Weekly Reading: Judgment Day Alpha

Published by Awesome Entertainment in June 1997

The covers:

Title: Heroes, Heroines & Homicide

(Judgment Day 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.)

Judgment Day is upon us.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Moore wrote Judgment Day to coincide with the end of his first year on Supreme, but delays on Supreme pushed that back toward the end of 1997. But comics companies like to do their big crossover event in the summer to boost sales, so Judgment Day started well before Moore meant it to.

Awesome didn't invent the idea of variant covers, but certainly pushed it to an extreme, as we can see with the five for this issue (just wait until we get to Youngblood). I'm not even fully certain I've found all of them to post above. That, combined with the odd issue numbering (the miniseries will be numbered Alpha, Omega and Final Judgment), made it difficult to know what a reader was supposed to buy to follow the story. Delays would push Final Judgment back a few months, which only made it worse.

One last bit about the covers. Note that three of them feature Agent America (it's probably not Fighting American - note the shield) and one completely replaces Agent America with Die Hard (copyright concerns?).

Anyway, the story starts with Mickey Tombs, the Australian Youngblood member known as Knightsabre comes stumbling back to Youngblood headquarters in Washington, DC, drunk from celebrating his 30th birthday alone. He stumbles past Sentinel, who is on guard duty and scribbling away at something.

Mickey's depressed because he's got no mates and also because he hasn't gotten laid in a while. Mickey decides to see if Leeana Creel, also known as Riptide, might be up for some fun. He enters her apartment, but the lights don't work and no one answers his call, so he assumes she has gone down to maintenance. Despite the damp carpet, he lays down in her bed and starts drifting off to sleep.

There are a few interesting things. He mentions that his name isn't really Tombs and that he thinks about his dad.We'll get more into that later.

The main story is being drawn by Rob Liefeld, creator of Youngblood and the owner of Awesome Entertainment. A lot of people don't like Liefeld's art. Personally, I don't mind his art, though he's not a personal favorite and it's only rarely that I think the art gets in the way of the story, so if you're looking for someone to bash the art, sorry.

And then we get our first historical flashback, to 1868AD in the old West. Gil Kane, well known for his Western comics, draws these pages and they are gorgeous. The Brimstone Kid and Nighteagle, who we saw talking about this very meeting in the Sourcebook, note that a storm is coming, and riding fast in front of it is another Western hero: the masked Kid Thunder.

Kid Thunder shows them an item (we don't get to see) that he took as payment from the puritan Deliverance Drue, who is now chasing him to get it back. Both Nighteagle and the Brimstone Kid can feel the powerful magic coming from the item and take off, leaving Kid Thunder to deal with Drue and the storm.

Thunder says he thought about meeting up with Lady Lash (we'll meet her in Youngblood) or Bill Kickok, but it's too late. He decides to make his stand in a nearby cave. He sees Drue approaching through a telescope, but Drue spots him, too.

Drue wants back "that source of life eternal cruelly taken from me!" Drue vows to bring his wrath down upon Thunder and his children. Moore clearly has fun writing for these wide-ranging characters, and this line from Drue is so great: "The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small."

Back to 1997 and Tombs is waking up in a pool of Riptide's blood. The other Youngblood are there trying to get answers for Leanna, whom Tombs didn't even know was dead. They lock up Tombs and Vogue and Badrock discuss what to do next. Vogue notes that with their celebrity, this will be covered as a media event, "...an ancient drama acted out by beings stepped from legend."

One complaint about Judgment Day is some of the modern dialog is overly arch like that example. There's a case to be made that Moore was overdoing it on purpose, as we'll understand at the end of the series, but I don't know. I think it might have been that the transitions were too much to make his normal technique of using a bit of dialog from one scene over the start of the next scene work, and he stretched the language too far.

Anyway, we're now in the year 436AD with Bram the Berserk (an obvious Conan analog), drawn in detail by Stephen Platt. Platt's a good choice for the detailed-work necessary to convey the feeling of Conan, and the blood flows freely on these pages.

Bram and his allies are attacking the castle of the warlock called Magnar. Bram has an inside man in the blue-furred troll Bartelmew, who promises to betray Magnar for his freedom. Magnar is ready for Bram: "Thus, it shall be your meagre brains my goblin devils guzzle from the polished chalice of your skull in their appalling revels underground this night!" I haven't read enough Conan to know if this is how they talk, but there's not quite the same spark about the dialog here as in the Western story. For me, this flashback doesn't work as well, as there isn't much that separates it from a Conan clone. There's no winking or any sort of new sensibility. It needed something more to pop.

Anyway, Magnar is betrayed by Bartelmew: "I took the liberty of rewriting our contract somewhat." Bram slices the warlock in two and then reaches for the most powerful object in the keep. "The images upon it seemed to move, and speak with him. It's worn and burnished edges glowed with destiny."

Of course this is Hermes' book of destiny, which is what this whole series is about. But we don't find that out until later.

Back to 1997. Shaft, one of two team leaders, is debating with Vogue about calling the police to deal with the homicide. Sentinel shows up and Jeff decides to call the only superhero cop he knows. "It's a fairytale gone wrong: the princess is dead, the knight is under suspicion, and we've got nobody left to turn to... except the Dragon!"

But we don't transition to the Winter Knight, which would make sense, we transition to 1943AD to Battlin' Baron and his Roarin' Roghnecks. We're now in a Nick Fury or Sgt. Rock war comic, and Keith Giffen draws it as an homage to Harvey Kurtzman and his EC Comics war stories.

Baron is setting out to take on Rommel's Afrika Korps, but their ally, the Phantom Aviator (also seen in the Sourcebook) has been hit. Baron decides to leave his youngest soldier with the aviator. The aviator tells the youngster that the Nazis are going to shell their location in five minutes and gives him a package and tells him to go just as an explosion throws the soldier.

Back to 1997. Erik Larsen's the Savage Dragon has shown up and tells Shaft that the legal community doesn't want to deal with superhero crimes and is willing to let the superhero community deal with this on its own. They decide they'll need to set up their own courtroom.

Meanwhile, Graves, Youngblood's government liaison, has gone ballistic over the situation. So Die Hard suggests bringing in some of The Allies and other superheroes.

And then we're in 1918AD in a darkened jungle in the Congo as Zantar (maybe a little too close to Tarzan, eh, Alan?), white god of the Congo, breaks up a native ceremony honoring the corpse of an explorer clutching a package. Adam Pollina's art has a nice, quick feeling about it, that makes this flashback fun. Moreso than the writing, where the best part is probably this line: "The superstitious tribesmen were no match for Zantar's keen intelligence, bestowed on him by centuries of noble Anglo-Saxon breeding." Um...

Anyway, Zantar grabs the package, screams like the white lions who raised him, and disappears back into the jungle.

Back in 1997, Youngblood has approached Supreme about hosting the trial at his Citadel. Die Hard has found a judge who helped The Allies back in the '60s to try the case, the former Lady Day will be for the prosecution and Toby, the Fisherman's sidekick Skipper, will be for the defense.

Toby asks for the synthetic Die Hard's visual memory banks. Sentinel mentions to Shaft that he has a bad feeling about how things are turning out when we switch to 530AD, where we meet Merlin, who is entrusting Camelot's treasurers to the Winter Knight, including the source of King Arthur's strength and wisdom.

Dan Jurgens draws this tale, but he doesn't have the right feel for a knight's tale (shouldn't it have a John Bolton feel?). Nor does this story say much, as the Knight flees from the falling Camelot, besieged by ogres and a dragon. He makes short work of them, robbing the flashback of most of its vitality.

Then back to 1997. The judge is ready, as are the lawyers. The prosecution vows to put up a strong case. Toby leads Shaft and Sentinel to the Citadel stadium, which will be the courtroom. He explains that they need all the space, as he's got so many witnesses. Sentinel wonders why he needs so many witnesses, when this is just a Youngblood affair. They go in and see row after row of heroes standing over a cuffed Knightsabre.

And that's where we end. Next: The Trial!

When I first read this story a long time ago, I remember having no clue what was going on. All these years later, I can see exactly what Moore is doing, but can also see how he wasn't entirely successful doing it.

The main story, other than the arch dialog, seems to work pretty well in this first issue, with its mystery of the killing and how they're going to handle the trial. Once we get into the trial, I'll want to talk about courtroom dramas, but we're not there yet.

Really, I think Judgment Day works or doesn't work based on its flashbacks. Clearly Moore was continuing the techniques he had developed and used so effectively in the Story of the Year Supreme issues, but to less successful results.

Unlike with Rick Veitch, who can do everything well in Supreme, Judgment Day has so many artists, and some are going to be better at pulling off their eras than others. While Gil Kane makes the Western stories beautiful to look at, Dan Jurgens doesn't do much with the Winter Knight.

But I shouldn't just pick on Jurgens. The real problem with the flashbacks is that Moore wrote the flashbacks in Supreme to work as standalone stories, usually giving them eight pages to breathe and have a narrative that works on its own and then additionally with the rest of the issue. Here, artists are given two pages, no dialog, and mostly replicas of captions from old comics. Without being their own stories, they aren't that interesting. I think that's why the four-page Western story works better than the two-page war story. For what Moore wanted to accomplish, he needed a bigger palette, and I don't know if it was Awesome or his own decision that hobbled him here.

I also wonder why more wasn't done to make the flashbacks feel like those old stories, the way they handled production on the Supreme flashbacks. The Supreme flashbacks were free to be black and white or to look yellowed or have bad four-color press dots. Why didn't they keep up the trick of knowing that this is a collection of comics? I wonder if that was Moore himself, or because Awesome made this miniseries the central focus of the company and they didn't want it to feel or look old. I have no evidence of that, but it's something I wonder about.

That said, there's so much going on in Judgment Day and some truly wonderful bits, that I think it mostly works. But I'll get into that more as we go.

Anyway, I'll have more to talk about this last page and much more in posts later this week. As always, please check out the Annotations Page, for all of the details and references that I completely missed.