Weekly reading: Supreme #41

My plan is to do a weekly reading of a single issue. I'll talk about the plot, characterization and anything else that comes to mind. I'll talk about artists and cover(s). And I'll post any random thoughts I have. During the rest of the week, I'll do some smaller posts about other things related to that issue, including interviews, anecdotes, random pieces of art, whatever. I'll also be adding to the annotations page. That doesn't sound too ambitious, does it?

A couple of things. 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 Supreme page.

So, let's jump in.

Supreme #41

Published by Image Comics in August 1996

It included three separate covers:

The first was by Jerry Ordway (more about him), a well-known Superman artist (though probably didn't know much about Supreme, as some of the coloring is off), who purposefully made the cover appear as a homage to the first Superman cover:

(Interestingly, DC ended this Superman series in the mid-1980s. Who wrote the last Superman story, you ask? Why, Alan Moore wrote it, of course in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow)

The second and third are by the then-current penciller on the series, Joe Bennett. Bennett (his actual name is Benedito José Nascimento), is a Brazilian artist who had been working on the previous issues of Supreme for a while and probably had no idea what he was getting into with Moore. Bennett leads off a group of acceptable, if underwhelming, group of artists who handled the modern stories in Supreme until Chris Sprouse showed up and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The third was also available signed by Moore through one of the exclusive variant cover companies (how that's a thing is beyond me).

The inside credits cover is all kinds of awesome just by itself:

Two more bits on the artists, and then we'll get into the story. Keith Giffen of Ambush Bug fame handled the limited flashback sequences that would be taken over and expanded by Rick Veitch in the next issue. And another famed Superman artist, Curt Swan was remembered in these credits. Supposedly, Curt was planning to work with Moore on Supreme, but died before he could create any artwork.

Moore, as he has done elsewhere, used this first issue to quickly dispatch all of the previous plotlines and characters, and start with the story he wanted to tell.

Supreme was already returning to Earth, but this was not his Earth. And astute readers probably realized this wasn't their Supreme when they read the line: "By the great indifferent galaxies!"

A special note should be made about the amazing lettering done by Todd Klein through this series. Moore would bring him on to the ABC line and elsewhere thanks to his work throughout.

I love the alliteration Moore was already using for Supreme: "Man of Majesty" "Ivory Icon" and the "Platium Paragon."

Soon Supreme confronts three other Supremes. The last line about this '90s model having powers so poorly defined as to be virtually limitless is just one of many dings against the then-current state of the comics industry Moore would throw into the mix on Supreme. He wasn't trying to give the audience what he thought the wanted in a '90s hero anymore.

"New Supreme" encounters three previous incarnations of Supreme and gives them a good whacking until Squeak the Supremouse showed up to save the day! And right there, Moore was signalling his days of grim, realistic Watchmen were loooong gone!

They calm New Supreme down, talk some sense into him and take him into the Supremacy. And so ends chapter one in this issue.

Moore has always been a strict formalist and likes to create a specific grid or formula for each series. Watchmen has been analyzed endlessly for this. Here, Moore sets up the idea of three stories within each issue. It allowed him to trim the acts of his story to more manageable 8-page chunks, and allowed him to create the wonderful flashback device we'll see next issue.

Chapter 2 begins with New Supreme entering the Supremacy, a celestial golden city dedicated to him. He'll chat with a number of Supremes before meeting King Supreme of the 1960s, the silver-age Superman analog, who explains the whole idea.

What happens to all the characters and continuity to comic book characters when they are revised? They go to Limbo. When the golden age Superman was revised by the silver age Superman, he went to Limbo. But rather than realizing that they're comic book characters, they experience it as a shifting to a Limbo space.

Moore, for a long time, lamented about DC Comics' revisions, ditching their longstanding and fun continuities. He hated the idea of Crisis on Infinite Earths. With the Supremacy, he found a way for it all to continue to exist, so he could play with it.

Moore gave a beautiful quote to George Khoury in his The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore about this idea from : "I decided that I’d rather liked the old Superman, that I’d rather enjoyed that rich mythology and continuity, all those kind of stupid but enduring elements, you know? Krypto the Super-dog, all of the old fashioned stuff that had so much more charm than the modem incarnation of the character. And so, having come up with what I thought was the core intriguing and whimsical idea of the Supremacy, the idea that there was some place where whenever a comic got revised, all of the stuff that had been revised out of the book ends up in some sort of limbo dimension. And that every conceivable misguided version of the character exists there somewhere, out of continuity. And once I’d come up with that fairly simple idea. I realized just how rich and funny I could make my treatment of it. The idea of a planet with hundreds of Supremes, every conceivable variation and where of course I could parody the various ills of the comic industry and where I could play with wonderful ideas, you know? Which was always the thing that Superman represented to me as a child. It didn't represent to me power or security or anything like that: it represented wonderful ideas, ideas that to me at that age were certainly magical. Where, to me, they provided a key to the world of my own imagination. And so what I wanted to do with Supreme was to try and give some of that sense of wonder, some of that pure imaginative jolt that I’d experienced when I was first reading comics. I wanted to try and give that to the contemporary readership so they could get an idea of what it had felt like. The kind of buzz that those wonderfully inventive old stories and comics had provided."

But the Supremacy wasn't just for long-running Supremes, it was for every variation, even the imaginary.But why does the Supremacy exist? Moore plants a few ideas from Supreme-of-the-Future. I can't decide whether this is pseudo metaphysics, actual theories or just Moore's sense of humor having the smartest Supreme of them all unable to realize he's just a comic book character.

New Supreme decides to return to the Earth to start his adventures. He goes through a golden portal and steps out of a... broom closet.

Ethan Crane, Supreme's alter ego, is now an artist who works at Dazzle Comics. What better way to add one more layer of meta to a comic about comic book characters?

I have to add a note that I love the coloring on Crane's outfit, with the V-neck shirt and red jacket, approximating his Supreme costume. crane returns to his home and finds a link to his forgotten past in Littlehaven.

And so ends the first issue of what would become a great run of Alan Moore's Supreme. Eric Stephenson, the then-editor of Supreme (and now-editor of all of Image Comics), wrote up a bit for the soon-to-be letters page.





A couple of small notes. Interestingly, Supreme #41 was a flip book. That means the comic can be read one way and then flipped over and there's a small preview or story that can be read from the other side. The story was a preview of Stephenson's New Men series. The artist? Chris Sprouse (who will become important). It was fate - Chris was there from the beginning.

A second note: In Issue #41, Kid Supreme, who had been a recurring character before Moore, decided to stay in the Supremacy. But actually, he didn't. Eric Stephenson had been writing a Kid Supreme series when Moore was coming on board Supreme. The Kid Supreme series seemed to just stop. But another story appeared in Asylum #9, Rob Liefeld's comic company's anthology series. There we see that Kid Supreme decided to leave the Supremacy at the last minute and come to Moore's new universe:

We don't really see much of him again until he turns up in the pages of Brigade #1, the last comic Awesome Entertainment ever published. But I'll talk more about that later.

Anyway, for annotations of Supreme #41, please go to the Supreme Annotations Page, which I'll be updating with each issue.

So, what did you all think?