Weekly Reading: Supreme #54

Supreme #54

Published by Awesome Entertainment in November 1997

The cover (which you can apparently buy here for $7,000):

Title: The Ballad of Judy Jordan

(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.)

Poor Judy Jordan. She spent a lifetime pining for Supreme, only to see him take off into outer space without her and then have her mind destroyed and body stolen by Supreme's nemesis. That's pretty awful.

Fortunately, this is Awesome and Alan Moore isn't giving anyone an awful ending. So we come to Supreme #54, a beautiful little story featuring art by the three best artists who have worked on Supreme (though, this being Awesome, they managed to partially mess it up, too - but I'll explain that in a minute).

First off, we get another wonderful credits page by Todd Klein:

Then we get the first chapter, drawn by Rick Veitch. It starts with Moore writing in verse of Judy's life, first as the teenage girlfriend of Kid Supreme and later working with Ethan Crane at K-ZAM radio and having adventures with the adult Supreme. But all of that stopped by the time she was 48, when Supreme left. So distraught, she didn't think to not open Dax's book, which stripped her of her body, darkening her soul.

I'm not one for poetry, and Moore's use of verse has always been hit or miss for me. There are a few nice lines that it's tough not to appreciate: "In that cloud of heady spices/while she had not time to sneeze/tiny microbe-sized devices/stripped her of her faculties."

As she lay on her kitchen floor, for all intents and purposes dying, all she can think of is Supreme. "Yet it seemed, as life was fleeing/that the song, the great refrain/that was Judy Jordan's being/missed a beat... and then began again."

And then, after the darkness, she wakes up to Supreme, welcoming her back. Of course, it's not really Supreme, just S-1. And she's not really Judy Jordan. She's the Judy Jordan suprematon, who appears to be only 25.

I love Veitch's flashback work, but his attempts at telling the modern story always felt to me like it wasn't quite fully-formed. It's too doughy or something.

Anyway, Radar fills her in on what happened as only a talking superhero canine could: "Since your own personality had been gnawed away by the dust, the body was left empty when Dax departed, like a clean dogbowl." Supreme found enough of her personality to put it into this robotic body.

But now she just feels like a Citadel exhibit, like the trophy room she and Radar walk through. (Note, there's the issue of Supreme #53 along with the superhero costume the real Judy wore when she became Supreme Woman in 1959.) "I wanted to be his wife. I was waiting for him... He can't love me as a robot. He can't love me as an old woman. What point does my existence have?"

One thing you can count on is Moore to think through any situation he writes about. And this seems like exactly the state Judy would be in at this point. She was created to be Supreme love interest. What is she if she can't be that?

She asks Radar to leave her alone. Later, we find out that she's donned the Supreme Woman costume and flown off. (Note the small image of Alan Moore that Rick Veitch drew into that last panel on page 8.)

 

The verse captions transition us from one chapter to the next.

How you're reading this issue will determine whose chapter two you get next. It turns out, through some mess up, two artists were assigned to this second chapter: J. Morrigan and Melinda Gebbie. In the issue, Gebbie's was lettered and printed in order and Morrigan's was presented as a special feature at the back of the issue. Checker, which later published the trade paperbacks and hardcovers lettered the Morrigan pages and replaced the Gebbie pages. I'll present them side-by-side in a post later this week so you can compare.

And now, part two: Duel of the Durable Damsels! Suprema sees Judy catching a flaming meteor. Judy quickly comes across as a jerk, telling Suprema that Omegapolis doesn't need her any more because Super-Judy's there. Suprema's worried that Judy doesn't know what she's doing, as evidenced by Judy hurling the meteor away, right into the path of a passenger jet, which Suprema shoves out of the way.

Judy and Suprema quickly get into it, with Suprema telling Judy that she doesn't have what it takes to be a hero. Judy responds, "Suprema, I'm getting tired of your snottiness supreme!" and then insults Suprema's costume. Suprema responds and ultimately tells Judy that suprematons are just disposable people, at which Judy hits her.

Now it's on.

Suprema shoves Judy so hard they end up on the moon where they have a cool, soundless space fight. Suprema knocks her out and brings her back to Earth, realizing that she let herself go too far: "Me and my durned temper! It's always the same when I get into a snit supreme!"

I love this characterization of Suprema, where she knows that she gets mad and can't stop herself. But she also feels a great deal of sympathy for Judy and resentment of her brother for unintentionally making things so bad for Judy. If you were to ask me who I thought was the most developed character of all the Awesome characters, I would say that I think Moore did his finest work on Suprema.

Suprema brings Judy back to the Citadel, where the real Supreme is waiting. But that's for the final chapter.

Then we get part three: Old Flames & New Sparks, drawn by Chris Sprouse. Supreme and Judy sit in the beautiful rooftop garden to talk in private. Judy is mad that Supreme wasn't there when she woke up, for which he apologizes and tries to tell her that she's more than a robot. But when she goes to hug him, he gets uncomfortable and says they should head back inside.

There's another beautiful page of the pair wandering down the central stairway where Judy tries to come up with a solution to her situation, whether flying off into space or becoming a light phantom in Amalynth. But those aren't solutions.

And then S-1 interrupts, explaining that he might have a solution because he is an exact copy of Supreme and has independent consciousness. He admits that he's always loved Judy and asks if, now tat she's a suprematon too, she would become his wife.

Supreme asks if this a relapse into S-1's madness. And it's a fair question. Let's remember that back in issue 43 Supreme found out that S-1 had turned on this very same Judy suprematon (along with others) and told her she was the real Judy and married her. But she didn't have independent consciousness then, so she had no choice. When she found out she was a fake, she asked to be turned off.

This time, though, she knows what she is and she has the freedom to make up her own mind. It's an interesting distinction and a powerful reminder of the importance of free choice. But it's also a little disturbing and it makes you wonder if she should end up with S-1 considering his violation of her when she wasn't able to make a choice. I don't know what I think, but I love how Moore's taken a couple of loose ends and strung them together to make something beautiful, rich and complicated. What do you think?

Anyway, Judy realizes that Supreme really does love her, but can't as a robot. However, a robot Supreme would have no problems with a robot Judy. She asks Supreme to leave them be and sparks fly as she and S-1 kiss.

In the epilogue, where Ethan is explaining the situation to Diana, he tells her that Judy and S-1, now renamed Talos, were married in a ceremony in the reconverted stadium after the Judgment Day trial with Suprema as maid of honor and Radar as best dog. It's a nice touch, again clearing away the violence and murder of the old Extreme universe and replacing it with the joy and love of the new Awesome universe.

There's also a nice touch about how suprematons make love: "It may be androids have more options for mutual pleasure and communion than us organic beings."

The pair then took off for outer space, where they found a planet and started constructing a new civilization. Next, they're working on splicing their programming to create unique children.

Carl mentions that the small talk in the office is really weird, with Billy Friday calling, wanting his missing laptop communicator. Gosh, I wonder if that'll become important.

The story ends with Ethan figuratively and literally staring off into space, possibly seeing Judy and Talos enjoying their happy ending. As the verse concludes: "So our ballad now is ended/in a crackling, chrome-lipped kiss/with Judy and her intended/in cyber-conjugal bliss."

You can call me a big softie if you like, but I love this ending for Judy and that she even got an ending. Remember that Judy was essentially Supreme's version of Superman's Lana Lang. As you may remember from Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Moore's ending for Lana was to be killed, burned by future villains.

The 1980s Moore left her dead, mourned, but gone. But the Moore of the 1990s was determined that the Awesome universe be more upbeat and optimistic. And so Judy died, but did not stay dead. Instead, she got the best of all possible worlds, marrying a version of Supreme and forming a new world with him, having children and having a new life filled with the adventure she was used to. Personally, I'd much rather this ending. In it's own way, this optimism is more powerful than the dark grimness that swallowed the 1980s.

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

The other Awesome comics: Kaboom

Welcome back to the ongoing feature where I read the other comics published by Awesome that ran alongside Supreme. I read them so you don't have to! (Like you were even considering it.)

So back in his Image/Extreme days, Rob Liefeld discovered the artist Jeff Matsuda. Matsuda worked on some Youngblood titles and other series before going to work for Marvel on one of the X-Men books (at about the same time Jeph Loeb was working on another of the X books).

When Liefeld and Loeb were kicking off Awesome, Matsuda pitched the series for Kaboom about a sixteen year old boy named Geof Sunrise who receives magical gloves that transform him into a superhero. That gift puts him in the crosshairs of a group of demons called the Nine. The gloves also have some connection to Geof's missing mother and older brother.

The story begins on Geof's sixteenth birthday. He's a normal high school kid. He's obsessed with getting his driver's license and getting the hot girl at school to notice him. And like every comic book teenager, he has a friend who obviously likes him whom he just doesn't notice.

While at school, he is approached by Zang, a magical Japanese saxophone player, who gives him the gloves. When he puts them on, his hair turns blue and he gets a purple and white suit. Because, you know, it's a comic book.

He's immediately confronted by the big bad villain, Scarlett, and his henchmen, the Nine. Almost as soon as they start battling, Scarlett kills Geof. It'd be a nice twist if, you know, this wasn't a comic. So, of course, he comes back, scares off the villains and goes home to a surprise birthday party.

The next day he goes for his driver's test and is confronted by Scarlett again. This time, Scarlett reveals that he's Geof's lost brother Jimmy, and he needs the gloves. Geof says no and runs off. They have a big battle and Geof defeats Scarlett at last and absorbs Scarlett into the Kaboom Cycle, the power the gloves tap into. He goes home and the issue ends with the suggestion that Geof's dad is now Scarlett.


The two Jeffs: Matsuda and Jeph Loeb also had a fun time breaking the fourth wall at the end of each issue, leaving us wondering what was going to happen next.

There were a pair of side stories in a holiday special and a prelude one-shot about a potential apocalyptic future/past from where/when the gloves came from. It's suggested that his mother is alive there/then and Zang was/will be younger. It's weird, but at least it suggested something bigger and interesting that the series was building toward.


So then Awesome went through its first financial strain and Matsuda left. All in all, the story really never felt all that new or different, but Matsuda's art had a life and a velocity that made it fun and interesting. It was so colorful and so off-kilter that, if that's your thing, you could just look at it and appreciate it. It's as if it had been illustrated by Sonic the hedgehog.

Loeb remembered the experience fondly in a later interview:

"We had a blast. It was one of those books that allowed us to just run wild with our imaginations. The Nine in particular were my favorites, not just because they were fun to write, but Jeff's designs were amazing. They literally zoomed across the pages."

Years later, these three issues were packaged up into a trade paperback and hardcover and released by Image.

But Awesome wasn't done with Kaboom yet. In 1999, volume two came out with three more issues. This time Liefeld came up with the story, Loeb wrote the script and Keron Grant handled the art. Grant's a mostly good artist and the series had a unique look, but it lacked Matsuda's sense of humor and style. As Matsuda submitted a variant cover for the relaunch, I assume he approved of it.

Anyway, it's now a year later than the last issue. Geof and Zang are now in L.A., though Geof has seemingly aged several years and Zang is younger and white now. Zang has recruited a street girl named Kyra and given her one of the Kaboom gloves. He goes about training her, though Geof has nothing but disdain for her and Zang.

Zang tells Kyra that in order to find out more about his brother and father, Geof went into the Kaboom Cycle, but wasn't able to control it, meaning he couldn't help his brother or father. When he came back out, he was older and dispirited and left for L.A. That's why Zang decided to follow him and ultimately recruit Kyra.

Scarlett is back, now working for some big robot thing called the Magistrate. He soon attacks Zang and Kyra tries to fight him off. Meanwhile, Geof tries to fight the Magistrate. Geof manages to make it to Kyra and together they defeat Scarlett.

Geof, putting aside his feelings, finds a way to work together with Kyra. They feel the pull of the gloves and soon combine into a Japanese-inspired giant hero, because I guess Mighty Morphing Power Rangers was a big thing in the late '90s, and defeat the Magistrate.

As the heroes celebrate, there is a call from Geof's mother that she needs help inside the Kaboom Cycle. The two heroes jump into the new adventure.

It's not the best story or ending, but unlike most of the other Awesome comics, at least it got a kind of ending. So, good job?

Speaking of good jobs, after all this, Matsuda left comics altogether and started working in animation. He worked on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle film, but is probably now best known as the lead character designer for the TV series Jackie Chan Adventures and The Batman. So I guess he did alright.

Unlike a lot of the other Awesome series, there's not a lot of crossovers or references to the other Awesome series. The only time they did was in the last Awesome comic to ever come out, Brigade, which I'll talk about more in another post.

There's really not much reason for me to recommend reading Kaboom for the purposes of this blog, but Matsuda's artwork and the fun storyline of the first volume certainly suggested something that had the potential to be great.  It also suggested the sort of enjoyable superhero stories that Moore envisioned for Awesome. That's an idea that he would take with him even after Awesome had run its course.

Elliot S! Maggin: SWAT! and the Seduction of the Innocent

So I came across this article at the always excellent Superman through the ages website about Elliot S! Maggin and the work he was planning on doing for Awesome. Maggin was a longtime Superman writer in the 1970s, who went on to write several influential Superman novels. He also happened to be good friends with Awesome Publisher Jeph Loeb, who convinced him to come and do some work for the company.

Maggin had the idea of playing on the ideas Moore had established in Supreme, especially in the 1950s. He proposed a 48-page one-shot called Seduction of the Innocent:

"It's Supreme and Fighting American and a lot of Alan Moore characters like Professor Night and the Fisherman and what was going on in the real world at that time. A major character is President Eisenhower. Some other minor characters are Bill Gaines, Jack Kirby, and [Red-baiting U.S. Senator] Joe McCarthy. It involves the Army-McCarthy hearings. I can't tell you what the story is about, but what it is really about is people with specific agendas imposing them upon the rest of the world in order to advance their own careers."

In Seduction of the Innocent, Maggin proposed that Supreme and the Fighting American find themselves the subjects of Congressional hearings, much as comic books were investigated in the real world by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The comic, of course, takes its name from the book of the same name, written by Dr. Frederick Wertham in the early '50s. Wertham's book purported to expose sexual overtones hidden in the comics of the day and claimed comics could and did cause children to become juvenile delinquents. The book led to Senator Kefauver's hearings, and it was these hearings that led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority, which set strict and often abusrd guidelines about what was and was not acceptable content for comics, which Moore's Swamp Thing was one of the first DC comics to take off of their cover.

"[Kefauver] was the guy that caused a lot of my friends to spend about ten years among the walking wounded.  Kefauver brought up this comic thing in order to get the [Democratic Party's] Vice Presidential nomination in '56, and this was a major tool in what he perceived to be his elevation in the world," Maggin says. "The way to there was to screw up the careers of a lot of guys.  And in the course of doing that, these [politicians] don't know what they are doing.  They don't know what they're playing with, the lives they're screwing around with." 

Maggin loved what Moore was doing in recreating a history for the Awesome heroes.

"A friend of mine who is a hot writer now with a larger company is saying things like, I wish this company wouldn't behave as if it didn't have a history.  And what Awesome is doing is creating their history.  They're doing it retroactively every day.  They're unloading the backstory.  And giving the public a chance to noodle around with history." 

Maggin also was working on a series called SWAT! which got a preview in the back of Fighting American: Rules of the Game #2. It's essentially Kickass before Kickass. Here's how Maggin explained it:

"Bruce Wayne without the fortune.  It's about the idea that you can be a superhero by training hard and being smart and going to the hardware store and buying lots of cool, cheap stuff.  It was created by Dan Fraga. He did a five-page promo on the idea and I said, geez, this could be really good.  And Dan said, I want to work with a writer.  So I said, okay, I can do that.

"It's about this 14 year old kid who has this mad crush on the head cheerleader, who is a head taller than he is, and his SAT scores are through the roof.  And she's got this notion that she is in the world to do good in it.  And that's what it is, these two kids that have decided that they are going to save the world.  Or at least their little corner of it.  And they do some good stuff.  They never get screwed up, because their hearts are pure.  There's nothing wrong with them.  They're like the Nineties' Billy Batson."

You can read the promo below. Nothing came of SWAT! or Seduction of the Innocent, as they were swallowed up in the Awesome financial crisis of early 1998.

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

Weekly Reading: Supreme #53

Supreme #53

Published by Awesome Entertainment in September 1997

The cover:

Title: 19th Dimensional Nervous Breakdown!

(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 back to Supreme. So now that he's gotten the Story of the Year and Judgment Day out of the way, Moore has established Supreme as a fleshed-out hero in a broad superhero universe. Gone are the flashbacks (though we haven't seen the last of Rick Veitch). And now it's time to play.

While working at DC, Moore never had a chance to write Superman on a monthly basis, and in some ways, I think everything Moore did to get Supreme to this point was so that starting from here, he could now write the Superman series the way he wanted to. And I'm not alone in saying that these are way better Superman stories than were being put out by DC at the time.

As you can see from the cover, Chris Sprouse has taken over as regular artist, and he has said in several interviews that he feels this issue was his best work on the series. I might disagree, as only he could have pulled off issue #50, but this one is a beauty.

The inside credits have changed a little, with a few new jokes from Todd Klein tossed in:

Apparently there's some debate about whether Supreme was popular enough to make it "worth publishing." Rick Veitch has said that sales on Supreme toward the end were regularly selling about 40,000 issues. Today, that would be one of the major hits in the entire industry, but at the time, that was a smaller audience. Awesome also had a major investor pumping money into all of the series, allowing Awesome to spend a lot of money, though it's doubtful they were making a lot of money. Anyway, I'll get into that more when we hit the financial crash of 1998.

So, the story starts with Ethan in a coffee shop explaining to Diana how he "heard" that Supreme tied up all of the loose threads from the end of the Story of the Year storyline. The first question I have is there anything more late-'90s than Diana's flower vest? Wow.

Anyway, we find out that Supreme is working on trying to retrieve Judy Jordan's personality from the empty shell of a body that Dax left behind when he shifted to MAGNO. Suprema comes and asks that Supreme deal with the villains in the Hell of Mirrors, who want Supreme to take Billy Friday away from them, as Suprema explains: "They're really anxious to get rid of him. Apparently he's been asking them questions about their childhoods and motivations." Hah.

Sprouse, unfortunately, still hasn't figured out Suprema's costume:

 

Um, no.

Billy, more concerned about his laptop communicator that he left behind, seems completely unhinged, so Supreme sends him to the Miskatonic Mental Institution for the Homicidally Distressed, which we get to see as a lightning bolt cracks behind it for effect. Moore is clearly enjoying himself.

Supreme then references that the Youngblood trial from judgment Day is just getting ready to start at the Citadel. The mention of superheroes causes Diana to pull out her make-ready of the latest issue of Omniman, except it isn't. It's this very issue of Supreme! We can see Ethan looking at this very page.

Concerned about revealing Supreme's personal secrets, Ethan takes it and runs off where we can see him thinking that he's reading his thoughts. It's very meta and very fun.

Supreme flies into Dazzle Comics and orders that they run the Omniman issue and not the Supreme issue, but a real life Omniman appears and tells them that he can't allow his secrets to be published like that.

There's a wonderful conversation between the two heroes.

Supreme: "B-But Omniman isn't real! You're just a comic-book character!"

Omniman: "Oh, and you're not? Isn't that you on the cover of that comic you're holding?"

Supreme: "Well, yes, but this is some sort of mistake. I'm not just a made-up fantasy hero..."

Omniman: "Oh, come on! In that outfit? What are you, the mailman?"

They decide to settle it by demonstrating their powers, which of course leads to a brawl between the two. Diana offers to help Supreme, as she's knowledgeable about Omniman's powers. It's a little odd that Ethan doesn't know, since he's been doing the art on the series for longer than she's been writing it, but maybe this is a subtle dig at how uninvested artists are on the series they're working on.

There's a wonderful bit as Diana and Lucas talk about the heroes fighting, with Lucas saying, "Believe me, Omniman coming to life and losing his marbles in downtown Omegapolis is the last thing Dazzle needs right now! I mean, with the industry in the state it's in..." He's interrupted as the heroes come crashing through into a comicbook shop. And then Carl Chamber, the new assistant editor shows up for his first day.

Carl's an interesting side character, as he's written to be a little oblivious, that he's a nice workplace foil for Diana. He very well could have been created just for the Civil War issue coming up, but I also think Moore had more in mind for him that we just never got to see. I hope so, anyway.

And then Omniman starts to break character and we learn that Omniman is actually Szazs, the Sprite Supreme. "I'm cute and I've got a big head!" he exclaims. And with that, he's already become a fan favorite. Szazs is competing in the Impolympics with the other imp, sprite and pixie analogs of the Awesome heroes to come up with "the most irrational and pointless stunt!"

I have to say I love the way Sprouse is able to mix his more realistic style for Supreme with a cartoony style for Szazs. It's a skill he'd Moore would make him use again in Tom Strong.

Szazs becomes a giant and wishes everyone could share his elevated view, but Supreme talks him out of making everyone into giants again. So Szazs makes a mirror image of the city on the sky, like something out of Christopher Nolan's movie Inception. Giant foam rubber clouds fall on the city, dampening Diana and the others on the ground.

Diana suggests that Supreme use the Supreme comicbook to see how to get Szazs to leave the dimension, which Supreme does. We find out that Szazs can only exist in prime-numbered dimensions, such as the three dimensions that we're able to see. Supreme explains that because we can sense time that we're in the fourth dimension, making Szazs disappear.

Moore sort of trapped himself by using up the fourth dimension explanation for this issues, meaning that if he ever had Szazs return, he'd have to explain the fifth and sixth dimensions, but I guess he was lucky that Supreme got cancelled first.

Anyway, the issue of Supreme remained as a memento, which Supreme put into his trophy room in the Citadel. We can see that the back of it is advertising the Judgment Day trade paperback (which never came out). We see Supreme talking to Die Hard, who then segues into explaining about the upcoming Youngblood murder trial. They walk toward the stadium, which we see being converted into the courtroom.

There's a nice bit, sort of setting the stage for the trial and why it's important to the Awesome characters.

Die Hard: "Well, whatever comic book I'm in has turned pretty grim recently. It'd be nice to just close the covers on it and begin a whole new chapter."

Supreme: "Look on the bright side. We've both been in this business long enough to know that no era lasts forever... even a dark one."

And right there is Moore's guiding principle on Awesome and comics in general. No longer is he content to complain about the dark state of comics. He's now working to start a new and better chapter. Though he may not have quite made it with Awesome, there's a strong argument to be made that Awesome created the foundation that he built his ABC line on, which opened the door to a better way to do comics and superheroes.

But we'll talk about that more later. For now, let's just enjoy this wonderful run of delightful comics.


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