What was the deal with the last two pages of Supreme: The Return 2!?!

As you may remember, Supreme: The Return issue 2 was kind of a mess. The lettering was off in a number of places, the colors were dark and muddy, and they even forgot to put "The Return" on the cover. But if there's one part that has always bothered me, it's why were the last two pages clearly not Starlin's work and clearly (bad) copies of Sprouse's work?

  

 For years, I've been blaming Rob Liefeld. But it looks like I owe him an apology... sort of.

My friend Doyle ran into Jim Starlin at a convention and asked him about the pages and whether he ever drew his own versions. Here's what he said:

Starlin says that they hadn't paid him for the Supreme pages he did (and maybe they had lost the script, that was unclear) so he scanned in some Sprouse art and turned that in.

 So, it turns out that Starlin was the one who gave us this mess. Thanks, Jim!

The Chad Bowers interview

Chad Bowers's run on Youngblood (2017) was the last to acknowledge Moore's ideas and characters. He was awesome enough to chat with me about his Youngblood run and where he was going with it and how Alan Moore, Tim Seeley and others influenced his run.  

Mike: Hi, I was wondering if I could ask how Alan Moore’s run on Supreme and Youngblood influenced your run on Youngblood?

Bowers: Sure, I’ll answer what I can!

It’s funny, you read interviews with creators where they’re asked “what did you want to do with so-and-so” and oftentimes they can’t remember, and I’m always a little disappointed and think “how can you not remember”… but here I sit, scrambling to remember all the bits and pieces of what was planned.

Let me grab a few of my notebooks and see what I can dig up. I can give you the broad strokes but I’d like to try and give a little more.

Mike: No worries, I appreciate you even willing to talk about it after so long. Yours was definitely my favorite of the Youngblood series that followed Moore’s and I love the way you incorporated Doc Rocket as the OldBlood member

Bowers: Awww thanks. I’m a huge fan of Moore and his Supreme run. Hell, all of his Extreme-related stuff. Badrock/Violater included.

I tried to pepper in all kinds of little references to his work on the characters…

Mike: Right! It felt like you took that ball and ran with it and kept finding new ways to make this a whole fun universe

The ninja magician riding the goat and controlling the birds in my YB #1 is supposed to be the modern age Condor, a bird-themed villain referenced only once in Supreme.

Or maybe referenced a few times. I can’t remember now…

My rule was that everything counted…

I really wanted to get to #100 and do something completely different. But wasn’t in the cards. Anyway, thanks for being interested… I’ll see what I can round up.

The Crime Condor! That was his name.

I didn’t find the outline I was looking for, but I’ll tell you what I remember… but I usually have two or three different resolutions, so who knows what would’ve really happened? Depending on how familiar you are with the original run of Youngblood, Rob’s first big bad of the series was this sort of Darkseid stand-in called Darkthornn. Darkthornn is defeated by Prophet and Youngblood, specifically Psi-Fire. But that story ends with the typical “I’ll be back” threats and some “this is my destiny” promises that, ultimately, don’t amount to much. So I kind of seized on that early on and had it simmering in the background of our book.

But I didn’t want to bog the book down with all that continuity with the relaunch, so I started with a very grounded, superhero crime story about a girl whose friend goes missing. Simple. Easy to understand with the added hook that her friend is also a superhero with a secret identity. But there’s little hints here and there throughout the run, and once we sort of won over the newbies AND the oldheads, I started to unpack the Extreme stuff more…

So effectively what’s happened off panel, in the missing years leading up to our #1, the Extreme Universe has gone through a forced revision. Whereas previous revisions happened “naturally”, this is the first man-made revision. And the man behind it was Darius Dax.

A Dax who escaped limbo and sabotaged the Supremacy out of existence (somehow) before returning to Earth to systematically eliminate all threats to his alternate self’s takeover of our reality… a hidden Dax who had avoided all previous revisions to become the most EXTREME Dax… Darkthornn of D’hkay.

Mike: Ha ha! That’s an awesome synthesis of the most Extreme and the most Supreme thing

Bowers: But before he could destroy the Supremacy, the King Supreme was able to send one sole survivor back to the current reality, a la Jor-El… and that’s Sally.

Which kind of starts this domino effect that begins to unravel Dax’s manmade revision almost immediately.

The way Dax achieves his “revision” is through Psi-Fire, who he has cloned over and over again and turned into a kind of biological magical memory machine in an underground bunker hidden in the Midwest.

 

 

Mike: As a guy who follows a lot of short Youngblood runs, it seemed like trouble when Towe left. I love Seeley’s Bloodstrike run and I liked Casey’s Youngblood run, but I know they both wanted to do a lot more.

Bowers: Yeah, Jim had an awesome opportunity and couldn’t NOT work on Spidey and Deadpool. I get it. But Cory was going to be a phenomenal replacement. It was more the whole rights thing that sort of killed the book.

Mike: That makes sense. It did all blow up right after that.

Bowers: So Seeley’s a pal, and last night I did find an “Extreme Team-Up” pitch I sent him for a Suprema + Twilgiht book.

Mike: Those last couple of issues of Bloodstrike with Suprema and Twilight are absolutely brilliant.

Yeah, Tim gets it.

His and Casey’s (and Moore’s) stuff were kinda my north stars.

Mike: How did you decide Doc Rocket was going to be one of your new Youngblood? I love your characterization of her.

Bowers: Honestly, I just really loved what Moore did with her and wanted to see/read more of her. Jim had a good design, too. But I liked the idea of making her the big sister instead of the rookie.

Wanted to write a speedster. Big Flash fan.

Mike: That was what was so great. You acknowledged her previous exploits and allowed her to grow and age. But she also wasn’t tied to the old Youngblood government stuff, which worked well with Shaft and Die Hard. She was so refreshing.

It felt like nobody knew what to do with her since Moore’s run.

Suprema is another character that has appeared in a lot of books since Moore’s, but maybe her character hasn’t always come through very well

Because of her amnesia, it seemed like you were taking your time to bring her along

Bowers: With Supreme/Suprema…

Yeah, the snap back in #6 and her absence after was supposed to lead into a spotlight issue where she would’ve uncovered everything related to Supreme’s absence…

In her quest she finds a rough draft of Storybook Smith’s book and a page with…

Hold on…

These symbols.

 

“The Extreme Equation”

The Extreme Equation- 3 symbols formed by three pillars; none as meaningful or as powerful without the other two. The triangle = Supreme. Y = Youngblood. III = Prophet (a man from the past, in the present, to save the future, etc…)

The “Jack in the box” texting Vogue in #7 is John Prophet.

Ultimately it was all building to them all returning for this huge battle against Darkthornn in what would’ve been a fallback to the originally numbering for Youngblood #100.

Youngblood with both Supremes and a reborn Prophet…

#101 would’ve been a temporary but complete revamp of the book for about six months… the solicit text for 101 below: Vol. 5 - Reset #101 In a world revised and now ruled by Darkthorn, a man named Youngblood rises from the ashes and begins an impossible quest across the wasteland that was America in search of a fabled magic book that just might change everything.

This is probably way more than you wanted. But I loved working on the book and it was my first solo series and who knew if I’d ever do anything else, so I went for broke. It’s a dude from South Carolina trying to refine/find his voice and not doing a very good job of hiding his idolization of Moore and Morrison, I guess.

Since we were the only Extreme book on shelves at the time, I felt a real obligation to deliver for every kind of Rob fan while telling a banger of a story that hopefully raised the critical bar on what people expected from Youngblood.

I wish I could tell you there was some secret code or that I had a bigger plan that piggy backed off Blue Rose, but any reference is mostly there to let readers know some element of those previous stories remains. And that I’ve read it, I loved it, and they were in good hands with me at the wheel.

Mike: This was wonderful. I really appreciate you giving me this kind of insight.

Reading pre-Moore Supreme - Gladiator/Supreme

Gladiator/Supreme came out in March 1997. Written by Keith Giffen. Penciled be Ed Benes and Carlos Mota. Inked by Wellington Dias, Rene Micheletti, and Joe Pimentel.

Was there anyone dying to read a pre-Moore Supreme versus Gladiator of the Shi'Ar comic? Probably not. But here we are. Despite this coming out the same month as Supreme 47, with Moore fully reworking Supreme, this one shot features Giffen's Bible-spouting murderous space Supreme who pops into the comics every now and again.

The issue starts with Gladiator investigating a destroyed Shi'Ar garrison outside the primitive world of Denuvi-7. Someone with extreme power destroyed this place and Gladiator gets a black box to try to figure it out.

On Denuvi-7, Supreme is hanging out when he realizes the people of the planet are making idols of their god. 

Deciding to check it out, he also spouts some exposition about how he destroyed the garrison because he didn't want them subjugating the innocent. He gets down to the people, who can't understand him, but he sees their idol, and it looks like him.

Meanwhile Gladiator is reviewing the black box and conclude only two beings could have done it: either that alien who came to earth as a baby or Supreme. (A nice little Superman joke for you.) They warn Gladiator that the people on this planet worship a figure like Supreme, so if he's not careful, he could taint the entire planet against the Shi'Ar. They also don't want Gladiator to become a new idol for the population.

Supreme goes to a church and realizes the priests want Supreme to be their new false god, which he's not having. 

So he goes nuts and starts killing the priests and destroying the church when Gladiator shows up. And this being the last pre-Moore Supreme comic, they do what they do and fight for pretty much the rest of the issue. 

As they do, they destroy parts of the planet, so the people turn on the priests who told them to worship Supreme. To give credit where it is due. Giffen tells this without any understandable dialog, which is actually some really clever sequential storytelling.  

 

Back to the fighting, Supreme ends up crushing Gladiator into unconsciousness. He checks Gladiator's pulse and can't find one and assumes Gladiator is dead. So he flies off. Gladiator then wakes up and explains that the Shi'Ar don't have pulses or heartbeats. 

We end the story with the Shi'Ar opening relations with the inhabitants of Denuvi-7 and the population replacing their faith in Supreme with their faith in the Shi'Ar.

There's almost enough there to be an interesting comic, but just not quite. But it doesn't matter because Moore was already well on his way to turning Supreme into something much better, 

So let's end this there. Pre-Moore Supreme was often terribly written, had all kinds of continuity problems, lacked any kind of interesting or consistent backstory or characterization, and never added up even when Jim Valentino tried to retcon the whole thing. People used to ask me if after reading Moore's version, they should read the early issues. I always said I didn't know, as I hadn't read them. Well, the answer is a lot more firm now. But still, it was a fun little trip through the early 1990s Image Comics boom. But I'm also glad to return to much better comics. 

Thanks for coming on this trip through time with me. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop them int he comments.