Okay, hopefully you've kept up and read both the main story in #52a and the backup features in #52a and the main story in #52b. Now it's time to look at the backup material for #52b. Clear as mud.
While the backup features in #52a contained a retro Suprema story, the rest were mostly timeless features that could have been run at any point in Supreme's history. Not so with the features in this issue. These stories all have a distinct retro feel, but are wonderfully different from one another. Let's take a look.We start with a one-page public service announcement that you'd often find in comics from yesteryear. I remember reading one-pagers with Spider-Man or some other character about not doing drugs or checking the battery in your smoke detector. Alan Moore being Alan Moore stretches this idea beyond the breaking point with "Supreme shines a light on National Flashlight Battery Inspection Day!"
Supreme warns two children that rather than going out to play, they should check the batteries in their parents flashlights, because who knows what tragedies could occur. Finding spent batteries, the children agree, "We'd better replace them all... and forget about going out to play!"
"That's right! Those kids may be happy now, yet by this time tomorrow they could be orphans!"
Some inappropriate laughter concludes the joke. Maybe I've read the joke too many times for it to stop being funny or it wasn't really all that funny to begin with, but it does add a nice little flavor to the wealth of extra features we get.The second is much better. Another of the World's Finest pastiches, this is the "Secret Origin of the Professor Night/Supreme Team!" The trio of heroes are congratulating themselves after foiling the Walrus and the Carpenter when Professor Night shows them a picture of when Supreme and Professor Night met as children at Star Beach Amusement Park, which they'd both forgotten.
Twilight reminds us that Supreme and Professor Night met as adults on a hijacked plane and learned each others' secrets when they both excused themselves to change into their costumes. But Supreme does remember visiting his aunt in Star Beach as a kid. And there he saw the Kendall manor, where Taylor lived, but he didn't venture out during the day because of his illness. He also saw the boarders at his aunt's boarding house before heading to the amusement park.At the park, he witnesses a gang dressed up like monsters rob the park. A young masked hero, calling himself The Midnight Mask, confronts them but gets thrown off the roller coaster. Kid Supreme turns up in the nick of time to save the masked boy. They chase the monsters into a tunnel, but lose sight of them. Kid Supreme's sight supreme bothers the Midnight Mask and they soon separate.
The next day Ethan called on Taylor and noticed sand in Taylor's shoes. Taylor, for his part, noticed hair dye on Ethan's fingers. They both admit to their secret identities. Taylor says that his idea came from the pulp magazines he likes to read, which feature stories on pulp heroes, including the Phantom Aviator. (This will be a point to remember for when we get to Judgement Day next week.)The boys suit up and decide to check the tunnel again. They find a trap door that leads into a giant tunnel under Star City and Kendall Manor. There, one of the monster crooks tells the other two that the cave leads to the legendary underworld and kills the other two to keep it all for himself. Supreme and the Midnight Mask go after him, but he trips and falls into an underground river. The two heroes dive in to find him but the water's mysterious effects sap them of their powers. By the time they give up and head home, they've forgotten the whole adventure and each other.
This story concludes with Twilight wondering if the tunnels, which Professor Night built his Halls of Night into still lead to the real underworld. We never find out. This always seemed like an idea Moore meant to use later but never got the chance to return to.
Then we get an awesome assortment of covers (drawn mostly by Rick Veitch, but one is by Melinda Gebbie) from Supreme's adventures, from his "imaginary story" death to Judy Jordan getting secret powers to Supreme returning to biblical time.
Then there's this description:
"Always especially popular amongst Supreme readers have been those stories, like this one, where Supreme travels back in time using the League of Infinity's time-tower to match his skills against champions of the past. In this old testament tale, Supreme not only battles Sampson and Goliath, but uses speed supreme to part the Red Sea for an unwitting Moses, for whom he also sets the burning bush on fire using his heat vision."
Um... what? So Supreme was Moses' God? I love that Moore just tucked that in there.
Finally we get two week's worth of Supreme's newspaper comic strips where he fights a series of classic comic strip characters, such as Popeye and Li'l Abner. They turn out to be robots--Syndicatrons--created by a Rube Goldberg-like inventor, who is upset that the characters have stolen his space on the funny pages and set out to discredit them.While it's impressive that Moore wanted to expand his examination of the Superman history even to the newspaper strips that were popular back in the day, what interests me is less the structure of them and what he decided to include within them.
I've talked before about how Moore was starting to erase the boundaries between fictional universes, and here he's continuing that effort. We're getting Supreme interacting with Popeye! Add that to the cover description suggesting that he interacted with Moses and you can see that there are few boundaries left for him.
You can say I'm reading too much into it, but I really think that by this point Moore has started to see all of fiction--including religion--as fair game to mix and play with. In Idea Space there are no boundaries.
Keep that thought in mind as we head into our next stage with Judgment Day.
As always, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for all of the details and references that I completely missed.
