Weekly Reading: Supreme #52a - part 1

Published by Awesome Entertainment in September 1997

The cover:

Title: The Return of Darius Dax!

(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.)

Here we are at the finish line for The Story of the Year! Of course, this being Awesome, there are a few strange things about it.

Originally, Moore planned that the end of this story would conclude in a gigantic annual, much like the ones he enjoyed as a child, containing a long original story, reprints, schematics or maps and various features. Somewhere along the way (at least several issues ago from seeing the in-house ads), Awesome decided to split up the 80 pages into two issues because their printer couldn't print an issue that big. Rather than making them issue #52 and #53, they decided to go the #52a and #52b route.

The problem, of course, was by this point variant covers had come into fashion. And variant covers for the same issues were often distinguished by letters, such as #1a, #1b, #1c, etc. So a lot of fans only picked up a single copy of either #52a or #52b and either missed the first part or second part of the story. Even to this day, when buying the series as loose copies, you have to make sure the seller is selling you a copy of each, because they often think it's just a variant cover thing.

(This also makes it a bit complicated for my weekly readings. I am going to treat each as a separate issue, and deal with one each week. Since they're long--40 pages each--I'm going to do the main story in this weekly reading and deal with the extras in a post later this week.)

Don't be fooled by this Chris Sprouse cover. As he said in his Modern Masters interview, he only handled the covers for these two so that he could get ahead on his work starting with issue #53. As we learn on the inside cover, J. Morrigan and Mark Pajarillo are handling the pencilling. Uh oh. Are we going to get good Mark Pajarillo (issue #48) or not so good (issue #49)? At least we get some nice Todd Klein work on the credits page.

We open this issue with a wonderful establishing shot of the Citadel under a blood red moon. This is clearly the work of J. Morrigan and is a nicely handled page. Supreme's now elderly former girlfriend Judy Jordan is reciting the elegy for Keats by Shelley about someone not being dead, but merely awakening from life. She is telling this to Hilda, who is translating it into reverse for Supreme inside the Hell of Mirrors where the pair imprisoned him last issue. There's another nice bit where we see Judy's shadow and it appears to be that of a taller, thinner man.

Supreme's not really listening, as he's getting pounded on by the villains he imprisoned in the Hell of Mirrors: the Shadow Supreme, the Televillain and Korgo the Space Tyrant. The Shadow Supreme goes to see why this old woman gave them Supreme and discovers that the old woman is the one who originally created him: Darius Dax! Korgo demands that Dax release them from the Hell of Mirrors, but Dax says no, that he doesn't want the competition, which, in a nicely handled moment, Korgo can appreciate.

And then we get to the portion where Mark Pajarillo took over and... okay, so it isn't going to be good Pajarillo.

Supreme wants to know what happened to Judy, so Dax tells his story. He starts from when a teenaged Dax stole the supremium meteorite from Dr. Wells in Littlehaven for his tremendroid, which we saw back in issue #42. Besides being defeated during that incident, the supremium radiation gave him lymphatic cancer. In 1967, the doctors in prison told him he had roughly a year to live.

So Darius wrote a special memoir with his time remaining, one that was a secret device containing all of his memories and personality in a special dust. As his body died, he sent the memoir to Judy, who opened the package and breathed in the dust. All that was Dax took over her body completely and eventually built the High Impact Lethal Defense Automaton (Hilda) and waited for Supreme to return.

The villains in the Hell of Mirrors decide to take Supreme to see The End. Dax, meanwhile, arms the Citadel with Korgo's planet smasher (referenced way back in issue #43)!

Morning is rising in Omegapolis and Diana Dane is eating a donut in a diner when Sally Crane approaches her. Sally says that she's looking for an apartment and that Ethan really likes Diana, as only Sally can: "See, Ethan isn't like me. He wouldn't even notice you were wearing too much make-up." They get interrupted when the Citadel drops its cloud cover and comes into view hovering over the city, and... oh... this is what we get:

 

Um... that's...something.

Anyway, Dax announces that unless he is put in charge of North America, it's going to get smaller, one destroyed city at a time. He then goes and switches bodies with Magno, the super humanoid, that Supreme brought back from the Allied Supermen of America's hideout in issue #44.

Suprema and Radar fly to the Citadel to confront Dax, though Suprema isn't so sure it is Dax, what with the voice being that of an old woman. "Trust me, mistress, I have an (untranslatable) feeling in my hackles. The meat of the voice is an old woman, but I'd know the bone of it anywhere. It's Dax," Radar assures her.

At the Citadel, they find Hilda with a Rigellian fission-bazooka. Hilda makes an electric bolt that knocks out Radar and his speakers and then threatens Suprema with the bazooka.

Meanwhile, Diehard and Glory turn up. Glory goes to confront Hilda while Diehard goes to check inside, but he quickly gets blasted out again. Dax in the Magno body comes out, eyes smoking green. Magno is quite the body, as it was designed to absorb the powers of the entire Allied Supermen.

And we're back to the work of J. Morrigan. Thank goodness!

The villains drag Supreme to the throne of The End, a presence we feel more than we see, as Moore wisely only lets us get glimpses of him. The villains offer to let The End finish Supreme, but he tells them, "You. Are. Specks. Go. Away."

They wonder at him not wanting to be involved at the end...

"The. End? This. Is. Not. It. I. Am. It." he yells at them.

It's a shame, but we never get to see more of The End. In my imagination, he's always sort of hovered over the ignoble way the series concluded. He was the villain Supreme couldn't finally defeat.

Sorry, I got off on a tangent there. This story ends as the villains decide to kill Supreme themselves while Dax is, no doubt, destroying the world. As the Televillain whines, "I wish I had a television" to see it.

It's kind of a weird place to end, especially with issue #52b basically taking up the idea of television right away. It makes me think that maybe Moore wasn't involved with the breaking of this story into two pieces.

Anyway, it's quite the predicament. Will our heroes prevail? What will happen with Dax and Hilda? Stay tuned for the next... no... for the same, but slightly differently numbered issue!

Look for a post later this week on the ton of extras that were packed into this issue.

As always, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for all of the details and references that I completely missed.