Weekly Reading: Judgment Day Sourcebook

Published by Awesome Entertainment in May 1997

The cover:

Title: None (as far as I can tell)

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

Welcome to Judgment Day. We're going to start with the little-read Sourcebook story, which acts as a kind of prologue. This Sourcebook was distributed exclusively by American Entertainment, a company that specialized in variants and signed issues, so you had to buy $10 worth of comics from them to get this for free (meaning not many people did).

It features a Rob Liefeld cover featuring Agent: America (I think). From my reading of Awesome's run on Fighting American, I'm pretty certain this isn't supposed to be Fighting American, but the Agent: America (check out the shield) character he created . You know what, it's just a cover, so I'm just going to move on.

Inside, we get a six page story entirely illustrated by Chris Sprouse. Here it is, so you can read it if you haven't:

 

  

  

  

 

There's kind of a lot to unpack, so let's dig in, shall we? Let's start with Hermes (known as Mercury to the Romans). He was the emissary and messenger of the gods. He was often portrayed as a trickster. He's a little like Awesome's version of Loki, but more powerful and majestic.  He is described as moving freely between the worlds of the mortal and divine, and was the conductor of souls into the afterlife. And, perhaps most importantly for our purposes, he was the god of language.

As we've talked about before, for Moore, gods really exist, but the only way they exist is as stories. The more power we give those stories, the more power they have over the real word. And Judgment Day is all about stories.

We also have Moore's view as time as a fourth dimension, where everything has already happened, but we just can't see very much of the fourth dimension. But to him, fate is already written.

In his throne room, Hermes is calling everyone that ever was and ever will be to hear his story that will span from the dawn of the world to the end of time. It includes every story imaginable, from comedy to tragedy.

I believe his use of the phrase "shades" alludes to Plato's allegory of the cave, which suggests that what we see are just representations of actual things. There's an idea table, and all other tables we see are just shadows of that table. So, everyone in this story is just a representation of the ideal or archetype. But I could be reaching.

Moore uses the final line about "All Fires" to show us a fire. We switch to a pulp fiction story from the 1930s. Three heroes are battling Dr. Lucifer (an unseen villain) before his headquarters explodes. We have The Fog (a Spirit or Shadow analog), The Phantom Aviator (a WWI flying ace) and Jon (also spelled John on the same page) Prophet. While Prophet was a Liefeld character from his Image days, Moore has reinvented him as a Doc Savage-style adventurer. In fact, if you imagine Sprouse's version here with a red t-shirt, he looks like another Moore-created Doc Savage-inspired adventurer.

Prophet passes an important package to the Phantom Aviator before he and The Fog seemingly die in an explosion. Prophet explains that the package is "the most important thing in the world" and it was given to him by Zantar (a Tarzan homage we'll meet later). Assuming you've already read Judgment Day, of course the package is Hermes' book of destiny.

Moore uses the line, "I'm afraid it's in the laps of the gods..." to go back to Hermes. I don't particularly think the transitions work very well, but they don't take much away from the story, either.

Hermes tells us that his story is fit for gods and has no beginning or end. It exists all at once, as the characters within live eternally as words. There is no past and future.

We then see the League of Infinity's Time Tower. This is a scene referenced in Supreme #52b (which wouldn't show up on comic stands for four months - good job Awesome), where the League (as adults) are coming down the steps to fight Darius Dax and run into another Future Woman and Giganthro as they are coming up from having testified in the Youngblood murder trial (which we'll get to in Judgment Day).

I don't know why one Future Girl is dressed in a uniform we've never seen before, but I'm sure it made more sense in Moore script. We get an interesting tidbit that the League first learned of Giganthro's existence from the murder trial and then we're back to Hermes.

Hermes tells us that his story twists and winds around itself, suggesting again that time doesn't move in a straight line. Within his story will be men and gods and whatever comes after gods. They're all caught in a "tale that is itself all tales." I'm not sure how much more obvious Moore could have been about the book of destiny.

We're then onto the old west, meeting some characters who will be important to the Judgment Day story: Nighteagle - the Native American shaman who is the master magus of his time and The Brimstone Kid - a cowboy who supposedly made a deal with the devil to shoot so fast.

They're talking about having left Kid Thunder to confront Deliverance Drue (which will happen in Judgment Day) on his own. Nighteagle seems to understand that everyone's story has already been written, suggesting again that the magic in the Awesome Universe is based on Moore's idea of magic based upon the power of stories. Nighteagle is getting ready to communicate with a future master magus who is summoning him to testify in the trial, which we'll see later.

Back to Hermes. Here he's getting into the power of stories. Men fear what they worship, no matter if it's a god or a lover. There's a nice line about how "they fear the altars where they bend their knee," linking praying in a church with getting engaged to a fiance.  He then talks about how people should fear any stories that they study intently and give power to (such as the Bible), because when we give them power, they have the power to cause plagues, war and killing.

We then switch to an accident at a beach. This probably happened in the '80s or early '90s and shows a young Leanna Creel after having an underwater accident, where she received her power over water to become Riptide. Her mother reveals that her father knew this would happen (he being Storybook Smith, as we'll see).

Then back to Hermes. He's telling us to beware stories that gods tell (like this one he's already ensnared us in) because they trap everyone. What are our own personal histories if not stories within fate, with literary displays and endings we can't guess at. We go back over our memories, over and over, looking for new clues, even as we move on, heading toward our final day.

When we get caught up in the story, we forget the power words can have to change the world or even to kill. And with that, he looks directly at us for the first time in the story, making it a personal threat. It's a nice little trick to make the moment more powerful. And then Hermes leaves, flying away. And we see his empty throne, making us wonder if he was ever there at all.

It's a beautiful little thing, explaining Moore's basic idea of magic and fiction and time. The rhyming of Hermes is a nice touch. The little scenes for the other characters don't add a ton, but are nice additions to the Judgment Day story. (Some day I might cut all the pieces together into a chronological story and see if it reads any different from the way Moore cut it up.)

So the only question remains, is it necessary, and if so, was it right to publish this way? I would argue that the Hermes part is very much necessary, as it's a beautiful explanation for the entire series. It adds flavor and depth and with the Chris Sprouse art, it just looks beautiful. I would feel that Judgment Day would be lesser without it. And yet, later when Checker published the trade, they left it out for some reason.

After this little story, we get a note from publisher Jeph Loeb and then samples of Moore's Judgment Day script (which, I'll deal with as we get to those portions of the story), and Rick Veitch's character designs (some of which we saw here and some I'll post later this week). It's a nice little package and worth finding.

I wrote up some annotations for this story, which can be found on the annotations page. As I'm doing these on my own, I welcome any suggestions on them.

As an added bonus, you can see Sprouse's sketches and layouts for this story below (which I stole from the always wonderful Alan Moore World blog):