Weekly Reading: Supreme #52b - part 2

(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.)

Okay, hopefully you've kept up and read both the main story in #52a and the backup features in #52a and the main story in #52b. Now it's time to look at the backup material for #52b. Clear as mud.

While the backup features in #52a contained a retro Suprema story, the rest were mostly timeless features that could have been run at any point in Supreme's history. Not so with the features in this issue. These stories all have a distinct retro feel, but are wonderfully different from one another. Let's take a look.

We start with a one-page public service announcement that you'd often find in comics from yesteryear. I remember reading one-pagers with Spider-Man or some other character about not doing drugs or checking the battery in your smoke detector. Alan Moore being Alan Moore stretches this idea beyond the breaking point with "Supreme shines a light on National Flashlight Battery Inspection Day!"

Supreme warns two children that rather than going out to play, they should check the batteries in their parents flashlights, because who knows what tragedies could occur. Finding spent batteries, the children agree, "We'd better replace them all... and forget about going out to play!"

"That's right! Those kids may be happy now, yet by this time tomorrow they could be orphans!"

Some inappropriate laughter concludes the joke. Maybe I've read the joke too many times for it to stop being funny or it wasn't really all that funny to begin with, but it does add a nice little flavor to the wealth of extra features we get.

The second is much better. Another of the World's Finest pastiches, this is the "Secret Origin of the Professor Night/Supreme Team!" The trio of heroes are congratulating themselves after foiling the Walrus and the Carpenter when Professor Night shows them a picture of when Supreme and Professor Night met as children at Star Beach Amusement Park, which they'd both forgotten.

Twilight reminds us that Supreme and Professor Night met as adults on a hijacked plane and learned each others' secrets when they both excused themselves to change into their costumes. But Supreme does remember visiting his aunt in Star Beach as a kid. And there he saw the Kendall manor, where Taylor lived, but he didn't venture out during the day because of his illness. He also saw the boarders at his aunt's boarding house before heading to the amusement park.

At the park, he witnesses a gang dressed up like monsters rob the park. A young masked hero, calling himself The Midnight Mask, confronts them but gets thrown off the roller coaster. Kid Supreme turns up in the nick of time to save the masked boy. They chase the monsters into a tunnel, but lose sight of them. Kid Supreme's sight supreme bothers the Midnight Mask and they soon separate.

The next day Ethan called on Taylor and noticed sand in Taylor's shoes. Taylor, for his part, noticed hair dye on Ethan's fingers. They both admit to their secret identities. Taylor says that his idea came from the pulp magazines he likes to read, which feature stories on pulp heroes, including the Phantom Aviator. (This will be a point to remember for when we get to Judgement Day next week.)

The boys suit up and decide to check the tunnel again. They find a trap door that leads into a giant tunnel under Star City and Kendall Manor. There, one of the monster crooks tells the other two that the cave leads to the legendary underworld and kills the other two to keep it all for himself. Supreme and the Midnight Mask go after him, but he trips and falls into an underground river. The two heroes dive in to find him but the water's mysterious effects sap them of their powers. By the time they give up and head home, they've forgotten the whole adventure and each other.

This story concludes with Twilight wondering if the tunnels, which Professor Night built his Halls of Night into still lead to the real underworld. We never find out. This always seemed like an idea Moore meant to use later but never got the chance to return to.

Then we get an awesome assortment of covers (drawn mostly by Rick Veitch, but one is by Melinda Gebbie) from Supreme's adventures, from his "imaginary story" death to Judy Jordan getting secret powers to Supreme returning to biblical time.

Then there's this description:

"Always especially popular amongst Supreme readers have been those stories, like this one, where Supreme travels back in time using the League of Infinity's time-tower to match his skills against champions of the past. In this old testament tale, Supreme not only battles Sampson and Goliath, but uses speed supreme to part the Red Sea for an unwitting Moses, for whom he also sets the burning bush on fire using his heat vision."

Um... what? So Supreme was Moses' God? I love that Moore just tucked that in there.

Finally we get two week's worth of Supreme's newspaper comic strips where he fights a series of classic comic strip characters, such as Popeye and Li'l Abner. They turn out to be robots--Syndicatrons--created by a Rube Goldberg-like inventor, who is upset that the characters have stolen his space on the funny pages and set out to discredit them.

While it's impressive that Moore wanted to expand his examination of the Superman history even to the newspaper strips that were popular back in the day, what interests me is less the structure of them and what he decided to include within them.



I've talked before about how Moore was starting to erase the boundaries between fictional universes, and here he's continuing that effort. We're getting Supreme interacting with Popeye! Add that to the cover description suggesting that he interacted with Moses and you can see that there are few boundaries left for him.

You can say I'm reading too much into it, but I really think that by this point Moore has started to see all of fiction--including religion--as fair game to mix and play with. In Idea Space there are no boundaries.

Keep that thought in mind as we head into our next stage with Judgment Day.

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

Weekly Reading: Supreme #52b - part 1

Published by Awesome Entertainment in September 1997

The cover:

Title: The Return of Darius Dax!

(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.)

And now for the second part of our conclusion to The Story of the Year! Don't be fooled by this Chris Sprouse cover, either. He won't be contributing any art to the inside. (Although, seeing that weird costume on Suprema, maybe it's a good thing he didn't.)

It's J. Morrigan's show, and I must admit that after Veitch and Sprouse, it's J. Morrigan that I think of fondly when I think of Supreme's art. Watch what he does with Suprema's hands. He often draws her using them daintily, which invokes her out-of-date morality and character. His work in this issue is beautiful and allows us to end this story on a great note. It's a shame, but after a few more issues of Supreme, he never worked in comics again. (If anyone knows what happened to him, please leave a comment below or shoot me an email, as I'd love to track him down.)

Let's dig in. We pick up mid-transition from last issue, as we finally get the Televillain's television reference in the reporter trying to question Suprema and Radar where they crash landed from their confrontation with Hilda. Radar can only bark, but Suprema talks to the camera. Realizing the footage will be archived, she tells Zayla 500 years in the future about the fight and asking for help from the time traveller.

This is a great technique for using the League of Infinity, but like the time travelling device in Harry Potter, sort of opens a Pandora's box of why don't they just call for Zayla's help in every emergency?

Suprema and Radar are spotted by Professor Night and Twilight in the Night Flyer, who join them to take the fight back to the Citadel. Prof. Night hides them in a blackout bomb while Suprema and Radar use their eye blasts against Hilda.

Inside, Dax in the Magno body decides that Omegapolis needs to be taught a lesson. Gunshots, though ineffective, stop him for a moment. Having received Suprema's message, Wild Bill and the League of Infinity emerge through the door from the Time Tower to confront Dax.

Dax thinks and then remembers: "Ahh.. The League of Infinity. I remember; an improbable and nostalgic teenage superteam with members from past, present and future. Sadly your past is historically absurd, your present standing is uncertain, and as for your future... you don't have one!"

What a great speech!

While the fight rages, Future Woman pauses time and goes into the Hell of Mirrors to rescue Supreme. She helps him out of the prison and suggests he wait a few minutes to heal now that his powers have returned. But he can't wait and rushes back to fight Dax.

Supreme is enraged because of Dax killing his former girlfriend Judy Jordan and as they fight, we hear Dax's side, too. "All those years suffering indignity in Littlehaven, always being second best, despite my genius, to some dumb hick who'd stumbled over a meteorite!"

Hilda, what's left of her, comes staggering in, with Suprema, Radar, Prof. Night, Twilight, Diehard and Glory after her. Dax doesn't like his chances, facing so many heroes and heads toward Supreme's science lab to get the supremium isotope, which is entering its violet stage. At that stage, anything is possible.

Then, in the conclusion to the longest running gag in Awesome history, who should turn up but Billy Friday, stepping out of the Time Tower doorway. Into the fray, he says: "Look, I told the convention organizers last time, I'm not judging any more fancy-dress events..." The supremium in Dax's hands causes Billy's limbs to multiply like we saw back in issue #45.

They manage to shove him into the mirror dimension again and then Supreme goes to stop Dax, but he's too late. Dax decides to merge with the Supremium and Supreme says that he feels deja vu coming on. The supremium radiates within Dax and falls through the floor. But as Supreme notes, he's not just falling through the floor, he's falling through space-time. Zayla opens a time window so they can watch where Dax goes.

Dax falls onto a farm in the late fifties where there's a girl and her dog... it's little Sally from issue #45, when the supremium man fell from the sky. "We're seeing the events that gave me my powers!" she says in the future.

They watch as the supremium man/Dax steals the supremium from that time and merges with it. His mass grows and he becomes a comet, falling through time and crashing in Littlehaven in 1925, where we see its radiation affecting a little boy and his dog. So Dax created his most hated foe in Supreme.

Nobody likes to do time-twisting stories like Alan Moore, so it's not surprising that this Story of the Year would wrap up in one. Of course the whole timeline doesn't make rational sense, what with the supremium isotope being created in the nineties, falling to the fifties and then falling back again to the twenties. But that's the idea. This story could only work with imagination. And isn't that what spremium really is?

Later on we see the heroes cleaning up. Supreme asks S-1 to create a ward for the comatose but mindless shell of the elderly Judy Jordan. The League heads back into their Time Tower. As Zayla says, "I met myself in the tower on our way down here, and apparently I'll return soon for the Youngblood Murder Trial... oh, but then you don't know anything about that yet, do you?"

Except the miniseries had already come out. So the readers and Moore are all ahead of Supreme. For us, we'll be taking up Judgment Day in the weekly readings next.

As Supreme waves goodbye in the Time Tower he sees the teenage version of himself from way back in issue #42, who saw the beefier version up the time stairs. The older version waves down, closing the loop.

Back in the Citadel, Suprema reports that Billy Friday is still expanding in the mirror prison, but the walls are holding. She asks if they should say something to the citizens of Omegapolis? Supreme agrees.

"Citizens of Omegapolis, this is Supreme! I have regained control of my citadel, and the menace is averted. I want to thank you all for staying calm in such frightening circumstances. I'm very proud of all of you. ... You are the heroes, the ordinary men and women of this planet. Without special powers or abilities, you struggle on. You are the reason we do this... You are Supreme!"

It's such a nice, uplifting ending. And if you like clearly-defined endings, this might be a good place for you to exit. After this, the proceedings get messy, storylines are never finished, and the promise of Awesome Entertainment goes down the financial tubes.

But for now, the heroes have returned. And for Moore, the idea of superheroes has returned with it. The wonder and bravery and above all, the imagination.

That is what is Supreme.

Look for a post later this week on the ton of extras that were packed into this issue.

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

The other Awesome comics: Fighting American

Welcome to the ongoing feature where I read the other comics published by Awesome that ran alongside Supreme. I read them so you don't have to! (You're welcome.) You can read part 1 here.

We've talked about archetypal superheroes, with Moore doing riffs on the Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman types of heroes. One he never worked with much was the Captain America type. Occasionally he wrote Diehard as a fill in for a war hero type, but it wasn't overt.

But Moore need not have worried; Rob Liefeld had his back. Enter Fighting American.

So Joe Simon created Captain America, the patriotic, secret-serum war hero in the 1940s. He was one of the first Avengers, as detailed in that movie subtitled "The First Avenger." He became a guy named Nomad for a while and fought some dude dressed up like a pirate. In other words, he was a well-established Marvel character. And because he created Captain America under work-for-hire rules, Simon never owned the rights to Captain America, allowing Marvel to get rich off the character.

He did try to rectify that in the 1950s, when he teamed up with Jack Kirby (look, if you don't know who Kirby is by this point, you might be beyond my help) to create Fighting American, another patriotic character. Initially the team thought they could just adapt the "serious" patriotic-minded Captain America stories for fighting communists, but the series quickly loosened up.

Simon said in 1989 that he felt the anti-Communist fervor of the era would provide antagonists who, like the Nazis who fought Captain America during World War II, would be "colorful, outrageous and perfect foils for our hero." He went on to say:

"The first stories were deadly serious. Fighting American was the first commie-basher in comics. We were all caught up in Senator McCarthy's vendetta against the 'red menace.' But soon it became evident that McCarthy ... had gone too far, damaging innocent Americans.... Then, the turnaround, [as] his side became talked of as the lunatic fringe.... Jack and I quickly became uncomfortable with Fighting American's cold war. Instead, we relaxed and had fun with the characters."

Published by Prize Comics, it was, contrary to standard industry practices of the time, creator-owned. It lasted only to issue 7, but made enough of an impact to be remembered decades later.

Fast forward to 1996. Rob Liefeld was hired to work for Marvel Comics on Captain America for the Heroes Reborn storyline. He lasted only six issues (Marvel said he left early because of low sales, Liefeld said because in 1997, the company, which had filed for bankruptcy, asked Liefeld to accept lower payment for his studio's work. He refused and was removed from the series).

Because he had almost two issues worth of drawings and no publisher, Liefeld reworked it into a two-issue miniseries (August–October 1997) for Awesome, written by himself (story) and Jeph Loeb (script), and penciled by himself and Stephen Platt.

Liefeld called Fighting American co-creator Joe Simon and Roz Kirby, widow of co-creator Jack, who agreed to license the character to him, but at a price Liefeld would not accept. Liefeld created the similar character Agent America, drawing "maybe three pinups and one poster image," but withdrew the character, he said, when Simon threatened to sue.

In fact, Agent America was referenced in Judgment Day and made it onto several of the miniseries' covers (all drawn by Liefeld).

Ultimately, Liefeld negotiated a new deal for Fighting American, but was then sued by Marvel. During the course of the trial, he said, his version of Fighting American acquired a shield. As one of the terms of the settlement, however, Fighting American was forbidden from throwing his shield like a weapon, to distinguish him from Captain America.

Thank god they got all that worked out and no lawyers starved during the process.


Liefeld recruited Platt (with his quite dissimilar art style) to do pages that intercut with Liefeld's main storyline. Liefeld's pages deal with a retired super soldier in the present who had become a farmer and doesn't want to go back to fighting. But the return of some of his old villains forced him to come back and team up with a new android sidekick in a teenage girl's form: SPICE.

Platt's pages, in jarring contrast, show Fighting American in pitched battle with forces explicitly stated to be communists in the 1950s. Except they don't look like Russians and we never engaged in full-on war with the Russians in the 1950s and as pictured, the Russians in this comic wore uniforms like Nazis and fly the Nazi flag. Um...moving on...

In the modern story, Fighting American is transported to a flying island, fights a communist version of the Red Skull (but made of metal called the Iron Cross) and the purple-colored Smash, and then leaves.

It's kind of fun seeing Fighting American interact with some of Moore's WWII-era heroes even though they're not really Moore's heroes.

Awesome followed it up with two miniseries. The first, Rules of the Game, picks up where the previous story left off, and surprisingly, it's wonderful. Loeb wrote it with art by Ed McGuinness. McGuinness's cartoony art style lets Loeb be silly with it. That breaks most of the similarity to Captain America and let's the series breathe on its own.

Loeb brought back ridiculous Russian villains from the Kirby and Simpson days (such as Hotsky Trotski - see that's how you do it), who are all trying to kill Fighting American for $10 million (now that they're all mafia goons and not communists anymore). Loeb realized that Fighting American wasn't meant to be taken seriously, and the series is richer for that. It's such a refreshingly fun jolt of energy that I'm almost tempted to recommend it even beyond just Moore's Awesome universe.

Awesome moved away from that template and followed it up with the miniseries Dogs of War, written by Jim Starlin and penciled by Platt. Gone is the android sidekick. Gone is the subplot about Fighting American having a long lost daughter. Gone is the bouncy, silly fun.

Now we get Fighting American as an idealist trying to survive in a world of modern espionage and mass murder.

I love Jim Starlin, but silly is not a word you'd use to describe his writing. While the story is well written and interestingly plotted, it was just such a stark tonal contrast. Page after page after page of killing, brutality and pitch-black morality is not what I was hoping for from an Awesome comic. And Platt's Jim Lee art style just adds to the heavy effect.

Written several years before Captain America's the Winter Soldier arc, Starlin wrote a similar story of a villain (No Name) who might be trying to kill Fighting American, who turns out to be his long presumed dead sidekick (Speed Boy). The pair are trying to track down a Russian arms dealer who is looking to sell a Soviet-era weapon of mass destruction that can kill based upon the pigment of skin. As I said, it's well written, the ideas are dark and clever, and Platt is a good match for the writing. It would have been a great Captain America graphic novel. Unfortunately, Dogs of War would go unfinished, so we never got a number of answers or resolution.

All this is to say, if you ever come across Rules of the Game in the cheap bin at your comic book shop, you could do much worse than picking it up.