Moore's concept for Supreme

There's a great website about some of Moore's Supreme and Awesome works, which can be found here. I guess everything below should be attributed to Joseph P. Rybandt, who interviewed Moore.

From the very beginning, Moore decided to do Supreme as homage to a Superman that DC had largely abandoned.

Moore: "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."

Moore: "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."

Joseph P. Rybandt: With Supreme, Moore is looking back to what Superman was to him, pure wonder and awe.

Moore: "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."

Moore: [So on 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."

Joseph P. Rybandt: Moore is not here to retell old Superman stories, but to start something new.

Moore: "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."

Moore before Supreme

Why did Moore want to work on Supreme?

Let's get a little history out of the way. Again, Wikipedia:

Moore started writing for British underground and alternative fanzines in the late 1970s before achieving success publishing comic strips in such magazines as 2000 AD and Warrior. He was subsequently picked up by the American DC Comics, and as "the first comics writer living in Britain to do prominent work in America",^[3](p7) he worked on major characters such as Batman (Batman: The Killing Joke) and Superman (Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?), substantially developed the character Swamp Thing, and penned original titles such as Watchmen. During that decade, Moore helped to bring about greater social respectability for comics in the United States and United Kingdom.^[3](p11) He prefers the term "comic" to "graphic novel".^[5] In the late 1980s and early 1990s he left the comic industry mainstream and went independent for a while, working on experimental work such as the epic From Hell, the pornographic Lost Girls, and the prose novel Voice of the Fire.

Me again. So when Moore left mainstream comics, he created his own production company called Mad Love with his soon-to-be-ex-wife and their shared soon-to-be-ex-lover. They created a wonderful graphic novel in A Small Killing, and started an ambitious run at Big Numbers. Big Numbers would flame out leaving Moore in a bad spot financially and emotionally.

Meanwhile, the American comics industry had gone nuts while Moore was away. Several of the industry's hottest artists set up shop at their co-owned publishing house: Image. While they may have been wonderful artists, they weren't all the best businessmen, nor could they all get along. It was just a matter of time before something happened.

So, Moore, needing some mainstream work to help him out financially, and being distrustful of DC and Marvel Comics decided to give Image a try.

Again, Wikipedia:

His first work published by Image, an issue of the series Spawn, was soon followed by the creation of his own mini-series, 1963, which was "a pastiche of Jack Kirby stories drawn for Marvel in the sixties, with their rather overblown style, colourful characters and cosmic style".^[3](p56) According to Moore, "after I'd done the 1963 stuff I'd become aware of how much the comic audience had changed while I'd been away [since 1988]. That all of a sudden it seemed that the bulk of the audience really wanted things that had almost no story, just lots of big, full-page pin-up sort of pieces of artwork. And I was genuinely interested to see if I could write a decent story for that market."^[2](p173)

He subsequently set about writing what he saw as "better than average stories for 13- to 15-year olds", including three mini-series based upon the Spawn series: Violator, Violator/Badrock, and Spawn: Blood Feud.^[3](p56) In 1995, he was also given control of a regular monthly comic, Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.S., starting with issue No. 21, which he would continue to write for fourteen issues. The series followed two groups of superheroes, one of which is on a spaceship headed back to its home planet, and one of which remains on Earth. Moore's biographer Lance Parkin was critical of the run, feeling that it was one of Moore's worst, and that "you feel Moore should be better than this. It's not special."^[3](p56) Moore himself, who remarked that he took on the series – his only regular monthly comic series since Swamp Thing – largely because he liked Jim Lee, admitted that he was not entirely happy with the work, believing that he had catered too much to his conceptions of what the fans wanted rather than being innovative.

Me again. WildC.A.T.S. was received okay, but by this point, no one thought Moore would return to his glory on a superhero project. And then he got an offer to take over one of Rob Liefeld's books. And Moore picked Supreme.

Here's what Moore thought about it: "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."

Supreme before Moore

I don't want to get lost too far down the rabbit hole of Supreme before Moore took it over, as frankly it isn't all that interesting to me, and Moore would abandon it all anyway. So, in the name of expediency, I turn to Wikipedia:

Supreme was introduced in issue 3 of Rob Liefeld's Youngblood limited series as a flip book story, before he was spun off into his own series. His history varied; at one point, he was an angel of vengeance who quoted the Bible to justify his actions. At other times, such as when he defeated the Norse god Thor and took his mystical hammer Mjolnir, Supreme considered himself a god. Although the most powerful being in the Liefeld universe, he had his share of defeats: he was killed in the cross-title Deathmate Black series (published by Image and Valiant Comics), lost his powers in Extreme Prejudice, and was killed by Crypt in Extreme Sacrifice.

The character received a comprehensive treatment in The Legend of Supreme, a three-issue miniseries by Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming. In the miniseries, reporter Maxine Winslow investigates Supreme's origin story. Winslow learns that in 1937, Ethan Crane shot and killed two men in retaliation for the rape of a 15-year-old girl. Crane was shot by two police officers, but survived and was sentenced to life imprisonment. In prison, the government offered him a chance to participate in a human-improvement experiment in the hope that (unlike the six previous guinea pigs) he would survive.

Although Crane died like the others, unlike them he returned to life in a world which was strange and new to him. He found his way to a church, where he received sanctuary from Father Beam and discovered some of his new abilities. Crane took the name "Supreme" and, hearing about the war in Europe, decided to do his part. Little was revealed about Supreme's work in World War II, except that he joined the Allies. After the war, Supreme believed that he had done his part as a good Samaritan and left Earth; in reality, Father Beam's accidental death at his hands drove him away.

Supreme spent decades in space, fighting a number of threats on the side of an alien race known as the Kalyptans (the race of Gary Carlson and Erik Larsen's Vanguard). He returned to Earth in 1992 to find a changed society, which included genetically-enhanced superpowered humans on teams such as Youngblood and Heavy Mettle. Although Supreme was briefly the field team leader of Heavy Mettle, he left the position after defeating the villain Khrome.

When Supreme fought Thor for Mjolnir, a character named Enigma acquired another Supreme from an alternate timeline to store if Supreme was defeated. Supreme was victorious, so the other Supreme was left alone; this figured in the events of The Legend of Supreme. Although Supreme apparently died during an assault on humanity by Lord Chapel, he was stranded on an alternate Earth for several years until the alternate Supreme (stored by Enigma) returned and was defeated by the original Supreme. Original Supreme switched bodies with the alternate Supreme, restoring his powers. After several events involving Enigma and Probe (Supreme's daughter from the future, also known as Lady Supreme), the original Supreme worked with Probe, Enigma and the alternate Supreme to defeat the evil Norse god Loki (who had shifted realities). At the end of Supreme #40, Probe remained on the alternate Earth and Supreme returned to Earth.

So, yeah, that happened.