After Awesome Part 1: ABC and Tom Strong

As I've now finished all of Moore's Awesome issues that came out, I'm going to start dealing with what came next in a series I'm calling After Awesome. I'll take a look at all the Supreme, Youngblood and Glory series that came out since (I might ignore Prophet since we never saw Moore's proposal and I have no idea how different his series would have been). I'll also take a look at the ABC line with a view to how they were a direct offshoot of Awesome. If there's anything else you'd like me to add to this group, just shoot me an email or put it in the comments.

So let's start with America's Best Comics. When news started to get around that Awesome had died, Alan Moore's phone started ringing, offering him work. Having some respect for Jim Lee, he decided to take Jim Lee's offer and set up a whole line of comics under the imprint: America's Best Comics. (He had already set up League of Extraordinary Gentlemen there, which was why it was creator owned when the others weren't.)

Part of his plan was to set up the comics with his Awesome artists. He set up Tom Strong for his Supreme artist Chris Sprouse. He set up Top Ten for Youngblood artist Steve Skroce, though Skroce turned the series down. He set up Promethea for Glory artist Brandon Peterson, though Peterson turned him down, too. Alex Ross helped Moore find new artists for those two series. Tomorrow Stories featured some of his favorite artists in Melinda Gebbie, Rick Veitch and Jim Baikie (all three who had worked on Supreme).

I'm not going to get into all of the ABC series because there's not a ton of overlap with the Awesome work, but I do want to talk about Tom Strong now and Promethea in a separate post.

Rob Liefeld, when talking about the ABC line, said:

"...much of the ABC line is made up of poorly masked Awesome characters and story outlines he prepared for us. If I was as sue-happy and litigation driven as some suggest I be, I believe I could draw direct connections to many of the ABC characters and their origins coming from pages of Awesome work we commissioned from him. In short order, Tom Strong is Supreme mixed with his Prophet proposal."

Without being able to see the Prophet proposal, it's impossible to know if this is true. But let's look at how Moore handled Prophet in Judgment Day. He first appeared in the prologue in the Judgment Day Sourcebook:

 

Maybe it's just that he's drawn by Chris Sprouse, who would go with Moore to create Tom Strong, but it's hard not to see the physical similarities. There was also this page from Judgment Day Omega where Prophet tangles with the Tarzan-like character, Zantar:

 

Moore based both Prophet and Tom Strong on the Doc Savage and Doc Strange style adventurers (Moore wrote that Prophet was "The Man of Marble" while later he wrote Tom "Doc" Strange into the pages of Tom Strong as an alternate version of Strong):

 

So, at least on their surface, whatever Moore had planned for Prophet and what he ultimately wrote as Tom Strong were probably similar. But how does the comparison to Supreme come in? Well, there's actually a lot of overlap.

Supreme, in The Story of the Year, did more than tell a story, it told the history of Superman (and broader) comics from the '30s until the '90s. Tom Strong tried to do something similar, but less obviously, using the covers. As Todd Klein, who handled the design of the covers, said on his blog:

"Tom Strong is a character with a decidedly pulp background, combining elements of Tarzan, Doc Savage, Tom Swift and other pulpish characters, but of course with plenty of modern touches. When Alan and I first discussed the cover possibilities, he suggested we look at old pulp covers, as well as action-adventure and science fiction covers from all eras. With that in mind, we tried to give each issue a completely different style, while staying in those parameters. This was not a new idea in comics: Will Eisner's Spirit, and early issues of Mad Magazine come to mind as other examples, but it definitely added to the design challenge. Instead of just having one familiar logo and layout, with different art and colors each time, we were trying for a new look each issue (though there were some repeats)."

Here are a few examples:

 

"We're firmly back in the pulp era for issue 6, with this great art by Dave Gibbons, which he began on paper and finished and colored on the computer. I gave him the title for the playing card, which he placed into his art. The logo and design were inspired by The Shadow, another great pulp era icon."

  

"Issue 13 was one of many direct comics pastiches we did, this one inspired by MARVEL FAMILY #1 from 1945. I had fun recreating Tom's logo and all the cover type in the style of the original, seen below. Artist Chris Sprouse did a great job of capturing the feel of the original while remaining true to his own vision of the characters."

 

"Another fun comics pastiche of FANTASTIC FOUR #26's cover by Jack Kirby, one of artist Chris Sprouse's favorites, and the second of three Kirbyesque covers on the series. Hey, if you're going to steal, you might as well steal from the best. As usual I had too much fun recreating the cover lettering, probably by Artie Simek, as seen in the original below."

Another stylistic choice Moore made was to split his Tom Strong stories into three-act features, just as he had done with his Supreme stories.

The content of the issues had a number of similarities to Supreme, too.

Supreme is a character who has been alive since the 1920s, with Tom Strong pre-dating him some, and surviving an extraordinary long time through the use of the Goloka root. He's an accomplished scientist, just as Supreme is, and he's very defensive of his family. Both families have talking pets with Radar and Soloman.

 

Supreme, through the Supremacy device, featured countless different versions of Supreme and his supporting cast. Moore also created alternative versions of the Strong Family, through the use of alternate dimensions. Do you need me to draw the parallels between Squeak the Mouse Supreme and Warren Strong the cartoon bunny version of Tom Strong?



In the pages of Supreme, a whole universe of silver-age heroes are abducted by the villain Hulver Ramik and put in suspended animation until they can be rescued decades later. In the pages of Tom Strong, Strong and Tom Strange rescue a whole universe of silver-age heroes who have been put into suspended animation for decades around the world of Terra Obscura.

 

Finally (appropriately enough), here is Moore's final page of Tom Strong when he ended the series with issue #36:

And here's how he ended The Story of the Year in Supreme, when he might not have been sure he was going to do a second year on the series:

 

I can certainly see Liefeld's point, even if I doubt Moore would have purposefully stolen any ideas from the Prophet proposal. Then again, without seeing the Prophet proposal, we'll never really know.

And this isn't to say there aren't plenty of ways that Supreme and Tom Strong were different. As Moore answered that question himself:

"As far as I know, the only similarities between Tom Strong and Supreme are that it's me and Chris Sprouse doing them. With Supreme, when I was handed the character, he was pretty much a straightforward Superman knock-off. I was trying to make into a good Superman knock-off."

The ones that stand out are Supreme's Superman-like superpowers vs. Tom's upbringing and tribal medicine being one. Tom's family and kids vs. Supreme's bachelor. Tom Strong is more interested in pulp-style adventures vs. Supreme's more superhero-based stories. But there are similarities that are hard to ignore.

Anyway, next time I'll take the other argument when Liefeld said, "Promethea is Glory."