Welcome

So a long time ago (the mid-1990s), the greatest writer in comics agreed to take over the writing duties for Image Comics' Supreme. He would radically reshape the character, the book, and due to forces beyond his control, a whole comic book universe. And it led to an award-winning run of comics, three additional titles (among several proposed) and ultimately led to the genesis of Moore's much better known America's Best Comics. And then it all went out of print and was forgotten by way too many.

Having gathered quite a bit of information about Moore's Supreme and Awesome runs, I decided to create a home for the forgotten Awesome. Over the course of a year, I put it all together here.

Each week I did a main "Weekly Reading" post that was a read-through of that issue. I followed that up with a couple of other posts about topics from that Weekly Reading or whatever else I came up with to talk about. You'll find the lost Youngbloods in the Youngblood section and the fan-edit of the last Supreme in After Awesome.

Below is the archive of posts broken up by book. Thanks for checking the site out!

Book 1: Supreme: The Story of the Year

Book 1: Judgment Day

Book 3: Supreme: The Return

Book 4: Youngblood

Book 5: Glory

Book 6: After Awesome

Book 7: 1963

Book 8: Night Raven

Book 9: A Small Killing

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

The revisions of Lex Luthor


Darius Dax has always been the Awesome analog for Lex Luthor, Superman's longtime foe. As hinted at in Supreme: The Return #2, Luthor's character has changed over the years, evolving as Superman has evolved. Here's a look at Luthor's revisions (from Wikipedia):

In his first appearance, Action Comics #23 (April 1940), Luthor is depicted as a diabolical genius and is referred to only by his surname. He resides in a flying city suspended by a dirigible and plots to provoke a war between two European nations. Lois Lane and Clark Kent investigate, which results in Lois being kidnapped. Luthor battles Superman with a green ray but Luthor is ultimately defeated by him, and Lois is rescued. Superman destroys Luthor's dirigible with him still on it, implying Luthor may have died, although stories ending with Luthor's apparent death are common in his earliest appearances.
Luthor from Superman #4

Luthor returns in Superman #4 and steals a weapon from the U.S. Army that is capable of causing earthquakes. Superman battles and defeats Luthor, and the earthquake device is destroyed by Superman. The scientist who made the device commits suicide to prevent its reinvention. In a story in the same issue, Luthor is also shown to have created a city on the sunken Lost Continent of Pacifo and to have recreated prehistoric monsters, which he plans to unleash upon the world. Superman thwarts his plans, and Luthor appears to have been killed by the dinosaurs he created. Luthor returns in Superman #5 with a plan to place hypnotic gas in the offices of influential people. He intends to throw the nation into a depression with the help of corrupt financier Moseley, but the story ends with Superman defeating him.

In these early stories, Luthor's schemes are centered around financial gain or megalomaniacal ambitions; unlike most later incarnations, he demonstrates no strong animosity toward Superman beyond inevitable resentment of Superman's constant interference with his plans. Luthor's obsessive hatred of Superman came later in the character's development.

In Luthor's earliest appearances, he is shown as a middle-aged man with a full head of red hair. Less than a year later, however, an artistic mistake resulted in Luthor being depicted as completely bald in a newspaper strip. The original error is attributed to Leo Nowak, a studio artist who illustrated for the Superman dailies during this period. One hypothesis is that Nowak mistook Luthor for the Ultra-Humanite, a frequent foe of Superman who, in his Golden Age incarnation, resembled a balding, elderly man. Other evidence suggests Luthor's design was confused with that of a stockier, bald henchman in Superman #4 (Spring 1940); Luthor's next appearance occurs in Superman #10 (May 1941), in which Nowak depicted him as significantly heavier, with visible jowls. The character's abrupt hair loss has been made reference to several times over the course of his history. When the concept of the DC multiverse began to take hold, Luthor's red-haired incarnation was rewritten as Alexei Luthor, Lex's counterpart from the Earth-Two parallel universe. In 1960, writer Jerry Siegel altered Luthor's backstory to incorporate his hair loss into his origin.

In 1944 Lex Luthor was the first character in a comic book (and one of the first in fiction) to use an atomic bomb in Superman #38. The United States Department of War asked this story line be delayed from publication, which it was until 1946, to protect the secrecy of the Manhattan Project. The War Department later asked for dailies of the Superman comic strip to be pulled in April 1945 which depicted Lex Luthor bombarding Superman with the radiation from a cyclotron.

Luthor vanished for a long time, coming back in Superboy #59 (Sept 1957), in a story called "Superboy meets Amazing Man". A flying costumed bald man probably in his forties appears in Smallville and starts helping people using his fantastic inventions. He later moves his operations to the nearby town of Hadley. Superboy finds he is using his inventions to set the town up so he can rob their bank, and stops him. In the last panel, Amazing Man is in jail and he tells Superboy he will regret it as sure as his name is Luthor and Superboy thinks that he will be Superman by the time he gets out and that Luthor's talents might make him an arch enemy.

In the origin story printed in Adventure Comics #271 (April 1960), young Lex Luthor is shown as an aspiring scientist who resides in Smallville, the hometown of Superboy. The teenage Luthor saves Superboy from a chance encounter with kryptonite. In gratitude Superboy builds Luthor a laboratory, where weeks later he manages to create an artificial life-form, which Luthor loved as if it were his own child. Grateful in turn to Superboy, Luthor creates an antidote for kryptonite poisoning. However, an accidental fire breaks out in Luthor's lab. Superboy uses his super-breath to extinguish the flames, inadvertently spilling chemicals which cause Luthor to go bald; in the process, he also destroys Luthor's artificial life form. Believing Superboy intentionally destroyed his discoveries, Luthor attributes his actions to jealousy and vows revenge. Luthor's revenge first came in the form of grandiose engineering projects in Smallville to prove his superiority over the superhero. However, the gesture proves a failure on multiple levels; for one, Superboy does not feel belittled, but instead is gladly supportive of Luthor pursuing his vindictive goal constructively. Furthermore, those projects also each go disastrously out of control and require Superboy's intervention, which Luthor rationalized as being sabotaged by the superhero. These mounting embarrassments further deepen Lex's hate for Superboy for supposedly further humiliating him, and he unsuccessfully attempts to murder the superhero. This revised origin makes Luthor's fight with Superman a personal one, and suggests that if events had unfolded differently, Luthor might have been a more noble person.

These elements were played up in various stories throughout the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Elliot S. Maggin's novel Last Son of Krypton. This revenge causes Luthor's family to disown him and change their names to Thorul. It also leads to years of Superman, Luthor, and Supergirl concealing the truth from Luthor's sister, Lena Thorul. She was told her brother died in a rock-climbing accident. She has ESP powers due to touching one of Luthor's inventions. Once she found out about Luthor being her brother and briefly lost her memory. However Luthor broke out of prison and gave her flowers he had developed that removed the bad memory from her mind.

In the 1986 limited series The Man of Steel, John Byrne redesigned Lex Luthor from scratch, intending to make him a villain that the 1980s would recognize: an evil corporate executive. Initially brutish and overweight, the character later evolved into a sleeker, more athletic version of his old self. Luthor is no longer recounted as having lost his hair in a chemical fire; rather, his hairline is shown to be receding naturally over time. Marv Wolfman, a writer on Action Comics who had one conversation with Byrne prior to Luthor's reboot recalled:

"I never believed the original Luthor. Every story would begin with him breaking out of prison, finding some giant robot in an old lab he hid somewhere, and then he'd be defeated. My view was if he could afford all those labs and giant robots he wouldn't need to rob banks. I also thought later that Luthor should not have super powers. Every other villain had super powers. Luthor's power was his mind. He needed to be smarter than Superman. Superman's powers had to be useless against him because they couldn't physically fight each other and Superman was simply not as smart as Luthor."

The Modern Age Lex Luthor is a product of child abuse and early poverty. Born in the Suicide Slum district of Metropolis, he is instilled with a desire to become a self-made man. As a teenager, he takes out a large insurance policy on his parents without their knowledge, then sabotages their car's brakes, causing their deaths. Upon graduating from MIT, Luthor founds his own business, LexCorp, which grows to dominate much of Metropolis.

Luthor does not physically appear in The Man of Steel until the fourth issue, which takes place over a year after Superman's arrival in Metropolis. When Lois Lane and Clark Kent are invited to a society gala aboard Luthor's yacht, terrorists seize the ship without warning, forcing Superman to intervene. Luthor observes Superman in action, and once the gunmen are dispatched, hands the hero a personal cheque in an attempt to hire him. When Luthor admits that he had not only anticipated the attack, but had arranged for it to occur in order to lure Superman out, the Mayor deputizes Superman to arrest Luthor for reckless endangerment. This, coupled with the indignation that Superman is the only person he could not buy off, threaten, or otherwise control, results in Luthor's pledge to destroy Superman at any cost. As such, he is more than willing to help other businessmen destroy other superbeings. He was instrumental in the apparent death of Swamp Thing, which jeopardized many lives as the Parliament of Trees attempted to replace him.

Despite general acceptance of Byrne's characterization, as evidenced by subsequent adaptations in other media, some writers have called for a return to Luthor's original status as a mad scientist. Regarding the character's effectiveness as a corrupt billionaire, author Neil Gaiman commented:

"It's a pity Lex Luthor has become a multinationalist; I liked him better as a bald scientist. He was in prison, but they couldn't put his mind in prison. Now he's just a skinny Kingpin."

Luthor's romantic aspirations toward Lois Lane, established early on in the series, become a focal point of the stories immediately following it. He is shown making repeated attempts to court her during The Man of Steel, though Lois plainly does not return his feelings.

In the Superman Adventures comic line based on the TV series of the same name, Luthor's backstory is identical to that of the Modern Age origin with slight changes. Luthor is shown originating in Suicide Slum, but at an early age already aware of how his brilliance outshone other children and his plans to have all Metropolis look up to him one day. Luthor's baldness is never explained, save for a brief depiction of him with blond hair in childhood, it is assumed the hair loss was natural. Luthor's parents die during his teenage years, however their deaths were indeed accidental and with no foul play by Lex. As in the usual story, Lex uses the insurance payouts to kick-start his future by paying for his tuition to MIT and eventually starting LexCorp. His hatred of Superman is explained as the citizens of Metropolis have had more admiration for the Man of Steel than for Lex.

More recently, DC has even had Lex Luthor win the U.S. presidency in 2000!

Alan Moore, in writing Darius Dax, has touched upon many of these elements, but ultimately decided to just have Dax be motivated by evil. Really, what more does Supreme's ultimate viallain need?

Monday, November 27, 2017

Weekly Reading: Supreme: The Return #2

Supreme: The Return #2

Published by Awesome Entertainment in June 1999


The cover:


Title: A World of His Own!

(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.)

(Originally, I had scheduled to start reading Youngblood this week, but it makes more sense to finish off the Awesome run of Supreme first, as there are some things that happen in these issues that will be referenced in the pages of Youngblood.)

With Chris Sprouse leaving Supreme, Awesome turned to a number of different artists over the next several issues, which makes The Return issues a bit of a hodgepodge art wise. It also gives the feeling that the whole thing could collapse at any given moment (which of course, it eventually did). Some of the artists worked really well with the material, some less so. We've moved beyond the best of the series and we're slowly stumbling toward the end.

Drat.

Oh well, let's dig in to this issue. First off, the cover. Notice that already two issues in and Awesome forgot to include "The Return" in the masthead. Whoops.

Drawing this issue will be Jim Starlin. Starlin is a favorite of mine, but I tend to only like his art when he's drawing his own stories. I'm also not certain he was a great fit for this specific issue, what with the need to draw so many different styles of characters, but instead they all feel like they're Jim Starlin-styled characters. Still, as we'll see, it could have been much worse.

We start off with a recap of Darius Dax's end from Supreme #52B, seen from Dax's point of view as he becomes the supremium isotope that gave Supreme his powers. And then he wakes up on a darkened street, being robbed by three other Daxes. It's, of course, a repeat of Supreme's story from issue #41, but this time it's Dax's story. So we get the original Dax, Daxor (a Dax from the future), and Delroy Dax (a blaxploitation Dax).

We also have some lettering problems, where bubbles aren't in the right order. Good job, Awesome!

Our Dax finds out that he's in Daxia, the Supremacy of Daxes that are no longer in continuity. Not one to let himself be robbed, he snags a molecular disrupter and threatens to vaporize the three.

Daxor: "This '90s model villain is dangerous, His almost complete lack of motivation makes him unpredictable." Ha.

But a duck version of Dax knocks our Dax out and the four of them take him to the Daxadrome to meet King Darius IV--the silver age Dax (known as the Maxi-Dax).

A side note: I'm not really certain who the Supremes/Supremas are here. Maybe really weak Daxes that the more aggressive Daxes made dress up as Supremes?

Anyway, in the second part of this three-part story, Original Dax tells us how he fought Original Supreme (in an homage to Superman's first adventure) and then disappeared into limbo with everything connected to him. Then more and more Daxes showed up (now with red hair, in a nice twist on Lex Luthor, who originally had red hair but lost it in an artist error). They soon built Daxia as the Supremes built the Supremacy. They even turned the sky black because they liked it better that way.

In the third part of the story, King Dax takes New Dax to a bar to tell his story to the assembled Daxes with the occasional interjections by '40s NAZI scientist Dax and Grim '80s Tittering Transvestite Serial Killer Dax. Ha. He tells them about how he took over Judy Jordan's body and fought Supreme, but was undone by supremium.

The Daxes conclude that the spacetime revisions might be a product of the supremium and they want to get their hands on some. But there isn't a current Dax in the ongoing continuity. New Dax volunteers to go back, but the others exclaim that would, "shatter all the rules of existence itself!" which sounds good to them. And so they go see Darius Duck, who has made a gateway to the correct continuity (powered by the mute apocalyptic Supreme-killer known as Doomsdax!). They send him to his secret hideout in the abandoned Omegapolis Museum.

And he's back from the dead (so that's how supervillains do that) activating his Torquemada computer assistant to prepare to kill Supreme.

Meanwhile, Ethan Crane is with Diana when he feels a chill. Diana says that she's having a problem writing Omniman when Ethan offers her the opportunity to meet Supreme, which Diana is excited about.

And that's where the issue ends. The last two pages, oddly, don't seem to have been drawn by Starlin and look off in a number of ways, from the Dazzle Comics logo being drawn by a six-year-old to where is Ethan's thumb in the panel above the Dazzle one. It's sloppy and unprofessional.

On the back cover, we got an advertisement for Alan Moore's The Allies series which never came to life. But I'll talk more about that in a post later this week.

This is where I say, "As always, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for all of the details and references that I completely missed." As I've pointed out, I've run out of the Supreme annotations by Aaron Severson and am now doing them myself. Please help me by letting me know anything I missed that can be added to the annotations. Thanks!

Friday, November 24, 2017

Chris Sprouse: Commissions and Evolution of a Comic Page

Unfortunately, Supreme: The Return #1 is the last we'll see of Chris Sprouse except for a cover he did for Youngblood, so let's send him out in style.

I had the opportunity to meet him at the CXC Comic Convention in Columbus, OH on Oct. 1, 2017 (pictured at right), and he was gracious enough to do this Supreme commission for me (which you can see him working on in that photo). It was very cool to meet a hero of mine:



I framed the piece with a Supreme poster signed by Sprouse and with an Alan Moore-signed script for issue #46:



Sprouse has been asked to do a number of Supreme commissions over the years, which I've collected from various sources and posted here:


 






 






There's also this Wizard pin up:


As you can see from my commission, Sprouse uses blue sketches to help guide him to make the best finished drawing he can. He does this all the time and you can often find some of his sketch guides online. Anyway, Checker, when they published the Supreme trades much later, included a cool feature that shows some of Sprouse's sketches and how they became final images. Here is the Evolution of a Comic Page:













Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Alex Ross and Supreme: World War Infinity

Alex Ross is a huge Alan Moore fan. Kingdom Come, which was Ross's idea, seemed to be based heavily on Moore's Twilight of the Superheroes proposal. And Alex Ross loved Moore's work on Supreme.

As Eric Stephenson mentioned in one of the letters column in Supreme, the plan had been to have Alex Ross paint a cover for a Supreme issue. Then came the financial crash and that idea went up in smoke. But Ross had painted two images for Supreme before then that are absolutely beautiful.

This one...


...was planned to be used as the cover for the first trade paperback of Moore's run on Supreme, as seen in this ad in Wizard Magazine #81 from May 1998:


It was eventually produced as a poster in another issue of Wizard as Awesome never produced the Supreme trades.

And the other image was this one, which was released as a signed lithograph from Dynamic Forces (there's a rumor that this was intended as a fold-up cover to issue #64):


Note Suprema's costume on this one. This came from her appearances in Youngblood, which suggests that this painting was done in late 1997 or early 1998. Supposedly Moore loved this image and mentioned that it included some Supremes he hadn't even thought of yet!

After Awesome's financial implosion, it was rumored that Ross wanted to do something to revive Supreme. Supposedly, he proposed a series or graphic novel called Supreme: World War Infinity. I assume that it would have taken place after Awesome finished publishing the remaining Alan Moore Supreme scripts, which end on a cliffhanger of (spoiler) all of the Daxes from Daxia (as we'll see in Supreme: The Return #2) about to attack Supreme's Citadel (end spoiler). Supposedly Alan Moore, who was working on his ABC line at this point, would have collaborated, but Ross would have been the primary creator. But I can't get anyone to confirm exactly what it was.

Here's Liefeld explaining the project's genesis:
"Alan and I are talking about a project that would team him with Alex Ross,"
Liefeld says. "It originally stemmed from me calling Alex and Alan in October
and telling them that if I only had a limited amount of dollars left to
publish comics in this business, I would give it to Alex and Alan and ask them
to do a book together. They both thought that was funny, and said they'd think
about it. It turns out that Alex really took to it and has talked to Alan
about it. Through their discussions, Alan really got interested, so it's
something that's in the development stages at the moment. Can't say if it will
happen for sure, but the possibility of it coming together gets better with
each day."

Later it seemed that Ross's Earth X writer Jim Krueger came on as to help with the writing. Here's a bit more about the proposed series (from Greg Williams' wonderful Supreme site), from a webpost in 1999:

ROSS, KRUEGER ON SUPREME
by Rob Allstetter

Awesome Comics' Rob Liefeld said that Earth X collaborators Jim Krueger and
Alex Ross will be working on a Supreme mini-series to be released next year.
"I'm a huge fan of these two gentlemen's work and we're going to be doing a
huge project with them in the middle of 2000," Liefeld said. "Alex Ross and
Jim Krueger are doing a Supreme Prestige Format, three-issue mini-series.

"I can't tell you the title, but Alex called me months ago and said, 'I've
created a hundred new characters for this series.' I said, 'You did not.
Don't tell me a hundred because I'll go repeat that.' He said, 'I'm telling
you, it's a hundred new characters.'

"It's a story I've never seen done in comics before. Alex will be doing the
third book. He's designing all the characters, painting all the promotion
pieces, he's painting all the covers and he's doing the third book of the
series."

Liefeld said he couldn't announce the other artists for the project's first
two issues because the deals haven't been signed yet.

"You're going to see a lot of build-up over the next year," Liefeld said. "I
think of it as our Kingdom Come. I'm extremely flattered that someone as busy
and talented as Alex and Jim have decided to do this for us.

"Alex has shown me some of the sketches and they will blow you away. Alex
continues to cement himself as one of the most versatile creators in the
field and this stuff is going to take him to the next level.

"He said, 'Rob, this will be the most controversial thing I've ever done.'
And I said, 'Well, if you're doing it with me, I can guarantee that will be
the case - whether you want it to or not.'"

Anyway, Ross did a number of sketches, most likely for the proposal, which showed new uniforms for Supreme, Suprema and Radar. In these sketches, Supreme appears much older and balder from Ross' previous paintings, which suggests to me that he planned for quite some time to have passed. But again, who knows.

Awesome published these sketches in something called Alan Moore's Awesome Universe Handbook in April 1999, just before launching Supreme: The Return. The sketches included quotes from Moore's various proposals and whatnot about Supreme and Suprema. Awesome also published the proposals for Glory and Youngblood, but I'll get to those later. Awesome supposedly planned another handbook with more of Moore's proposals, but for whatever reason, decided not to (I can't imagine it sold very well).

Anyway, here are the images from the handbook (and the two variant covers, one of which was digitally painted):


 


















Some of the sketches are great (who doesn't love Radar?) and some aren't to my taste, but they certainly point to interesting directions the series could have gone.

The images of Supreme and Radar were so popular that Ross did a real painting, which he released as a lithograph with a statue of the pair:



You can hear Ross describe his design process for Supreme's new costume and for the bust here:



It's funny, I have one of these busts, but it's really hard to explain to people that the only collectible produced for your favorite series is one with a costume that never was explained and came from an unpublished story that nobody really has any grasp of what it was supposed to be about.

Oh well.

Two years after the Awesome Universe Handbook came out, in 2001, just before Awesome went belly-up for good, Awesome licensed a small reprinting (limited to 50 copies) of Supreme #41 in a "Museum Edition" by the Jay Company. They used the same sketch and digitally painted sketch for the covers.


According to the Jay Company website:

Museum Edition Comics are produced by Jay Company comics in the US & are limited edition comic books with new variant artwork covers. Each Museum Edition is crafted on archival museum stock paper & individually hand numbered.

Here's the only information I've been able to find on the edition (thanks for the tip, Brandon), from an auction site:

Supreme Vol. 2 #41 Museum Edition, 1 of 50 (Image, 1996) Condition: NM. Here we have a supremely rare comic. Only 50 of these Museum Editions were produced, and this is number one of the 50! This comic also has the distinction of being scripted by Alan Moore, with his revision of the Supreme mythos. And it's got gorgeous front and back covers by Alex Ross. Museum Editions are not just rare, their extremely high-quality presentation have proved to make them highly sought after collectibles.

Because Alex Ross is a hot artist, later when Checker published the collections of Supreme, they used these sketches of Supreme for the covers. Again, Supreme never appears in this costume nor appears this old in these collections, but why worry about making any kind of sense.

Anyway, all of this was to explain how that Alex Ross variant cover on Supreme: The Return #1 got there. Now you know.