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."