Weekly Reading: Supreme #45

Supreme #45

Published by Maximum Press in "Late January" 1997

The cover:

Title: Supreme featuring: Supreme's Pal Billy Friday

(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.)

Welcome to the second issue of Supreme that appeared in January 1997. That weird feeling of seeing two issues arrive in the same month is a portent of the terribly delayed publishing schedule yet to come. Start worrying now, 20-years-ago me!

We should welcome our latest modern penciller in J.J. Bennett, who is labelled as "Guest Penciller" as though there is a regular one who is just taking a month off. So, I have to ask, does anyone have any idea who J.J. Bennett is? I've looked all over and never found any references for him other than these issues of Supreme. The art doesn't look like Joe Bennett's, so maybe a brother or something? It's very strange. He's not great, but not truly bad, so we'll pass right on over that and dig in.



The story starts with dialogue over an image of Supreme flying someone to his Citadel. As I mentioned earlier, Moore had long sworn off thought bubbles for his modern comics, so he tried to be inventive with his captions to tell the story. In this case we have Diana asking Ethan to ask Supreme to take Billy Friday to the Citadel, as Billy Friday wanted to start writing a true life series of comics, which allowed Diana to work on Omniman with Ethan. So, obviously, Supreme agreed.

And we get our title, kind of. As best I can tell, it's "Supreme featuring: Supreme's Pal Billy Friday." The title is both ironic (Billy is no friend of Supreme) and a play on the long-running series, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen.

DC expanded the number of Superman series by giving the supporting casts' their own series, both for Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane (not to mention Superboy and Supergirl). Jimmy Olsen's book was purposefully humorous and often showed Jimmy Olsen accidentally being turned into things (including a speed demon, a super-brain, a gorilla, a fire-breather, a human octopus, a wolf-man, a giant turtle man, a human porcupine, bizarro Jimmy).  Most relevant to us, he would become Elastic Lad, who became an honorary member of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

When Billy Friday sees the Citadel and the trophy room (sadly, our streak of getting a new trophy room each issue ends here) and it all, he says, "This is like, a sort of post-ironic statement, yeah?" To which Supreme says no. But that's exactly what Moore intended, even if Supreme is unaware that he's a comic book character.


There's also the wonderful joke when Billy sees Stupendo, the Simian Supreme, that, "This gorilla can't be real. The square-cube law proves that things couldn't grow to this size without collapsing!" Supreme: "Well, I'm afraid Stupendo did, okay?" The square-cube law basically says that as an object increases in size, it's volume goes up a lot faster than it's area. Basically, Stupendo would have too much mass for his structure to sustain him.

As Supreme explains, Stupendo was exposed to supremium, which is "a meta-element" that distorts all laws of physics. Supreme is currently working on a supremium experiment, trying to get an artificially created piece of supremium to move from it's white stage to its violet stage.

He gets distracted by two suprematons, who tell him of a birth in his mythopoeic zoo of a brand new idea, of the villains in his hell of mirrors, of the prism-world, and of the installation of items taken from the Allies' headquarters into Supreme's trophy room.

Meanwhile Billy goes and checks out the supremeium.

Supreme then shows Billy the armory, including Optilux's photo plasmic converter gun, which created the prism world. Billy, of course, wants to know more about the supremium radiation: "What is it? 'Black' research for the nuclear conspiracy?" Billy won't find anything that he can't warp with his own cynical worldview, which makes him an especially good foil for Supreme.

(It has been suggested that Jimmy Olsen is a stand in for British comic book writer Grant Morrison. As one commenter wrote on the Last War in Albion - a whole tome on the careers and conflicts of Moore and Morrison, "Friday is obnoxious, loud, prone to bold statements, and a fan of ridiculously complicated plots. He even tries to turn himself into a superhero, a Morrisonian move if ever there was one." At some point I'll have to get into the whole Supreme vs. All-Star Superman, but fortunately not for a while.) 


And then we get our Rick Veitch flashback with more about supremium. It starts in Supreme's home town of Littlehaven, with a birthday party for little Sally, Supreme's adopted sister. Supreme arrives and gives her a suprematon copy of Radar (now a spotted dog). They go out to play and see a man falling from the sky. The man is emitting white light which makes Sally feel funny. Supreme goes to fight it, but it starts making him feel funny, too, as it says, "Imbecile! You are to blame for all of this! You do not understand the forces at work here!" I wonder if that will become important later?


The supremium radiation coming from the humanoid turns Supreme into a ventriloquist's dummy. Stunned, the Meteor Man runs away. As Supreme returns to normal, we see that Sally's hair has turned white!

Supreme catches up with the Meteor Man and goes to attack, but the man replies, "You again! You don't realize you're no match for me in any decade?! You won't stop me getting what I came here for! I'll rust increase my radiation..." and Supreme turns into a steam cloud.


There's a wonderful bit as Supreme uses an ice cream truck to condense and turn into a puddle. Supreme returns to normal and sets off for Doc Erwin Wells' house, where the Meteor Man is tearing the place apart. Supreme gets too close again and turns into a modern art version of Supreme, cycling through cubism and da da.

The Meteor Man goes to steal and fuse with the supremium meteor that created Supreme in the first place. He tells Supreme that he "fell from a terrible war in the heavens!" He picks up the supremium and it and he starts turning purple. "Of course! All supremium resonates in unison. In a sense, there is only one isotope of it, spread throughout time!"


The Meteor Man absorbs the supremium, but then shrinks and becomes more dense, finally collapsing from reality. He's gone and took the supremium meteor with him, leaving only the question of Sally and her white hair, which we'll deal with next issue.

And we're back to Supreme's tour for Billy. There's a nice little joke about Billy not recognizing Supreme as Ethan before Supreme hands Billy off to S-1. In no time, Billy starts not feeling right. He's growing limbs at a fractal complexity, getting bigger and bigger. Billy sees this as a chance to become a hero: "Elaborate Lad!"

There's a nice in-joke as the suprematons try to contain the expanding Billy. "It's no use, sir. He's becoming more complex with each passing instant until there's just a huge, sprawling ungainly mass!" "Well, he's a British comic-book writer. His reaction may be pre-disposed by occupational factors."


Billy's expanding starts to threaten the structural integrity of the hell of mirrors, which the inmates hope will give them the opportunity to escape. Supreme, running out of ideas, heads to the armory and grabs the photo plasmic converter and sends Billy to the prism-world of Amalynth.



Supreme has S-1 pose as him and explain the situation to Dazzle Comics as he listens as Ethan Crane. S-1 gives Dazzle a video communicator device that allows Billy to communicate from the prism world and write his series from there.

As S-1 flies off, Diana remarks that Supreme seemed "cold and mechanical" and how much he looked like Ethan, though Supreme is taller. She asks if Supreme ever had a female sidekick. He says yes. "Her name was Suprema," whom we'll meet next issue.

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