Weekly Reading: Judgment Day Final Judgment

Published by Awesome Entertainment in October 1997

The covers:

Title: Brought to Book

(Judgment Day 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.)

So three months after the last issue, Awesome finally released the final issue of the miniseries (sort of). On the cover, Dave Gibbons finished off his three-part image that made a cool poster (I'm a sucker for covers that link up to make a bigger image):

 

Isn't it interesting that Awesome decided to use a Dave Gibbons image with black and yellow lettering to sell the miniseries. What could they have possibly been trying to reference?

Anyway, on to the issue. Marat Mychaels does his best Liefeld impersonation at the dawn of the next day. Shaft and Sentinel are talking as they fly in, Shaft in disbelief at how things are turning out. "I guess this case is full of revelations. Revelations as in apocalypse... Revelations as in judgment day." Subtle dialog there, Alan.

We then switch to Fisherman and Toby, who lay on the fishing sayings a little too thick: "Don't cast your net too wide, Skipper..."

It's important to remember that the Fisherman and Skipper were always intended as ridiculous characters, even in the pastiches in Supreme. Now that they've recently awoken from the 1960s, it's jarring to hear them still speak as in dialog from comics put out then.

We find out that Toby thought Troll was the most likely subject, but a stray video of a Youngblood barbeque has him thinking differently. He sends two suprematons off to get one last bit of evidence. The trial starts up again and Toby calls Blake Baron, the occult agent. Baron refuses to acknowledge The VEIL, but tells of what he knows personally, starting with his service in WWII.

Flashback to the war. We learn that the company's mascot, Sammy Smith, got the book when the Phantom Aviator died (back in the first issue of the miniseries). Sammy Smith rewrote what the book could do and became Storybook Smith of the Allied Supermen of America. Eventually Smith became a late-night movie host before disappearing completely.

A letter from Smith's common-law wife fills in more details in a wonderful flashback by Rick Veitch. We see how Storybook Smith joined the Allied Supermen and how he had already started writing the storyline for his daughter in his book. We find out that Smith is the descendant of Eliza Smith, Deliverance Drue's servant girl.

Smith moved on from superheroing and got into drugs. Eventually he was robbed and the book disappeared from his life. In a hilarious bit, even Detective Gorilla couldn't track the book down for him. So he turned to late-night movies before walking out and never returning. But he left a gift with his longtime girlfriend: she was pregnant. The baby grew up to be Leanna Creel, Riptide.

The suprematons return with Elizabeth Langston, Marcus's (Sentinel) wife, and the book of destiny, which Toby soon reads from.

And we get our last flashback, by Ian Churchill, whose detailed, modern style is a good representation for the late 1980s and 1990s. Marcus got the book from his thief of a father in the late 1950s. After that, there are two stories in the book for Marcus, one crossed out. The crossed out one has him become a drug addict and dead from a botched robbery. The other one has him go to college, invent a supersuit and form Youngblood. "He writes it so that he gets to be the bestest superhero, in the bestest super-team in the world."

But the adventures aren't dark enough.

"Around the middle ninteen eighties, Marcus has grown bored of this. He decides to write a nastier, shadowier and more violent world for himself... and for everybody else. Our entire reality changed and darkened."

Look at the panel Moore tells Churchill to draw for this.

Where have we seen this before? Oh, that's right. Here:

So, everything in comics went bad because of the Dark Knight Returns? Um, that's an interesting take. But that feels like he's blaming Miller, which I have a hard time imagining that's what he's doing. He's spoken quite eloquently on how important Miller and DKR were to comics and to Moore's growth as a writer.

You know, it might have been better if Moore had used The Killing Joke, which we know he doesn't like, but this sort of leads down a different path of blaming someone else. Does Moore take responsibility for the awful comics that followed Watchmen and The Killing Joke? Or was it all DKR's fault? Would comics have been better if DKR never happened? What would comics have looked like then?

Of course, DKR and Watchmen were the poster childs for a movement to darken comics anyway. And I believe we would have gotten the same crappy comics we got in the late '80s and early '90s regardless of those two seminal books. And we shouldn't blame good writers for the bad writers.

There's also the issue that Moore and Miller's politics have gotten in the way of their relationship over the years. But I'll deal with that in a later post.

As Toby explains: "Gone was the naive wonder of the 'forties, the exuberance of the 'fifties and the nobility of the 'sixties. ... Now, heroes motivated only by money or psychopathology stalked a paranoid, apocalyptic landscape of post-nuclear mutants and bazooka wielding cyborgs."

So, Toby recites Langston's story as his confession, telling how Leanna saw the book in Langston's house and knowing what it was, took it. He went to her apartment to get it back, killing her in the process. Then he went downstairs and wrote the opening monologue from the first issue into the book, making Knightsabre the fall guy.

Sentinel attacks Toby, grabbing the book. Supreme and Suprema knock out his flight controls with sight supreme. Langston threatens them with the book, but an arrow from Shaft knocks the book off of the Citadel. When Langston jumps after it, Toby uses a fishing pole to catch him and reel him in. From the moment Moore created the Fisherman in Supreme, I'm sure he was waiting for the day someone would catch a crook with a rod.

Later, the case over, we find out that they locked Sentinel into Supreme's Hell of Mirrors. We find out that Kid Thunder was Langston's forefather and that Deliverance Drue's curse of damning his seed to hell came true.

Now that the case has been cleared, the Allies decide that they might reform. Shaft is talking to Waxey Doyle about reforming Youngblood with a new team and that the New Men are talking to Blacky Conqueror about exploring the dinosaur-filled Island of Conqueror Island.

In a final epilogue, we see the book fall into the hands of a homeless girl. When she sees the book, she says, "Oh wow." And the story goes on.

And that's Judgment Day.

The most obvious aspect of the book is that there's a wonderful irony of Alan Moore using a Rob Liefeld-illustrated comic to rail against the stories told in Image-era of comics.

The ad for the Judgment Day TPB
from Awesome that never came.
It included a 10-page prelude story
that was only six pages in the
Sourcebook. What a strange company.

It's also refreshing that Moore is clearing that landscape out to start the new Awesome universe that harkens back to the '40s, '50s and '60s, but will also be its own thing. Probably his Youngblood will best represent that, which we'll get to soon. It feels like he's optimistic for this new thing to commence, which makes one hopeful for Awesome's future, even knowing that it all ends badly.

Obviously, some of it works and some of it doesn't. It's got a weird structure and some of the dialog is very bad. There's also the problem (as reader Ice pointed out) of using a terribly-written piece of violence against a woman to wipe clean a period where terrible things often happened to women characters. But overall, I think it works because it's so personal to where Moore was as a comic creator at this time. The Hermes parts are some of the best interpretations of his magical beliefs, at least until we get to Promethea, and of course the greatest magic would be the magic of stories that have always existed. Moore's DNA is all over this series and I think to write off any of this work as work he did for the money completely misses what he was doing at Awesome.

There's also the possibility that it was truncated from what Moore wanted to do. A friend with connections to Awesome passed along this tidbit a little while back:

For instance Rob [Liefeld] one day found a story idea that he said was phenomenal, and asked Eric [Stephenson] why they didn't publish it.  Eric said that it was the other half of Judgement Day, and Rob was trying to keep it short.  Can you believe that!  There is more to Judgment Day!

Despite all that, it's a series that I appreciate because of all the parts that do work. As he said in the interview I posted a while back, this is Moore at play. And all work and no play makes Alan a very dull boy.

Next time we'll get into the odd last bit of Judgment Day in Judgment Day Aftermath.

As always, please check out the Annotations Page, for all of the details and references that I completely missed.