and was meant to be. How did they expect it to live up to the greatest graphic novel ever written?

As always, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for all of the details and references that I completely missed.