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."