Weekly Reading: Supreme #52a - part 2

(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.)

Be sure to read part 1 for the main story.

One of the nice things about giving Alan Moore 80 pages to play with is that he'll play with all of them. He devoted 38 pages to finishing off the main story and 42 of them to all of the extra stories and various goodies, spread over the two issues. And while I appreciated the pin-up gallery we got in issue 50, all of the extras here feel as though they have a purpose and a guiding hand.

Let's see what he's given us, shall we?

We start with Tales of the Supremacy starring: Squeak the Supremouse in "What a friend we have in cheeses!" With art from his soon to be League of Extraordinary Gentlemen co-creator Kevin O'Neill, Moore tells a ridiculous story about a friendly baseball game between the 1950s-era Supremes and the 1960s-era Supremes, told through the point of view of Squeak as he assembles his '50s team. It's silly for the sake of being silly, and it works.

In the "Hole of Heroism" Squeak wakes up for "another >yeek< big day for the rodent of >yeek< righteousness!" His lair is filled with more trophies, including the Master Trap, house droppings, and a Mickey Mouse-shaped corpse on the tomb of the unknown rodent. My favorite is Missteria, a bizarre pair of womens' legs on a chair with tanks at the base and a cybernetic brain.

After a breakfast of supremium stilton, he's off to check on Fifties Supreme at the peak of Summit Supreme. We get another trophy room, with my favorite piece of signage in the Titanic: "Time Travel Rescue 1951-1912."

Squeak is concerned because Fifties Supreme is addicted to supremium, what he calls, "The White Death." Despite once sporting a "three-rocks-a-day-habit," he swears he's clean now. We even see a display of what supremium does to him, turning him into all different kinds of Supreme, including a foreshadowing (both for this story and LoEG) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Supreme.

Squeak heads off and rounds up the rest of his team, including Supremite, the Three Sergeants Supreme, a gross Fat Supreme and the green giant-brained Supreme-of-the-Future.

And then he meets up with the umpire: Grim Eighties Supreme, who is an obvious parody of Frank Miller. Oddly, it's most similar to his work on Sin City, which came out in the '90s, but whatever. It's kind of a tired parody, but just do like Squeak: shrug and move on.

They play ball and all is going fine, until Squeak realizes that his pitcher, Fifties Supreme, has secretly switched the ball for a supremium meteorite, which could prove disastrous. Squeak flies in front of the pitch and swallows the ball before getting hit by Sixties Supreme and sent flying out of the park.

Eighties Supreme comes to mourn Squeak in the hospital: "So. Supremouse. Death claims even you."

Oh no, it was just a few bruises. "But you're crippled for life?" Eighties Supreme asks, which again references back to The Killing Joke. No, Squeak is fine and will be back for the further adventures of the vermin of valor.

It's a joy to watch Alan Moore just be silly. Like MAD Magazine, which seems to inspire him, he's not as funny as he thinks, but enough jokes land to make the whole thing a lot of fun.

Then we get the special bonus feature! The Secrets of the Citadel Supreme cross-section diagram by Rick Veitch. There's the Hell of Mirrors and the Armory of All Worlds, Supreme's private quarters and the mythopoeic zoo.

 

On the inside back cover was the key to the diagram. 

Here are a few highlights:

•  6. Supreme's private quarters: A private haven amidst the bizarre bustle of Citadel life, in here the Gilded Goliath can sleep, rest and treasure those rare solitary moments. Equipment housed in the cybernetic bed will digitally record his dreams for posterity.
• 7. The doghouse supreme: Home of the indomitable Radar, Hound Supreme, these spacious quarters have room for dog toys from a dozen different galaxies, as well as Radar's very own ultrasonic Hi-Fi system and scent-surround television.
• 19. The stadium supreme: Even muscles charged with strength supreme need exercise, and it is here in the Stadium Supreme with its truly Olympian facilities that Supreme, Suprema and even Radar the Hound Supreme take their early morning run and workout to keep in shape.
• 20. Supremuseum of art: This room houses Supreme's unequaled collection of art and historical artifacts from countless different worlds, times and dimensions. Included are a portrait of a time-travelling Supreme undertaken by the artist Rembrandt, and a set of strange carnivorous landscape paintings from the Rigel system.

Man, I love this so much. It's so simple and fun and you can only do it in a comic. If I was 13, I would take this to my library's photocopier and blow it up five sizes and make my own poster out of it.


Next up is a retro Suprema story, this time drawn completely by Jim Mooney, who had worked on Supergirl for so long. Suprema is in the outer reaches of space and feeling tired and decides to stop on a backwater planet for a night of rest. She asks the yokel locals if she can do some chores to earn a night's stay. They doubt she's capable, but take her up on the offer.

Off to fetch some water, it gets colder and darker to the point she even sees a frozen bolt of lightning! Frozen, the yokel carries her back to the house where she develops a cold.

The next morning she offers to help build a stone wall, but the weather erodes the rocks almost as fast as she can put them in place. "It's a poor laborer who blames her tools!" the yokel mother complains. Suprema can barely get two rows completed.

Suprema, determined to show her strength, offers to lift the baby's snow globe from the table, but can just barely lift it. She then challenges one of them to arm wrestle, and they suggest the baby. It's all she can do to keep him from winning.

She's about to leave in shame, calling herself the "frail of failure," when the locals drop teir disguise to reveal the League of Infinity, who tell her that she's passed their test. The cold was the frozen ends of time and all she got was a slight cold. The wall had been accelerated by time, even though "billenia happened in seconds!" The snow globe was the entirety of the universe, and Suprema hefted it. And the baby was the total of all human evil, which she battled to a standstill.

And now Suprema is welcome to join the League of Infinity. There's a nice joke about how we'll find out more about Suprema's adventures with the League "in future issues of Actual Comics!" (the made-up equivalent for DC's Action Comics).

Finally we get three pages of details on Supreme's villains, with art mostly by Rick Veitch (Satana's is by Melinda Gebbie). I like this description of Korgo the Space Tyrant (though he looks nothing like the Korgo we saw in the main story):

"Brinn Korgo, a wealthy and pugnacious space-brat, became notorious while he was a teenager as Korgo the Space Bully, battling Kid Supreme with a power belt his parents bought him. In later life he grew to become the intergalactic scourge known as Korgo the Space Tyrant."

And this one for Satana:

"At first believed to originate in Hades itself, the she-devil Satana and her master Lord Sin were later discovered to issue from a region of the infernal realm that has shaped itself according to fears and fancies of late twentieth century America."

There's just so much fun to be found here. And I think that's at the heart of what Moore is doing here and with Awesome as a whole. The audience isn't really 13-year-olds. The audience is (mostly) guys in the 20s or 30s and up. But Moore is saying that while it's important to leave some childish stuff behind, you don't have to leave all of it behind. Especially if it's fun.

Of course, much later, Moore will have changed his tune and say that superheroes are "a cultural catastrophe." But there's a reason I'm chronicling this iteration of Moore's work and not the ones he is doing currently. There's a joy and wonder and basic positivity to what he's doing on Supreme that Moore will later reject, which is sad.

And it's not that I don't understand what Moore is saying about letting go of the old cultures, such as those of superheroes created in the early to mid-20th century, in order to make new ones that are more relevant to our times. I get that, and it's not a wrong sentiment. But there's also an inherent cynicism to what Moore seems to be creating now. Now he's writing about zombies and H.P. Lovecraft's monsters. Those stories never end well.

So, I miss that optimism, and it's what I feel when I read Supreme and the other Awesome books. I'll talk more about this in a later post, but I just don't think Moore has the basic optimism to go back to working on Supreme now even if he wanted to (which he doesn't). So let me say thank goodness that Supreme will always exist from the time he could.

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