Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

Prior to Supreme, Moore had already contributed two major works to the Superman mythos. The first was a story for a Superman annual: For the Man Who Has Everything, which is one of the finest Superman stories ever told and if you haven't read it, please go find it. A year later Moore wrote the second, and better known, which was the last story of the silver-aged Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

Does this cover look familiar?

As I've mentioned before, by the 1980s, DC was overwhelmed by continuity. There were multiple Earths, with different versions of Superman and the other DC heroes. DC being DC decided to wipe them all away and start again from scratch with the big crossover event: Crisis on Infinite Earths. While Moore was opposed to the wiping away of the old continuity, he couldn't stop it.

Outgoing Superman editor, Julius Schwartz, decided to "make believe" his last two issues of Superman and Action Comics were the actual last two issues ever. Moore demanded that Schwartz let him write this final story. Longtime Superman artist Curt Swan drew the issues.

The story was amazingly well received and has often been cited as one of the best Superman stories ever. Which makes it weird for me to say this - I don't particularly like it. But I'll get to that in a second. Let me detail the story.

So the book starts with Bizarro, the jokey Superman opposite, going on a murderous rampage, destroying his planet and ultimately committing suicide to truly be the opposite of an alive Superman. And then Lois Lane, in a future framing structure says, "Still, after what came next, Bizarro's death seemed trivial."

In other words: prepare for blood.

So more people die as Clark Kent is unmasked as Superman. The Daily Planet building is attacked. So Superman takes those closest to him and holes up in the Fortress of Solitude. Meanwhile Braniac's robot head fuses to Lex Luthor's body, taking him over, and they move to attack Superman and his friends. Ultimately Superboy's childhood sweetheart Lana discovers that Superman loves Lois and not her. She attacks Braniac and Lex asks her to kill him, which she does. She then gets killed. Jimmy Olsen gets killed, too. The Kryptonite Man is killed by Krypto, who dies protecting his master. And then it's revealed this is all a plot by Mr. Mxyzptlk, who has decided he wants to be evil rather than a trickster. So Superman kills him.

Ugh.

Look, I know I'm selling the story short, and there are a lot of poignant and well done moments that are well regarded, but frankly, the basic plot of this story is awful. When you think of the silver-age Superman, do you want his final chapter to be one of large swaths of death and destruction? Can't we just leave that to Zack Snyder?

One of Superman's most important traits, which is often neglected by lesser creators, is gentleness. If he is a being who can do almost anything and could easily destroy a person or a world without meaning it, he would have to spend his life willfully making sure he never does. That's what makes Superman compelling to me. I didn't want to see the end of this gentle character and his richly imaginative world splattered with so much blood.

(As bad as this is, it's nothing compared to what Moore had planned for Superman and the other heroes of the DC universe in his Twilight of The Superheroes proposal. If you want to read the whole text, it can currently be found here.)

That's what makes me wonder about the opening jokes of Supreme #43. Was Moore aware of how much of that blood is on his hands, or is he projecting it onto Billy Friday, representing the writers and editors who decided to tear apart the old continuity? Or onto the writers who followed him and used Watchmen as an excuse to grim and gritty every superhero? I'm not sure.

Moore has acknowledged that some of his 80s DC work left a bad taste even in his mouth. He has said that he regrets The Killing Joke for its viciousness and that he is upset how many writers saw Watchmen as a license to do grim and gritty superheroes. This is a favorite quote of mine where he talks about the comics that followed Watchmen:

"The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it's like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we'd got this insane right-wing voter fear running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work. But it was a genuine bad mood, and it was mine. I tend to think that I've seen a lot of things over the past 15 years that have been a bizarre echo of somebody else's bad mood. It's not even their bad mood, it's mine, but they're still working out the ramifications of me being a bit grumpy 15 years ago. So, for my part, I wouldn't say that my new stuff is all bunny rabbits and blue-skies optimism, but it's probably got a lot more of a positive spin on it than the work I was doing back in the '80s. This is a different century."

Which brings me back to Supreme. Moore has said that he felt like Supreme was a chance for him to sort of apologize for the bad mood of the '80s. And there is a wonderful optimism and joy in Supreme that wasn't always noticeable in his previous superhero work. There's a gentleness. And that's what I love about it.

Anyway, there's one more part that I want to get into with Whatever Happened... Moore wrote a little introduction to the story, which is as famous as the story itself. In it, he explained that this was an Imaginary Story, which was a kind of story told in silver-age Superman comics, where it was understood that what happened there didn't affect what was happening to the real Superman. They were What If... or Elseworlds stories of their times.

But aren't all stories imaginary? Of course. But what the combination of the imagination and the story produces is an idea important to Alan Moore and would become very important to the Awesome Universe to come, as we'll soon see.