Weekly Reading: Judgment Day: Aftermath

Published by Awesome Entertainment in March 1998

The covers:

Title: None

(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.)

And then, five months after the last issue of the miniseries, long after most of the readers had forgotten what had happened, Awesome came out with this sort of epilogue -- a collection of tales that was supposed to point the way forward for the new Awesome Universe. There were a few problems with that idea, though.

First off, the issue took so long to get out, some of the comics it was supposed to precede, such as Youngblood #1, had already come out, making that team's introductory story even more of a tangled mess than it needed to be (which I'll explain more when I get to Youngblood).

Second, this issue was published in March of 1998, just as the major financial investor in Awesome Entertainment pulled all of his funding for the company, near-fatally injuring the organization. Most of the talent would soon leave for other work, most notably in the architect for the new Awesome Universe in Moore himself.

Also, as long as we're talking about what's wrong with this issue, there's a noticeable problem with the lettering where some lines are repeated and some are obviously out of order. It's annoying and shoddy, much like the color reproduction. Add these to the number of bad omens for Awesome's future.

But let's ignore all of that for now and read this in the order Moore intended, so right after the rest of Judgment Day.

For the sake of these weekly readings, I am skipping the Glory and Youngblood stories in this issue, as they fit in certain orders with their ongoing series, and it gets too confusing to take them separately.

I have to say that I'm a fan of the Adam Polina cover on this issue. There aren't many images that represent most of the heroes Moore was arranging for Awesome, and this comes about as close as they'll get. The second cover, by Ed McGuinness was one of a series of variants he was doing across the whole company's books of little chibi characters. Clearly manga had taken root in the American comic scene by 1998.

We can't talk about this issue without talking about Gil Kane. Kane was a legend in the field. He drew the most famous Spider-Man story in the Night Gwen Stacy Died. He created the Silver Age Green Lantern, the Atom and Iron Fist. Name just about any superhero and there's a good chance he drew them. He was also a dynamite Western artist, which he displayed in Judgment Day Alpha and a later issue of Supreme.

Kane was one of the first to experiment with graphic novels with the self-published sci-fi spy story His Name Is... Savage. As a sort of parody, Kane became the lead character in a little story that appeared in DC Comics' supernatural anthology House of Mystery #180 (June 1969). In the six-and-a-half-page tale, penciled by Kane and inked by Wally Wood, frustrated comic-book artist Gil Kane kills his House of Mystery editor, Joe Orlando. Orlando, also an artist, and Friedrich exact revenge by drawing Kane into artwork that is then framed and mounted in the house.

Moore, being the encyclopedia of comic history that he is, decided to use the idea of Kane as a character in Judgment Day: Aftermath in the framing sequence that is one of the weirdest things Awesome put out but also probably one of the most personal to Moore's belief in Idea Space.

We see Kane, in some sort of space suit, fly through the a rainbow color field to some sort of space station overlooking a planet that looks like Earth. The space station is a "concept-generator" and represents Awesome Entertainment. Kane is a freelancer in the "imagineering corps."

He flies down and meets up with Fighting American, whome he recognizes as "one of Jack's boys," referring to Jack Kirby. He then says that he heard Kirby was over on this side full time (as Kirby was dead by this point). Fighting American says that yes, Kirby is off with Woody and some of the other guys. (Moore will get into what Kirby is doing in a later issue of Supreme.)

Fighting American hands Kane off to some weird Awesome mascot named Andy Awesome, who takes him to the concept generator. "We've got some discs of raw idea-stuff that needs shaping into visible, material form," Andy tells him. Kane jokes that he remembers when they came as typescript, before settling in to visualize Moore's scripts.

And then we're into the Youngblood and Glory stories that I'm going to wait on. Each story was about six pages long, so there's really not much to them. They're more like the sampler pack, giving you a taste of what Moore had in mind for each character and group, giving us the best idea of what the Awesome Universe was supposed to look like.

After those two come the NewMen's story. Moore has changed the NewMen from yet another supergroup into a Challengers of the Unknown-inspired group of explorers, discovering more about the mysterious Conqueror Island. In redesigned uniforms, Reign, Byrd, Kodiak and the others explore a volcanic vent that leads to a magma-filled pit. Over the radio, Dash (with a broken ankle) and Dr. Conqueror relay information to the group.

In the pit, they're attacked by a '50s gigantic monster called Magman. The burning-hot creature makes short work of the NewMen but not before they discover that Magman is a she and she's protecting her clutch of eggs. The NewMen depart wondering if they shouldn't have gone to the Youngblood tryouts (which we'll read about soon), but decide that they like the idea of being explorers and advancing knowledge.

As I said, there's not much there, but it was a new way to take the group. Awesome planned to revamp the NewMen series to follow the lead of this story, but when the financial crisis hit, that plan never came about. This was all that we got of Alan Moore's NewMen, and probably ever will unless his series proposal ever turns up.

Next up was Maximage, who we last saw in Judgment Day Omega. As far as I know, he never planned to give her her own title, but he suggested that he had plans to work her into the pages of Youngblood (which we'll get to later). She had her own series at one point in the Extreme days, but Alan Moore decided to give her a fresh start, basically as the Dr. Strange of the Awesome Universe.

Seeing demons in New York City and reading lots of bad omens there, she decided to set out for San Francisco to find the house of a previous Master Magus, Eddie Saint. Oddly wearing her costume under a trenchcoat, she goes to the house unheeded but is welcomed by the master magus' servant Lei-Ling.

Lei-Ling fills Lori Sanders (Maximage) on the previous master magi: Eddie Saint, the third eye in the '50s; Della Psychic in the middle '60s; Stephen Hush, ghost-breaker from the '20s; Dr. Mystic in the '40s. And now Lori. They see some trophies from the various magi before Lori finds an old table with her name carved in one of the chairs. She sits and falls into a weird time loop with the magi from various times all talking over one another.

Lori talks about a mission against the Coven in 2004 and another in 2011. Realizing that time is messed up, she stands away from the table and returns to 1998, where she settles into the house. The table's a neat device and another way for Moore to play with the historical heroes he invented for the Awesome Universe in Judgment Day. It's a real shame that we never got to see more of it.

Next up is a seven-pager on The Allies, Awesome's version of the Justice League, featuring Supreme, Glory, Die Hard, Roman, Professor Night, the Fisherman and Spacehunter. All of The Allies get summoned to their headquarters on an asteroid. We find out that Spacehunter has a human guise as a police officer and that even though he speaks in some kind of alien language, people can always understand him in their own language. We also find out that The Allies have a transporter system.

On the asteroid, Roman tells them that he saw his nemesis the Killer Crab on the asteroid, but the others doubt it. Then they see the inter-stellar mind-controlling plant, Florax, though that doesn't make sense, since the sensors don't detect her and she had been destroyed long ago. Then Prismalo shows up and then Magno (all seen from the pages of Supreme).Professor Night suggests thinking about people they love instead of people they hate and then their love interests start to appear.

It turns out to be nano-dust particles that the asteroid base must have drifted through after The Allies abandoned it in the 1960s. They vent the particles out then decide to return to their respective locations. There's a funny typo where the letterer wrote in "alien" for Spacehunter's alien speech.

I don't know, this Allies story was kind of lame, but it did have to be cramped into seven pages. Moore wrote a proposal for an Allies series, which I'll talk about in a post later on.

The last story was a five-page on Spacehunter. I don't think Moore ever intended to do a series just on him, but he was the least seen of The Allies. This is the strangest of the stories. As best as I can make out, Spacehunter belongs to a race that is part of an extra-dimensional network and he serves on a kind of police force to protect the network.

All of the dialog after the first page is in Spacehunter's alien language, so we have to follow the art which shows him waking up from some kind of robotic connection. He has some kind of eagle/bat pet thing. An evil alien tries to attack him, but the bird protects him, killing the evil alien.

Then we're back to Kane on the Awesome base, who speaks for the audience when he says, "I was just starting to have fun with that last one, whatever it was about." Kane tells Andy he's off to do more imagining, maybe toward the jewelled borealis of the science fiction latitudes or the smouldering hellburn of the horrorworlds.

There's a nice line, harkening back to that His Name Is... Kane story: "Once, long ago, a tale processed had portrayed him as a prisoner of the imaginary realm. If so, no freedom ever was so sweet."

Even with this sampler pack, Moore was able to turn the issue to the themes so important to him, which had become the core of his Awesome work: the idea that imagination is magic and Idea Space is the ultimate realm of that magic.

This was the last full issue Gil Kane ever worked on before dying shortly after. It stands as a wonderful memorial to him and his lifetime's work of creating the images from imagination. Even if you hate all of the Awesome stuff and think it's not worth considering as being a vital and important work in Moore's history (as I do), I think you can look at the bookends to this issue as something truly special and important on its own merits.

Next week, we return to the pages of Supreme.

he drew one of the (if not the) most famous Spider-Man story of all time, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died.” He co-created the Silver Age Green Lantern and Atom. He co-created Iron Fist.

Read More: His Name Is... Kane: A Birthday Tribute to Gil Kane | http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-gil-kane/?trackback=tsmclip

he drew one of the (if not the) most famous Spider-Man story of all time, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died.” He co-created the Silver Age Green Lantern and Atom. He co-created Iron Fist.

Read More: His Name Is... Kane: A Birthday Tribute to Gil Kane | http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-gil-kane/?trackback=tsmclip

he drew one of the (if not the) most famous Spider-Man story of all time, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died.” He co-created the Silver Age Green Lantern and Atom. He co-created Iron Fist.

Read More: His Name Is... Kane: A Birthday Tribute to Gil Kane | http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-gil-kane/?trackback=tsmclip

he drew one of the (if not the) most famous Spider-Man story of all time, “The Night Gwen Stacy Died.” He co-created the Silver Age Green Lantern and Atom. He co-created Iron Fist.

Read More: His Name Is... Kane: A Birthday Tribute to Gil Kane | http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-gil-kane/?trackback=tsmclip