The psychedelic existentialism of Jim Starlin

During the 1970s there was a run of wonderful existential-inspired cosmic stories, and few did them better than Jim Starlin. While I missed out on his Warlock days, I was a big fan of Dreadstar and the nihilistic anti-organized religion story he had to tell. But it's impossible to tell the story of comics without touching on his run on Warlock.

Starlin took a secondary superhero who had adventures like this:

And turned him into a cosmic hero battling an evil future self and grappling with the ramifications like this:

 

To stop himself from becoming the villain he hates, he confronts a future self and convinces himself to kill himself.

To the modern reader, it's overwritten and overwrought, but it was new and different and spoke to the times in a way that comics hadn't yet. This would all grow into the Thanos/Infinity War stories that swallowed the Marvel Universe and is now swallowing the Marvel movies. If you want more on the weird Warlock story and Starlin's writing, check out this great blog.

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to show off some of Starlin's incredible artwork that obviously helped inspire Rick Veitch for the flashback in Supreme #49. Enjoy!

 

 

 

As we've seen, some of the great artists of yesteryear turn up to work on Supreme, and Starlin is no exception. He'll do the art of an entire issue later in Moore's Supreme run.

Weekly Reading: Supreme #49

Supreme #49

Published by Awesome Entertainment in May 1997

The cover:

Title: There Is A Light That Never Goes Out...

(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.)

At long last, welcome to the Awesome Universe. In the speculation-crazy days of the mid-1990s, Rob Liefeld set out to build another comics company, this time without other comic creator partners. He hired Jeph Loeb to be the publisher (as Loeb wrote several series for Awesome). He also got financial backing from both John Hyde (Film Roman CEO) and Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, who had run Malibu when they lured Liefeld from Marvel and now ran Platinum Studios (home of Cowboys & Aliens).

As you can see from the image above, the Awesome line had a unique look with the Awesome logo running along the side. It's always appealed to my graphic designer side as it was distinctive and fun. Beyond the cover (and notice they've scrapped the "New Adventures" subhead), not much had changed on the inside. For the first time in a while we have the same art team working on the issue, with Mark Pajarillo handling the modern story and Rick Veitch handling the flashback.

So, following up from the last issue, The Allies were facing off with Supreme villain Optilux in a part of Idea Space. As this issue starts, Optilux explains that he faked his suicide in 1969 and instead became a form of spiritual light. He hired Hulver Ramik to kidnap the other heroes' souls to put them in special glass prisons that will act as a batteries that will allow Optilux to turn the whole universe into the same sort of spiritual light.

The Allies decide to attack, but as Roman asks, "How can you fight something that's made of light?" To which Supreme replies that they have to find a way to "snuff" him. It's the start of several bad puns which make me wonder if Moore didn't realize that what worked in the flashback stories doesn't always work in the modern story. Personally, I don't mind it too much, but your mileage may vary.

Optilux makes short work of The Allies. Supreme and Glory awake in a bed looking at a chandelier, wondering where they are, if they are in fact anywhere.

 

I want to pause for a second and point out the really weird art on this page (seen above). We have these three small panels pulling back to reveal the chandelier and then the large panel has huge swaths of space for the ceiling and covers up the only detail on the chandelier. There's something really wrong here that I don't think was intentional, and I can't decide whether it's that we've hit the artistic limitations of Pajarillo, which I doubt, as some of the work he did on issue 48 was lovely, or more likely, this issue was rushed so much that there wasn't adequate time to get it right.

Anyway, moving on, Supreme explains to Glory that Optilux can make solid material out of his astral light, especially here in this realm of Idea Space. And that means that here light can attack like an animal, which we soon see in the form of light-based manta rays (get it?!?). The heroes beat them back, with Supreme pointing out that Glory's godly lineage giving her great power in this area of Idea Space. Here is where gods and goddesses are at their most real, and hence, most powerful (as Moore noted was a powerful idea he came away with from writing From Hell). As Supreme and Glory look for a way out of this mind maze, Supreme flashes back to his "Space Years."

And we have our Rick Veitch flashback, this time most likely inspired by Jim Starlin's cosmic psychedelic existential works of the 1970s. Supreme has left the Earth to "find himself" and the answer to the riddles of God, death and existence. "A reason for us and our universe to be!" he thinks.

He soon comes across Jack of Lanterns, the keeper of the Living Lantern, who warns him to turn back for he has reached the gateway of reality. Jack is the Awsome Universe's version of The Spectre, a one-time hero who became a cosmic being. Jack takes Supreme into the borderlands of being, "reason's furthest reaches" where they battle for a bit through some wonderful Veitch visuals before Supreme tears down the gauze of reality. Unfortunately, it's too much for Supreme's mind to bear and he loses his mind.

I've always felt that Moore was trying to say something here about whether Supreme came to realize that he wasn't part of our reality. That he's a bit of imagination and nothing more. But it also may have been meant as nothing more than an homage to a period of comics that Moore referenced several times in scripts and proposals he was writing around this time. You can decide for yourself.

Anyway, back in the modern story, Supreme explains that he wandered around with amnesia and journeyed to fake Earths until he recently returned at the start of Supreme #41. Through a trick of shadows, Supreme realizes Optilux is nearby and he manages to shock the villain, letting the heroes out of their mind mazes. Supreme then uses his shout supreme to crack the prisons of all the other heroes, finally letting us meet Professor Night and the other imprisoned heroes.

Again, the layout, inking and even the color are off on this page. Look at how none of the characters on the sides are detailed, inked or colored correctly. It's a shame because this could have been a really nice page.

The heroes decide to attack Optilux's light, which doesn't do much good, but Supreme comes up with a plan to trick Optilux into a prison made of the same special glass he had imprisoned the other heroes in. Mark Tyme's dimensional powers transports Optilux's prison to the real world and the heroes awaken from their extended slumber. The Allies remove their helmets and they're back in the real world, too.

Back at the Citadel, we see Radar and Suprema (who is wearing a costume that looks nothing like what we've seen before), who tells them that there is a time distortion in mind space and that Ethan is missing an appointment to work with Diana. He quickly takes off and Radar and Suprema have a feeling they know why: "He's fallen in heat," says Radar.

There's a lot to like from this issue, with the great villain in Optilux and the interesting setting of Idea Space. Moore set himself up with some wonderful heroes freed from Hulver Ramik. But ultimately, the art is dragging the book down. Fortunately next time, Chris Sprouse arrives to save the day in "A Love Supreme."

From the continuing misadventures in promotion, we get this, explaining that Supreme #52 will be spread over two issues (with the same issue number):

Why they decided to promote this months ahead of time in issue #49 (with a piece of art that appears in issue #50), but not in the actual issue just before it (#51) is bizarre. And why would you say Alan Moore's 2nd year on Supreme begins today, when it's not going to start for three to four issues?

More confusion: according to the letters page, Judgment Day Alpha was now available at comic shops. I'm not going to take it up until after Supreme #52 a & b, as that's where it's referenced in the Supreme series. Even from the start, the scheduling of Awesome books was off.

Drat.

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

The collective unconscious and the superhero archetypes

I talked a lot last week about Idea Space and how it's part of the backbone of Alan Moore's magic. But there's a bit more I wanted to get into while Supreme and friends are traveling through Idea Space in the pages of Supreme. Namely, the concept of Carl Jung's collective unconscious.

I'm not a psychiatrist or even know that much about Jung, but there are some parallels to Moore's concept of Idea Space, so I figured now would be a good time for me to learn, too.

So, as best I understand it, the concept of the psyche developed first with Sigmund Freud, who explored the id. This is what makes you who you are, based upon the things that happened to you. Of course, he was largely working with damaged psyches, so it had a lot to do with trauma and repression.

Jung, however, believed we're made up of more than the id. As verywell.com puts it:

"Jung believed that the human psyche was composed of three components: the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. According to Jung, the ego represents the conscious mind while the personal unconscious contains memories including those that have been suppressed. The collective unconscious is a unique component in that Jung believed that this part of the psyche served as a form of psychological inheritance. It contained all of the knowledge and experiences we share as a species."

Shared knowledge that present themselves as instincts. What are they, and why are they common to all humans? Things like sexual instincts or fear of snakes?

As Moore explained in Supreme, we start in our own psychic backyard and then move on to the everyday consciousness of brand advertising and celebrity. Then we go through our emotions to get to the realm of archetype.

Archetypes were central to Jung, too.

"All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes," Jung explained in his book The Structure of the Psyche.

"This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form, they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness, not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses but to translate into visible reality the world within us," he suggested.

Because people aren't born as blank slates, they need these archetypes to understand how to be human. Jung believed there were four major archetypes, which I'm not going to get into, but are really kind of interesting. You can read more about them here.

Jung's ideas have largely been refuted for modern psychological work, and are often derided for veering into the mystical and pseudoscientific. That said, they seem to work well for Moore's view of Idea Space.

Of course, if any comic writer knows something about archetypes, it's Alan Moore. Moore has spent much of his career as a deconstructionist, getting to the root of the archetypes within the superheroes. As we'll see later when we get to the Kirby issue of Supreme, he'll even refer to different types of superheroes by the creators who invented them. In the pages of Supreme, he'll play with the Superman archetype, the Batman/Shadow archetype, the Wonder Woman archetype and many more.

I think it's telling that he has Supreme find many of these archetypal characters for the Awesome Universe trapped within Idea Space: Professor Night and Twilight, Polyman, Janet Planet. Because that's where the archetypes reside.

But he wasn't content to stop with golden age and later archetypes. As we'll see when we get to Judgment Day, he would start to push the timeline for superhero archetypes back to earlier roots. It's an idea he'd already started to consider with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and it's one that would lead to the poster boy for Moore's later ABC line of heroes, namely in Tom Strong. But we'll get there soon enough.