Image, Extreme, Maximum and Warchild

Today let's talk about the exciting world of Image Comics, its history and financial practices...

Wait! Come back!

Okay, so this wasn't exactly what I was looking forward to thinking about today either, but I promise I'll keep it brief and it gets weird and funny by the end.

The original Image founders

Image was founded in 1992 by several high-profile illustrators (Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino and Whilce Portacio) as a venue where comics creators could publish their material without giving up the copyrights to the characters they created, as creator-owned properties.

They each set up studios where they all did their own thing, at first trying to interconnect the Image Universe, but ultimately setting up their own little universes. Liefeld set up his Extreme Studio, where he put out Youngblood, Supreme and other titles.

Titles thought not to fit with the Image brand were self-published under Liefeld's separate imprint: Maximum Press. These were financially supported separate from his Image/Extreme titles. These titles included Avengelyne, Law and Order, Black Flag, Risk, and licensed properties such as Battlestar Galactica.

The Image creators weren't known for having managerial or production experience, and a lot of the titles fell behind schedule and it was a mess for distributors and retailers. Disagreements between partners began to develop. Several of the partners complained that Liefeld was using his position as CEO of Image to promote and perhaps even to financially support Maximum Press. The other partners discussed ousting Liefeld from the company, and Liefeld resigned in September 1996, giving up his share of the company.

So what does this have to do with Moore or Supreme or Awesome? A lot, in fact.

Moore had been doing his own thing since leaving DC Comics, creating Lost Girls and From Hell among others, and returned to find that Image had completely shaken up the comics industry. Moore saw the Image founders as rebels, bringing change to the corporate industry, and was wooed into working for some of the separate studios.

In 1993 he wrote issue 8 of Todd McFarlane's Spawn and would eventually do some spinoff work for McFarlane on a character called Violator (god, this is worse than the financial analysis). He also wrote a self-owned retro miniseries called 1963 with Rick Veitch and Stephen Bissette.

1963 was an important touchstone on the way to Supreme as Moore and company were recreating comics from the 1960s, in much the same way as they would later recreate Supreme flashback stories. The intent of 1963 was to create a group of heroes from silver-age comics who would then battle the Image heroes of 1993. Of course, there were all kinds of production delays and fallings out among the Image guys (as well as between Moore and Bissette) so by the time Moore started writing the script for the final battle, it had all unraveled. The series ended on a cliffhanger of Youngblood's Shaft kidnapping a 1963 hero for a reason we never found out. (Spoiler alert... oh wait, nevermind.)

The next year Moore would put out a miniseries mixing his McFarlane work with another of Liefeld's Youngblood characters in Violator vs. Badrock, seen at left. (Please, can we go back to talking about how Todd McFarlane originally envisioned Image as a comic book creators' union? That sounds interesting, right?) Well, the only point I'm making is that Moore had produced a couple books with Liefeld characters prior to Supreme.

He almost produced one more: Warchild.

In 1995, Maximum Press promoted a series written by Moore called Warchild. According to the wonderful Glycon website, Liefeld gave an interview (posted on OC Weekly) that revealed some details:

"'He once called us up to tell us that he had just been in the dream realm and talking to Socrates and Shakespeare, and to Moses, dead serious, and that they talked for what seemed to be months, but when he woke up, only an evening had passed, and he came up with these great ideas. And I’m tellin’ ya, I think it’s shtick, dude. I think it’s all shtick. I’m gonna start saying that stuff. Cuz you know what? It makes you instantly interesting. Like "O yeah, last night I was hanging out with Socrates. Came to me in a dream. We played poker . We dropped acid." That’s the kinda stuff Alan would say all the time, and he’d say "Oh, I’ve been practicing dark magic."'"

"Liefeld goes on to describe a comic book pitched to him by Moore that he still owns the rights to, entitled Warchild. Written shortly after Moore saw Pulp Fiction for the first time, it's a knights-of-the-round-table concept set in a Tarantino-esque inner city gangland setting.

"'I have him on tape for 4 hours just talking about it; it’s my most cherished possession.

"'You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Alan describe the heroes – this is in the near future – getting trapped in an amusement park in Compton, where one of the rides you go on is a drive-by shooting.

"'A couple of the artists I gave it to handed it back. The first ten pages is some of the most difficult, visually, it’s hard to crack. We’ll probably publish it in script form. I can’t crack this, life’s too short.

"'There’s standing atop a building, looking in through the window at a certain angle, while the person is sitting doing their hair looking at themselves in the mirror...and the panel descriptions, you go, how do I shoot this? I could shoot it with a camera, but like all the storyboards? It’s just very difficult.

“'He’s a genius, a showman, a shrewd businessman, and a whiner. I have no intention of working with him again.'”

Moore disputes having some of these discussions:

"'OK. I’ve never spoken to Rob Liefeld at all in my life. I don’t ever remember ringing the Image office. I have had some conversations with [Image partner] Eric Stephenson, er –'

"OK.

"'For the record I have never had conversations with Socrates, Shakespeare or Moses.'"

Anyway, the ad for the series is above. Suffice it to say, this series never came out, to this reviewer's dismay:

In WARCHILD, a young warrior-boy (called Sword) and his cyborg guardian (called Stone) and their companion Merlyn (who is the famous mage, but inhabiting a female's body) team up to have adventures that circulate around battling villains The Black Knight and Morgana Ley Fe.I initially purchased this because of an advertisement I saw in a mid 90s Image comic announcing a project called WARCHILD written by Alan Moore and drawn by Rob Liefeld. I do not know if such a book ever existed, or if perhaps things got changed around in the planning stages (IE... Alan Moore telling Liefeld and Image to ram it where the sun don't shine), but in any case, this book--the book I ended up with, was created and plotted by Liefeld, written by Eric Stephenson, with art by Chap Yaep and John Stinsman, with some other inkers.

It's a medieval knight sword-n-sorcery fantasy adventure, something that might make a dazzling FX anime, but leaves a lot to be desired in the brainfood department. I don't share people's total criticism of Liefeld's art, but I never thought much of his (so-called) writing/plotting ability. As I mentioned, I bought this book expecting to get Alan Moore writing and Liefeld's art. I ended up getting neither (although, Liefeld drew alternate versions of the covers to the individual issues that make up this compilation). I have seen Chap Yaep's art before (Youngblood/Xforce, Youngblood) as well as Eric Stephenson's scripts (SUPREME), so I gave the book a chance.

First of all, I wasn't always sure if I was reading a period piece, or simply an adventure taking place in some alternate reality. After awhile, I didn't really care. There was plenty of action, but I found myself not really caring about any of the characters. I read the book simply to get to the end (so I could read other books). I did not find this a terribly engaging adventure. Like so many of the failed Image projects, the action was fierce and fast, and the art looked dynamic enough, but there just wasn't much imagination or creativity to it. Definitely not something I'd save to reread somewhere down the line.

If you're a fan of this kind of fantasy, and you're willing to pay 6 bucks (plus $4 shipping & handling), then have at it, knave. But I think this story will simply bore you and have you craving something really exciting--like seeing how many bites it takes to get your fingernails down to the nubs that you're used to having.

Much, much later, people would bug Liefeld and Image's Eric Stephenson about the Warchild scripts. Various rumors have popped up over the years about how it was a four issue series and the scripts were for more pages than the standard 24. Was Liefeld sitting on a potential masterpiece? Why haven't they published it in the last 20 years?

Here's Stephenson's response:  

"Well, I think you may be over-calculating how many of those scripts actually exist... There are two scripts for Warchild."

So Moore never finished writing the series. Did Liefeld tell him to stop? Did he just decide to do Supreme instead? Who knows? But don't expect Warchild to ever be produced or completed. If we're lucky, maybe the scripts will be released or leak out and we can all look back and wonder why we thought Tarantino was so cool in the mid-'90s.

Anyway, that's the long form reason why, starting with Supreme #43, the book came out for a while by Maximum Press instead of Image Comics. Moore eventually used this break as an opportunity to create a whole new universe. But that has to wait for another Day.

We're so close to Awesome, I can almost taste it!

Well, I think you may be over-calculating how many of those scripts actually exist. Alan wrote a total of eight Youngblood scripts, three of which have been illustrated, to date. There are two scripts 

The Ridiculous Retro of Righteous Rick Veitch

As we see from Issue #42 on, Rick Veitch's retro flashbacks bring the depth and warmth that make Supreme something special. He's the artist who serves on the series the longest and is probably the most vocal advocate for the series after it's gone. So, let's find out more about him.

Veitch had already developed a unique comics voice before he came into contact with Alan Moore. He produced some great comics for Marvel's Epic line, including The One.

He'd go on to work with Moore on his legendary Swamp Thing run, as well as a couple issues of Miracleman. He'd go on to write Swamp Thing after Moore left, before he had his own falling out with DC Comics.

From Wikipedia: "When Moore left the Swamp Thing series after issue #64, Veitch took over as writer, dividing art duties between himself and Alfredo Alcala. His Swamp Thing stories took a similar approach to Moore's, combining horror-fantasy, ecological concerns, and an encyclopedic knowledge of DC Comics fantasy characters; he gradually turned his attention from the DC Universe to history and mythology, using time travel to introduce his hero to a variety of legendary figures. This was to conclude in issue #91. Difficulties arose after Veitch's plan for issue #88, a story in which Swamp Thing met Jesus Christ, was scrapped by DC President Jenette Kahn. Although DC had approved Veitch's initial script for the Jesus story, the topic was later deemed too inflammatory and was cancelled at the last minute. The publisher and writer were unable to reach a compromise; Veitch quit, and vowed never to work for DC until the story saw print."

He'd go on to work with Moore on 1963, Supreme and Greyshirt from Tomorrow Stories. He's done a ton of work since.

He's also got a great blog going here. On one post about the secret development of Marvel's The Sentry, he talked about the nature of the retro work he did on 1963 and Supreme:

"I’d been involved in two major retro projects (1963 and SUPREME) in which Alan Moore and I had developed a sort of “deadpan” approach to the genre. Then and now, most retro stories you see tend to be over-exaggerated. The dumbness is caricatured; played for laughs in both the writing and art. Alan and I believed such an approach was to be avoided; that in fact the mad random lunacy of a Mort Weisenberger SUPERMAN or a Lee/Kirby THOR needed no exaggeration at all. It was this close-as-you-can-get-it mimicry approach that I wanted to bring to SENTRY..."

At the time, he was also selling Supreme pages:

Bah!

Weekly Reading: Supreme #42

Supreme #42

Published by Image Comics in September 1996

The cover:

Title: Secret Origins

(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 Supreme page.)

Welcome back! And with the second issue we get our first understanding of what this book is going to be like going forward. There's a central, modern story interlaced with a flashback(s) in the form of homages or pastiches of prior eras of comic books.

So, the modern story starts with Ethan's journal. This is a concept Moore and other authors use regularly to put you into the mind of the hero. Moore swore off thought bubbles in modern comics a long time ago and has to find other ways to give you the protagonist's thoughts.

In this first bit we learn more about Ethan Crane's job as the artist on a Superman-like comic, working with Billy Friday and meeting Diana Dane, who is working on the Wonder Woman knock off Warrior Woman.

There's a nice action shot of Supreme saving a jet (hmm... where have we seen that before?) and a great joke about how it takes Ethan four minutes to pencil and ink the issue (comic pencillers and inkers everywhere share a knowing look).

Then it's on to Littlehaven, the stand-in for Smallville, Superman's boyhood home. Ethan wanders into the woods and starts having memories. As he says, this Ethan doesn't have memories until they're filled in by the flashbacks he's about to experience.

He then makes a remark that I think is important: "The memories were yellowed fragments from an illustrated children's story."


It's important because on the next page is the recreation of a yellowed fragment of an illustrated children's story. We've gotten our first flashback by the Ridiculous Rick Veitch!

While Moore rightly gets most of the credit for Supreme, Rick Veitch deserves to be billed above the title, too. It's his work, recreating the past eras that will give this story its form, its sense of joy and wonder, that make it the story it is.

As Moore said in the introduction to Veitch's Greyshirt: Indigo Sunset, "If the comic industry is ever on fire, someone please make sure to save Rick Veitch...because in some eerie and unfathomable way, every comic book panel ever committed to pulp has imprinted itself upon this man's more-than-usually-twisted DNA. ... Curt Swan silverings or Kirby krackle-fests, gunslingers or G.I.s, furry funsters or fashion floozies, there remains no obscure corner or cobwebbed and discarded genre of comic book history that this creator has not poked, prodded or pitched his tent in for a while." And he'd get a chance to show it all in Moore's Supreme and the Awesome universe.

Sorry, got distracted there. So, here we learn Supreme's secret origin of being adopted, coming across the Supremium meteorite, and being rescued by his dog Radar. We meet his parents and his friend, Professor Wells. Soon enough he's flying, along with his now-superdog, and rescuing people.

At left is one of my favorite pages from this flashback, as not only do we see the first appearances of Kid Supreme, but we get a look at his secret hideout. We see the secret trap door, the hidden tunnel, the workshop and the robot suprematon decoys. Even as an adult, how can you not look at that panel and start imagining how it looks and works? (The answer is, you can't.)

Also, I love the joke, "Look up there in the sky! Is it an eagle? Is it an auto-gyro? No! It's Kid Supreme, the lad of laurels."

We meet Ethan's love interest in Judy Jordan and his nemesis in Darius Dax. Of course Kid Supreme grows up to become just Supreme, working on K-Zam! radio with Judy, still battling Dax and going to war for truth, justice and the American Way!

One note about this. The dialog through this section is hokey. The bombast at the end is ridiculous. If these were modern comics, the audience wouldn't stand for it. But because it evokes a period, it's not only accepted, it makes it more real.

Let's take care of one piece now, as it's the subject of a lot of online arguments and it's going to be important as we go on: does Ethan Crane recognize that the flashbacks are comic books? The line before the flashback starts can be read either way. Erik Larsen, who would take over the writing on Supreme after Moore, claims that Moore's scripts make it clear that Ethan doesn't see these as comics, he experiences them as memories. Only the audience knows that they're comics. We know Ethan is a comic book character, but he doesn't. That's the joke. So, if you prefer to read it as though he does know, go ahead, just know that I'm going with the idea that he doesn't.

Back in the present, Ethan meets up with the aged Judy Jordan, who runs the Kid Supreme museum. Moore loves superhero lairs with trophies from prior adventures, and we get the first of many here.

We find out that Darius Dax died. Which leads us into the second!! flashback.

Here we see the way many of the Superman stories of the era started, in the midst of the action, before going back to the start of the story to see how we got here. This one is about Darius Dax, who has kidnapped Judy Jordan and is calling out Kid Supreme. Kid Supreme shows up, but so does Ethan Crane! How is this possible? It's not a robot decoy, a dream, or an "impossible" story!

Well, it turns out the other Kid Supreme is the work of the League of Infinity.

Moore gave himself a lot of gifts to play with in Supreme, and one of my favorites is the League of Infinity. Led by Futuregirl, the League has "historical" teenage figures, including Bill Hickok, a witch, a caveman and Achilles, who travel through time. They've come to prevent Kid Supreme from being exposed to Dax's stolen Supremium and to recruit Kid Supreme to join them in their Time Tower. Of course he joins as he can already see our current/"husky" version higher up the tower in the future.

No one does time travel stories as well as Alan Moore (who views time as a fourth dimension, probably from taking too much LSD, but hey, he makes it work). And the Time Tower and teenaged superheroes from various eras are such a joy.

The League defeats Dax and depart, knowing Kid Supreme has become a member.

Back to the present. We meet Judy's granddaughter Hilda and then they all head to the cemetery. Judy tends to Ethan's parents' graves, as well as Darius Dax's, who died in prison, but not before sending a religious book to Judy as a farewell present.

Hilda gives Ethan a picture to take to Supreme in Omegapolis. And that leads him to think about some of his missing details, like Radar and Supreme's floating fortress hideout, the Citadel.

We'll have to wait until issue #43 to find out more!

Before I end this, I want to talk about one more idea. It's been said in a lot of places that Supreme is one of the best Superman stories ever told, that it's a love letter to Superman and his history, that it's how Superman stories should be told. And while I agree with all of those things, I think a lot of readers are missing a crucial element. Supreme isn't just a love letter to Superman; they're a love letter to Superman comics.

Moore talks a lot about how when he writes comics he writes them to take advantage of the form. They aren't just stories that can be easily adapted to tv or movies or whatever. No matter how often Warner Bros. tries, Watchmen can't be adapted to a movie or tv show because Watchmen is about comics. The ads. The grid. The panels. The archetypal characters. The humor. It can only exist as a comic.

In the same way, Supreme can only exist as a comic. How would you show these flashbacks in a movie? How would you show a panel that reveals Kid Supreme's hidden lair? You can't. Nor would it be a good movie if it did.

That's why the work of Todd Klein was so important to this run. The feel of the old comics is important because this story is an homage to the stories and how they were told, not just the characters in them.

Anyway, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for all of the details that I completely missed.

Come back next week, when we take it to the Maximum!

Letterer Supreme Todd Klein

Most comic fans don't think about who is lettering the comics they read very much, but Supreme was so lovingly created and rendered in detail down to its lettering that I wanted to bring the man responsible to your attention. Todd Klein has lettered just about everything and is an acknowledged master. He also has a wonderful, readable blog about lettering that is top notch!

I'll reference him again as we go on, but here are some of his contributions to Supreme #41 and how he helped capture the exact retro feel that made the book such a loving homage.

As I mentioned in my weekly reading, the credits page helped set the tone for the issue that followed. Klein created it, as he explained on his blog:

 

"Hand-lettered rather large in the style of Ira Schnapp, this appeared on the inside front covers of SUPREME #41-52 and served as the ongoing story title for those Alan Moore-written issues. I no longer recall who suggested going this route, but it was probably Alan. I think I was the one who found appropriate old DC Comics house ads to imitate, pulling ideas from several of them. Scanned from the original lettering in my files. Lots of other Ira Schnapp and Gaspar Saladino lettering homages appeared in the issues."

It makes sense that Klein was modeling the design on Ira Schnapp (who created logos and lettering for DC Comics from about 1940 to the late 1960s) as Moore and company were creating a love letter to the comics they grew up with.

Some more pieces of lettering from this issue, from another blog post:

"When I was lettering the Alan Moore issues of SUPREME, whenever I did some hand-lettering I thought I might want to use again, or at least refer to, I made a photocopy. My copier wasn’t the best, and sometimes, as above, the copies were dodgy, but good enough for reference."

"This one I copied in case I had further use for this style for Squeak the Supremouse. The sound effect was a bonus. Leave it to Alan to sum up what I loved about super-animals like Mighty Mouse as a kid in one choice panel!"

Joe Bennett interview

Joe Bennett was interviewed by the Brazilian Facebook page dedicated to Alan Moore, which you can find here. It was translated on the always great Alan Moore World Blog here. I repost the relevant questions below:

AMBr: Joe, you drew the first Supreme stories that Alan Moore wrote. How do you appraise the work you did back then?
Joe Bennett: I wish I could go back in time and redo it all. [But] the ‘Image Era’ limited my style. I could have done something much better like for instance the issue I did recently for SUPERMAN; that should have been my draughtsmanship for SUPREME.

But Extreme - the Liefeld's studio inside Image (then Maximum Press and then Awesome Comics) - was known to impose a specific art mould, the "Liefeld school", correct?
JB: Yes, back then it was like that, only those who kept to that prevailing style could draw for Image and I never liked that, but I needed to work. I have always been a fan of the classic in comics: Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, John Buscema, Garcia Lopez. It was a pain for me to draw in that Image style because I have always had a good narrative, but there was no room for good storytelling, it had to be just the visual and the thrashing. It was hard, but I adapted fast and soon enough I went back to my original style.

And how was it, to work with Alan Moore scripts? Was his level of detailing very high?
JB: Yes, it was enormous. And I always say that I feared changing anything, because if he asks you that a dog crosses the road in the background, you get scared not to draw it… Who knows if that dog is going to become a cosmic entity in the future of the script? [laughs] But it was very good, it was a lesson on how to do scripts.

You were already on it before Alan Moore got on board. How was this change of scriptwriter?
JB: I even thought I would be out… But no, I stayed. And it caused me diarrhoea for three days, seriously… I was nervous.

Did drawing for Alan Moore demand more time? How long did it take you to make a single issue?
JB: No, what took me time was to read the script. There were four sheets for each page, or even more. But as usual, I finished an issue in twenty days.

You were one of the few Brazilian artists to have worked with Alan Moore. How important is it to your career, in your opinion?
JB: I think I was the only one to have done a script directly from him, because if I remember well, Avatar launched something, but it was a text adapted to script and the illustrator was Brazilian.
It was very good for my career, gave me an enviable CV, and for the fan in me, it’s a dream that came true, imagine a guitar player that plays at the local bar, playing alongside John Lennon? It was more or less like that.

Joe also made the art below (I believe for Alan Moore World) that shows what his Supreme #41  cover could have looked like.

Weekly reading: Supreme #41

My plan is to do a weekly reading of a single issue. I'll talk about the plot, characterization and anything else that comes to mind. I'll talk about artists and cover(s). And I'll post any random thoughts I have. During the rest of the week, I'll do some smaller posts about other things related to that issue, including interviews, anecdotes, random pieces of art, whatever. I'll also be adding to the annotations page. That doesn't sound too ambitious, does it?

A couple of things. 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 Supreme page.

So, let's jump in.

Supreme #41

Published by Image Comics in August 1996

It included three separate covers:

The first was by Jerry Ordway (more about him), a well-known Superman artist (though probably didn't know much about Supreme, as some of the coloring is off), who purposefully made the cover appear as a homage to the first Superman cover:

(Interestingly, DC ended this Superman series in the mid-1980s. Who wrote the last Superman story, you ask? Why, Alan Moore wrote it, of course in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow)

The second and third are by the then-current penciller on the series, Joe Bennett. Bennett (his actual name is Benedito José Nascimento), is a Brazilian artist who had been working on the previous issues of Supreme for a while and probably had no idea what he was getting into with Moore. Bennett leads off a group of acceptable, if underwhelming, group of artists who handled the modern stories in Supreme until Chris Sprouse showed up and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The third was also available signed by Moore through one of the exclusive variant cover companies (how that's a thing is beyond me).

The inside credits cover is all kinds of awesome just by itself:

Two more bits on the artists, and then we'll get into the story. Keith Giffen of Ambush Bug fame handled the limited flashback sequences that would be taken over and expanded by Rick Veitch in the next issue. And another famed Superman artist, Curt Swan was remembered in these credits. Supposedly, Curt was planning to work with Moore on Supreme, but died before he could create any artwork.

Moore, as he has done elsewhere, used this first issue to quickly dispatch all of the previous plotlines and characters, and start with the story he wanted to tell.

Supreme was already returning to Earth, but this was not his Earth. And astute readers probably realized this wasn't their Supreme when they read the line: "By the great indifferent galaxies!"

A special note should be made about the amazing lettering done by Todd Klein through this series. Moore would bring him on to the ABC line and elsewhere thanks to his work throughout.

I love the alliteration Moore was already using for Supreme: "Man of Majesty" "Ivory Icon" and the "Platium Paragon."

Soon Supreme confronts three other Supremes. The last line about this '90s model having powers so poorly defined as to be virtually limitless is just one of many dings against the then-current state of the comics industry Moore would throw into the mix on Supreme. He wasn't trying to give the audience what he thought the wanted in a '90s hero anymore.

"New Supreme" encounters three previous incarnations of Supreme and gives them a good whacking until Squeak the Supremouse showed up to save the day! And right there, Moore was signalling his days of grim, realistic Watchmen were loooong gone!

They calm New Supreme down, talk some sense into him and take him into the Supremacy. And so ends chapter one in this issue.

Moore has always been a strict formalist and likes to create a specific grid or formula for each series. Watchmen has been analyzed endlessly for this. Here, Moore sets up the idea of three stories within each issue. It allowed him to trim the acts of his story to more manageable 8-page chunks, and allowed him to create the wonderful flashback device we'll see next issue.

Chapter 2 begins with New Supreme entering the Supremacy, a celestial golden city dedicated to him. He'll chat with a number of Supremes before meeting King Supreme of the 1960s, the silver-age Superman analog, who explains the whole idea.

What happens to all the characters and continuity to comic book characters when they are revised? They go to Limbo. When the golden age Superman was revised by the silver age Superman, he went to Limbo. But rather than realizing that they're comic book characters, they experience it as a shifting to a Limbo space.

Moore, for a long time, lamented about DC Comics' revisions, ditching their longstanding and fun continuities. He hated the idea of Crisis on Infinite Earths. With the Supremacy, he found a way for it all to continue to exist, so he could play with it.

Moore gave a beautiful quote to George Khoury in his The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore about this idea from : "I decided that I’d rather liked the old Superman, that I’d rather enjoyed that rich mythology and continuity, all those kind of stupid but enduring elements, you know? Krypto the Super-dog, all of the old fashioned stuff that had so much more charm than the modem incarnation of the character. And so, having come up with what I thought was the core intriguing and whimsical idea of the Supremacy, the idea that there was some place where whenever a comic got revised, all of the stuff that had been revised out of the book ends up in some sort of limbo dimension. And that every conceivable misguided version of the character exists there somewhere, out of continuity. And once I’d come up with that fairly simple idea. I realized just how rich and funny I could make my treatment of it. The idea of a planet with hundreds of Supremes, every conceivable variation and where of course I could parody the various ills of the comic industry and where I could play with wonderful ideas, you know? Which was always the thing that Superman represented to me as a child. It didn't represent to me power or security or anything like that: it represented wonderful ideas, ideas that to me at that age were certainly magical. Where, to me, they provided a key to the world of my own imagination. And so what I wanted to do with Supreme was to try and give some of that sense of wonder, some of that pure imaginative jolt that I’d experienced when I was first reading comics. I wanted to try and give that to the contemporary readership so they could get an idea of what it had felt like. The kind of buzz that those wonderfully inventive old stories and comics had provided."

But the Supremacy wasn't just for long-running Supremes, it was for every variation, even the imaginary.But why does the Supremacy exist? Moore plants a few ideas from Supreme-of-the-Future. I can't decide whether this is pseudo metaphysics, actual theories or just Moore's sense of humor having the smartest Supreme of them all unable to realize he's just a comic book character.

New Supreme decides to return to the Earth to start his adventures. He goes through a golden portal and steps out of a... broom closet.

Ethan Crane, Supreme's alter ego, is now an artist who works at Dazzle Comics. What better way to add one more layer of meta to a comic about comic book characters?

I have to add a note that I love the coloring on Crane's outfit, with the V-neck shirt and red jacket, approximating his Supreme costume. crane returns to his home and finds a link to his forgotten past in Littlehaven.

And so ends the first issue of what would become a great run of Alan Moore's Supreme. Eric Stephenson, the then-editor of Supreme (and now-editor of all of Image Comics), wrote up a bit for the soon-to-be letters page.





A couple of small notes. Interestingly, Supreme #41 was a flip book. That means the comic can be read one way and then flipped over and there's a small preview or story that can be read from the other side. The story was a preview of Stephenson's New Men series. The artist? Chris Sprouse (who will become important). It was fate - Chris was there from the beginning.

A second note: In Issue #41, Kid Supreme, who had been a recurring character before Moore, decided to stay in the Supremacy. But actually, he didn't. Eric Stephenson had been writing a Kid Supreme series when Moore was coming on board Supreme. The Kid Supreme series seemed to just stop. But another story appeared in Asylum #9, Rob Liefeld's comic company's anthology series. There we see that Kid Supreme decided to leave the Supremacy at the last minute and come to Moore's new universe:

We don't really see much of him again until he turns up in the pages of Brigade #1, the last comic Awesome Entertainment ever published. But I'll talk more about that later.

Anyway, for annotations of Supreme #41, please go to the Supreme Annotations Page, which I'll be updating with each issue.

So, what did you all think?

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.