Weekly Reading: Supreme: The Return #6

Supreme: The Return #6

Published by Awesome Entertainment in June 2000

The cover:

Title: New Jack City!

(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.)

For almost two decades this was thought to be the end of Supreme. To be honest, it wasn't so bad, as least it ended on a really strong note. And, as an added bonus, I have the script for this issue, so we can see what Moore had in mind (to be honest, it's pretty close).

As we've seen, Alan Moore and Rick Veitch are both students of comics' crazy history. And no history is complete with recognizing Jack "King" Kirby. So it's only right that Moore and Veitch would dedicate an entire issue to the man and his work.

Originally, the plan had been for Veitch to draw all of the Kirby elements and Chris Sprouse to draw all of the Supreme figures flying through the Kirby world. So Veitch drew the pages with Supreme figures in pencil to be finished by someone else, like this:

 

With Sprouse having left a long time ago to go work on Tom Strong, Rob Liefeld filled in. It worked for most of the pages. And Todd Klein returned and do the lettering on the Kirby-based pages, which made a big difference. And this issue is a beautiful gift from Moore and Veitch and Klein to us. Perfectly timed for Christmas!

We start this issue with Supreme flying to the Himalayas to investigate the sudden appearance of a town. When he descends through the clouds, what he sees is an entire city filled with multiple backdrops. Here's how Moore described it...

 

...and how Veitch turned it into a two-page spread:

 

There are modern skyscrapers next to structures from mythology. Supreme lands on a Brooklyn street from the 1930s where he's confronted by some streetrats known as the Little Tough Guys. They say that they're just doing the "monarch's will." Then a city maintenance hero, called The Custodian, shows up.

Supreme agrees to help them fight Doctor Dread somewhere down in the Wonder Well! They soon find Dread (a Dr. Doom knock off) and an Atlas-era Kirby monster called "Baragoom, the creature that walked like a thing!" Ha.

As they fight, Dread creates a magical fog to conceal his escape. Supreme chases after him and the other heroes, but comes out in a World War II warzone where he finds Sgt. Strong's Dambustin' Dogfaces and the Battlin' Yank. They join the fight with other '40s era heroes fighting the Steel Swastika.

Supreme flies on into a giant woodland where he finds a twisty homeland like that of Kirby's New Gods. One of the New Breed recognizes that Supreme is an outsider by, "the eyebrows... the lack of shadow on the chin. You do not have the regent's mark upon you!" Supreme picks up a guide, Davey Krikkit, who will lead him to the realm of the gods to meet this regent.

They head up an amazing staircase, which leads Supreme to ask, "How can all this landscape fit into one remote mountain valley?"

Krikkit: "Mister, that's nothin'! Why, I've heard it said that this whole >chirrik< cosmos could fit inside one man's >chirrik< head!"

As they go on, Supreme notes that there's something childish, but also something divine about the landscape. Krikkit says those two are the same thing. Eventually they come to another gate that leads them even higher.

Krikkit: "The thing about >chirrik< imagination is, there ain't no ceiling! It just keeps >chirrik< going up!"

Then they're introduced to the essences of the gods. Supreme notes that they don't look like the standard gods, but Krikkit explains that the look different depending on how they're filtered through the human mind.

The gods send him through the narrow gallery of truth to the omegadrome, the central aleph-point of all existence.

And inside he finds the king... the disembodied head of Jack "King" Kirby! All kinds of characters are growing out of his head. Supreme wants to know what he is, and the king explains that he was an imagineer who used to farm ideas in Idea Space. 

As Supreme talks to the King, we see his head as a collage of panels illustrated with Kirby-esque ideas and patterns. It's very beautiful. Here's how Moore set Veitch's imagination going:

 

And here's what Veitch came up with:

 

  

The king talks about how he used to only spend part of the time in Idea Space, but now he lives here permanently after his physical body died. But that doesn't matter, because, "All we are is ideas."

King: "The ideas we have, the ideas other people have about us, the ideas we have about ourselves... what else is a personality?"

The king appreciates not having hands slow him down from the act of creation anymore.

Supreme wants to know what he's doing in Supreme's world, to which the King replies that this seemed like a nice place he could set up a retreat for his concepts.

King notes that Supreme is a Wylie-type character from the book "Gladiator" and that dark detectives are Gibsons and warrior princesses are Moultons. The king then has an idea for a war between a planet of good and a planet of evil, but Supreme thinks that's unlikely.

And then the king and his worlds are gone. See what I mean about this being a good ending for Supreme?

As in his Hermes-centered Judgment Days, Moore addresses his basic concepts about imagination, Idea Space and the power it has over us and our worlds. It's also interesting to note that he basically told Supreme that his world is in Idea Space. And this world is linked to all the other worlds with Supreme and Darius Dax in combat, all powered by supremium, making anything from imagination possible. Unfortunately, Moore never got to put his period on the Supreme story, though it seems clear where he was headed.

The brilliant thing about this issue is that it's taking Moore's ideas, filtering them through the body of work (pun intended) of Kirby and doing it in a way that honors Kirby. As we've talked about before. The best comics aren't just stories... they're works that can only exist as comics. And this issue could only work as a comic.

Anyway, Supreme returns to Diana in time to have a dinner date, where he and Diana make light of her seeing another guy (the guy being Ethan).Diana then shows him the makeready of the Omniman issue (with the Todd Klein reference in the script removed... drat).

Diana wonders if the Supremes in the Supremacy will mind her using the idea for her comic, but Supreme replies, "How could a comic book affect the Supremacy?"

We'll see. But it would take 12 years for me to see it happen, with Revelations not coming out until 2012. It'll take us a while too, as I'm switching to Youngblood starting next week.

In the letter's page, it was announced that Awesome was planning to do a collection of Supreme #41-#46 under the title "Secret Origins."

 

As we'll see, collections would come out, but they should have stayed secret. But I'll talk about that in a post later this week. As a nice Christmas week bonus, I'll be doing posts each day this week--including interviews with Alan Moore and Rick Veitch--so keep an eye out for those.

I heard a rumor that after Supreme's supposed demise, Liefeld tried to sell Supreme to Marvel. He offered to redo the whole thing with one artist (probably himself), but at the time Marvel was doing a series called Supreme Power and they didn't want their fans to get confused. And so it languished for a long, long time. But it's not the end. As we'll see.

As always, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for more details and references and please help me by letting me know anything I missed that can be added. Thanks!