Weekly Reading: Supreme: The Return #1

Supreme: The Return #1

Published by Awesome Entertainment in May 1999

The covers:

Title: Through a Glass Darkly...

(As always: 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 Moore's Awesome works page.)

With your permission, I'm going to handle this Weekly Reading a little differently. Normally, I talk about the cover, when the issue came out and finally get to the content of the story. In this case, there's so much to deal with that will just get in the way of dealing with the second part of our story, that it's just easier if I deal with that other stuff at the end. Deal?

We start off with a prologue that gets it's own title: Mr. Korgo Goes to Washington, which is hilarious. We're back in the Bill Clinton White House with an on-fire Secret Service agent waking the first family. Clinton, written like the Saturday Night Live version of him, goes out to deal with Korgo, wondering what his administration's policy is. "I think the vice president covers parallel-universe topsoil erosion in his book, sir," an aide tells him.

Look, your amusement on this will vary, but at this late date, it leaves me nostalgic for a time when all one had to worry about was the president's hokeyness.

Anyway, Korgo challenges "Clint's-son, legendary gray-maned wolf of the Americas" to one-on-one battle. Clinton's not having it until Korgo and Vor-Em basically call Clinton a sissy, at which point he hits Korgo. Korgo pounds Clinton back and takes Hillary and the White House as his own.

Meanwhile Supreme is fighting Shadow Supreme through downtown Omegapolis. Supreme pounds the Shadow Supreme down past a subway (that looks like Washington DC's Metro) to the Earth's center of gravity, which Supreme hopes will hold the monster.

In a suburb, the Slaver Ant is turning husband against wife through her propaganda chemical while stealing their children. She walks away with two babies while their parents are at each others' throats.

Suprema is at the rock concert where Optilux is converting the Bon Jovi audience into photons and depositing them in Amalynth, as part of his messiah complex. There's little Suprema can do, as Optilux is just a being of light.

"At least if he's firing at me he's not concentrating on this audience of rather badly-dressed young people!" Suprema thinks. What a great character!

She uses her super breath to spread the adhesive glitter (I had no idea that was a thing) from the crowd and to mess up the projectors making Optilux solid. Suprema's able to grab his photo-plasmic converter from him and shoot Optilux, sending him to Amalynth.

That was a quick way of dealing with a villain that took Supreme, The Allies and a messload of other heroes to deal with over the course of two issues before! She tells Supreme what happened and about the few hundred Bon Jovi fans that joined him in the prism world.

Supreme's response: "Oh well. Can't be helped." Ha ha!

The Tellevillain, not wanting to face Suprema and Supreme, starts jumping from aerial to aerial again, but Supreme jolts him with static electricity. He's dazed long enough for a band of angry Friends viewers to find him and start beating on him.

I really enjoy Moore's writing when he lets loose like this and just has fun. This is exactly the kind of story DC should have been putting out for Superman for years.

Then the Shadow Supreme pops back up from underground. Just as he's about to attack our heroes, a familiar voice appears: "When a dog is mad, mistress, you must pay no attention to its bark. You must be merciful... and put it to sleep!" Radar is back (and has his own logo)!

Apparently Shadow Supreme killed a suprematon (those Radar suprematons get destroyed all the time!) and said it was the real pooch. Radar goes after the fake Supreme, breaking the skin and ripping his arm off. I love letter Todd Klein's small font for Supreme's protests trying to get Radar to heel.

Radar chases after Shadow Supreme leading him to Washington, which we see on a conveniently-timed newscast. Apparently Hillary "Rodham Space-Tyrant" has taken a liking to Korgo's policies on healthcare.

But before that, the heroes get a lead on Slaver Ant and find her trying to make a hive for her kidnapped "family." They take her to Washington, where Shadow Supreme is arguing with Vice President Vor-Em over who's more important. Supreme drops Slaver Ant on the villains, spreading her chemicals on the brutes. They proceed to fight each other unconscious.

Korgo appears to challenge Supreme, but secretly asks him to put him back in the Hell of Mirrors. "Put me back in the mirror... anywhere away from that woman! Gods, I thought I was ruthless!" he whispers. Supreme pretends to knock Korgo out and then tells Hillary, "Pretending to play along with Korgo was wise, Mrs. Clinton, but now you can rejoin the real president now!"

Hillary: "Huh? Oh, him. Yeah, sure. Whatever."

Nothing funnier than an ambitious woman, right? Groan.

As I said, your sense of humor will determine how much you like this ending, as the issue concludes with Radar flying the villains back to the Citadel to meet Suprema. But it's a fun, light story, filled with humor and inventive action. This is exactly what Moore planned as the Awesome template.

And that's it. Except, it wasn't supposed to be. According to Chris Sprouse in his Modern Masters book, there was a page 24, which he pencilled, but Awesome never published:

 

I had it inked...

 

 and colored and can be seen below:

 

Somewhere there's a script for this page that will, hopefully, one day surface. I asked Sprouse when I saw him at a convention about it, but it doesn't sound like he has the script handy.

Drat.

Okay, so, first things second. It took over a year for this issue to be published. That's because in February or March of 1998, the primary investor in Awesome Entertainment (whom I believe to be Scott Rosenberg -- chairman of Platinum Studios) backed out abruptly.

Many people believed that was it for Awesome. Someone called Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse and told them Awesome was done. The news spread and other publishers called Moore to see if he'd come work for them, which he quickly did with Jim Lee's Wildstorm. But we'll talk about that later.

Ultimately Awesome came back, though never as well organized as it did before. Here's Liefeld talking about how he decided to bring Supreme and Awesome back:

"When Awesome went on hiatus, I put all of Alan's work away, and figured that

we'd eventually work through all the financial issues, and develop a timeline

to release all his stuff. Originally, I was going to hold onto Alan's material

because I had been told that America's Best Comics was going to launch in

November of '98 through February of '99. Then, they told me that they were

going to postpone it indefinitely as the deal with DC came to light."

"Through all of this I was talking with Alex Ross who is my conscience of

sorts on Supreme. He's been very helpful in guiding creative decisions in

marketing what we have, because he is really passionate about the character

and has been very generous about helping us garner more attention for the

series. Alex told me that we should get Alan's material out before the ABC

books hit. Originally, I wanted to wait until after the ABC debut and follow

his newer stuff, but with the majority of these books done, it didn't make

sense to sit on them any longer."

"Now, as the solicitations come out, we're getting most of the Awesome

material started up before the bulk of the ABC line starts, but I don't think

they'll compete against each other at all. The Alan Moore fan would love a new

Alan Moore book every day of the week, so we're betting they're going to drink

all this stuff up."

Anyway, Awesome decided to bring Supreme back, launching a newly-titled and numbered series in the middle of a two-part story. It used (most of) Sprouse's artwork. Awesome also used a variant cover from a sketch by Alex Ross that has little to do with this series (more on that in a later post this week) as well as a jumbled mishmash with all three other covers poorly stretched to fit, which Dynamic Forces sold.

And on that positive note, I'll see you for more Supreme next week!

This is where I say, "As always, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for all of the details and references that I completely missed." As I've pointed out, I've run out of the Supreme annotations by Aaron Severson and am now doing them myself. Please help me by letting me know anything I missed that can be added to the annotations. Thanks!