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!
I'm still really looking forward to your posts about Youngblood (what a great series! It's too bad it's unfinished), but I'm probably more excited now that you'll get to my favorite issue of Supreme, Return #6, a few weeks earlier.
ReplyDeleteJim Starlin's an interesting artist, in that he's worked so much on "Jim Starlin style" stories that he's almost typecast. He's an incredibly talented creator, but I can hardly see his name without thinking "will this story feature a cosmic Thanos-type meeting Supreme?!"
I really like when this series looks more closely at the concept of the Supremacy and Daxia. The whole idea is just a fascinating little twist on old school comics. I like all the Daxes, too. I'd love a Daxia spin off series. I imagine they're all just constantly double crossing each other. I'm surprised anybody is in charge!
"In other words, it looks Awesome." Nice. The last two pages are odd, now that you mention it. They look like they could be somebody maybe trying to do a Chris Sprouse style look? It's clearly not Starlin's art, unless it's been majorly reworked.
I look forward to the post on "Alan Moore's The Allies". I really enjoyed the few issues of Youngblood that exist. I'm sure Allies would have been a similarly fun twist on the hero group dynamic.
Sorry, I completely forgot that Moore introduced some new characters in the League of Infinity that become important (well, sort of) for dealing with a later issue of Youngblood. So I wanted to get to that before jumping over and doing Youngblood.
DeleteI feel similarly about Starlin, but only when he's doing his own artwork and writing. If he's just writing, he can go in a lot of interesting directions, though they'll probably be dark.
I think you're onto something with Daxia. I imagine that if we ever got Moore's version of the fight between the Supremacy and Daxia, it probably all would have fallen apart for the Daxes due to infighting.
It's hard to tell what The Allies would have been without the proposal. Really, all we have to go on is the little story that was in Judgment Day: Aftermath which I found underwhelming (but how much can you really do in 9 pages?). It's also hard to tell whether Moore planned to write it, as in the interview he gave to Combo magazine, he said he wasn't sure what series he was planning to write and, if he did, for how many issues. Remember, he was also working on From Hell at the time, so he might not have been up for writing as many series as he did when ABC launched a little later.
I think all those panels from the last two pages are just badly photoshopped panels from Sprouse's Supreme 53, yes? The panel you mention with the missing thumb is the panel of Ethan holding a copy of the Supreme 53 that Szasz created, with the comic-book taken out (with Ethan's thumb missing because it originally was blocked by the comic he was holding).
ReplyDeleteShoddy production on this issue all around. Tons of typos and misplaced balloons. The most egregious is the characters talking about "1996," and the letterer put it in as "1966" instead, which makes a real hash of the whole conversation about the last revision.
Yeah, you're definitely right. It's either a photoshopped copy or traced from that Sprouse page (which wouldn't be a shock, if the rumors of Liefeld's work ethics are to be believed).
DeleteI'm sort of two minds on this. On the one hand, I hate how Supreme was being treated by this point. On the other, it's sort of amazing that it came back at all.
Worst issue of the run, followed closely by The Return No 6.
ReplyDeleteYou think so? The writing is really good, but the art is terrible and the lettering mistakes are worse.
DeleteI like Return 6 quite a lot, as I find Moore's take on Kirby in Idea Space really interesting.
If I had to pick a worst issue, for me it's probably The Return #3. While I love the trip to Amalynth, the future time does nothing for me and I find the trip to the Supremacy too silly.