I've already discussed Erik Larsen illustrating the last Alan Moore Supreme script back in this weekly reading. In May 2012, he started writing his own issues so we could see what happened when the Daxes attacked the Citadel in Supreme #64. I remember back in 2012 being so excited for the last Moore script that I was willing to overlook everything I had ever thought about Erik Larsen and give him the benefit of the doubt on his continuing with Supreme.How could it go wrong?
It ended up being a short run where he brought back Rob Liefeld's "Mean" Supreme while also dealing with the fallout to Alan Moore's Supreme characters. "My thought was to marry the two and take what Alan had done and what came before and try to find something in the middle which might appeal to both audiences," he said.
Oh...yeah. That's how it could go wrong.
Picking up immediately after Supreme #63, the Daxes downed the Citadel and when Supreme and Diana opened the door to the Supremacy, the Daxes blew up the Supremacy. They decimated all but a handful of the Supremes, including Radar (Larsen ignored the fact that Radar was off on his own planet). New Supreme and Original Supreme decide to let Rob Liefeld's Mean Supreme out of the prison where he'd been chained since Supreme #41. He kills all the Daxes and then finds silver supremium in the Citadel wreckage, which he uses to strip the five remaining Supremes of their powers.It's not a particularly good start to Larsen's run for fans of Moore's Supreme.
From there, Larsen separates the book into two parts. The first involves Mean Supreme feeling betrayed that no one came to rescue him for the last 24 issues (he acknowledges that it was a decade and a half). He goes and beats up Super Patriot, demanding to know why he didn't help. Super Patriot says that Supreme was always so confident, how were they to know he needed help, when he never needed it before.
The better part of the book involves the five non-powered Supremes: New Supreme, Sister Supreme, Fifties Supreme (with lion head), Original Supreme and Squeak. When the military takes them into custody, Suprema goes to rescue them. But New Supreme tells her that they have to cooperate with the authorities.
While Suprema goes to confront Mean Supreme, Ethan and Diana discover that Dazzle Comics and all the other aspects of their existence are gone, including Ethan's whole apartment building. When they go to Diana's apartment, she has a message on her answering machine from a boyfriend named Ken. Um, what? Did she always have a boyfriend or is that just in this new revision? 
Suprema and Mean Supreme end up in a fight where Mean Supreme beats her into a bloody pulp that is so beyond the boundaries of good taste that I'm not sure how Larsen thought he could possibly appeal to fans from the Moore run. Just as he's about to finish her off, this revised universe's Omni-Man (an alien from Image Comics' Invincible series) comes and fights Mean Supreme to a standstill.
Ethan rescues Suprema and takes her to the hospital. He is also thinking about moving on with his life and getting a new job as a comic artist. But the other non-powered Supremes want to do something about Mean Supreme. They decide to team up with the only Dax who survived the Dax massacre, Darius Duck, who gives them gloves that can help them steal Mean Supreme's powers.Mean Supreme, unconscious from the fight with Omni-Man is abducted by an old Liefeld villain, Khromium, from an antagonistic alien culture.
By issue #68, the writing was on the wall for the Erik Larsen series as Cory Hamscher, the artist who finished Larsen's layouts, left the series. The result looks like barely-finished chicken scratches, which suggests that no one finished the layouts and they just put it out anyway. But it doesn't really matter, since this was the last issue and it doesn't end with any real resolution.While Mean Supreme kills Khromium and all of his race, Ethan realizes he doesn't have any artistic abilities without his Supreme powers. He ends up sleeping with Sister Supreme. They discuss whether it was even possible for the Daxes to have destroyed the Supremacy, since it was just a limbo realm, and that maybe the real versions of themselves with their powers are now in the real Supremacy. I took this as Larsen acknowledging the Moore fans who hated Larsen's version, and that their version still existed somewhere in the Supremacy.
Meanwhile, Diana goes to see Suprema in a coma in the hospital. She says she remembers being Supreme's girlfriend and that she's pregnant.The end.
Larsen has the audacity to say in the letters page that he always planned to "do the book but just long enough to set the pace and get the ball rolling. And now my job is done."
Bullshit. The sales on the series were awful and it was clearly cancelled before Larsen thought it was going to.
And as with all Rob Liefeld series, none of it mattered because the next team ignored all of this and did something new. We never find out if the Supremes are in the Supremacy. We never find out what happens with Mean Supreme, or Diana and her baby, or if Suprema recovers.
Now there's quite a lot of this arc on the series that I not only don't like, but actively hate. Everything with Mean Supreme, which was mostly mind-numbing overlong fight sequences, was a total waste. The way Larsen abuses his characters, especially shooting Radar and beating up on Suprema, show a complete disregard for common decency, which was one of the hallmarks of Moore's run on the series.
But there are elements that work. The subplot about Ethan having lost his abilities to draw along with his Supreme powers is a nice touch, and almost everything involving the powerless Squeak is a lot of fun. While I don't like the idea of Ethan and Diana having a falling out, the character of Sister Supreme was a hoot and a unique character for Ethan to interact with. And Cory Hamscher's art really had a nice, comic look to it that made the series easy on the eye. There was potential here and I wonder what would have happened to these characters if the series had continued. Ultimately, these issues seem like a lost opportunity to continue Moore's series and find new stories to tell. Larsen was right not to try to duplicate what Moore did, but Larsen was the wrong choice to lead the series forward, as few people really missed Rob Liefeld's version of Supreme. And no one wanted him to try to split the difference between Moore and Liefeld.
Up next... wait, what? Yet another shitty version of Younglood? Yay.
Good work, here! You have really studied these books, and the 1990's Image/related SUPREME.
ReplyDeleteIt proves what I felt in 2012 - these new books were really just fluff (from #64 'Storming Heaven').
Perhaps working with a team or strong editor, these 2012 SUPREME books could have had better stories; had them altered and re-written to publish a better book. But, it was not to be so...
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AjenoD
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I’m not sure how widely Image uses their editors. On a big publisher, the editor would control the direction much more. At Image, I think the creators control, especially when you consider that Erik Larsen was one of the Image founders.
Delete(I apologize if this goes through twice. The first time I tried to comment, it didn't work.) I wonder how many comic readers even really WANTED the pre-Moore Supreme back. Of course, the comic sold before Moore took over, but Moore's work seems to have much longer legs to me. Larsen said he wanted to "marry the two and take what Alan had done and what came before and try to find something in the middle which might appeal to both audiences" but...did anybody really even WANT that?
ReplyDeleteI'd be curious to know how Moore's #63 sold compared to Larsen's issues.
I seem to recall seeing that they did a second printing on Supreme #63, so it must have sold well. Maybe I’ll see if I can find those numbers.
DeleteMy understanding of how Image works is that they don’t pay pagerates, they pay a percentage of the profits from the book. So if the comic isn’t making money, the creators find out pretty fast. That’s what leads me to believe they pulled the plug when they did.
A friend (seven years ago, maybe even around 2011) as a budding artist/comics scriptwriter talked to Larsen himself, and Larsen said this - we publish the book when you are ready - "Image keeps 50% and you keep 50%" but that could be of PROFITS.
DeleteIf there is no profit or the printing cost is too high, a book won't make it past a few issues, I think you mean.
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AjenoD
Yeah, that's my assumption on how the costs work.
DeleteI'm planning to send a writeup to this blog about the original Supreme and what I found interesting about it. But before I do that, I'd just like to spill my thoughts out here under your article about Larson's run, because I have a lot of criticisms about it and I don't want to spend all my time ragging on Larson
ReplyDeleteThe thing about the huge sales of the original Supreme is that the industry was completely different at the time. People bought comics in bulk because they assumed they'd be collector's items in a decade. IIRC, Moore's run came after the big comic crash.
I know people who actually enjoy the original Supreme, myself (somewhat :P) included. But nobody gets behind Larson's version. Morally, the character was much more nuanced and ambiguous than Larson ever wrote him. In this series he goes from an anti-hero to a full blown psychopath, and the comic expects us to care when he gets into a multi-page fight with a different villain? Puh-lease!
Larson's run didn't do justice to either version of the character, and that's why it just didn't work and nobody enjoyed it. It wasn't like the fans of "Mean Supreme" were jumping for joy. Most of them liked Moore's version better anyway. I find it pretty absurd that Moore created a built-in mechanism for new writers to do whatever they wanted and Larson just ignored it. It was Murphy's Law in action: anything he could do wrong, he did. If he wanted to wed the two versions, he should have just made a new version that combined elements of both. Could you imagine Supreme as a beloved Golden Age hero who returns to earth years later bitter, cynical and jaded? Or perhaps a violent and morally ambiguious anti-hero slowly learning to be a better
I've heard that Larson's described himself as a "Homer Simpson"-like figure, and I think that fits perfectly. This is the exact kind of thing Homer would do. Go in with the best of intentions, try to make something that satisfies everyone while not understanding what people actually want, and then watch in horror and sadness when everybody hates it and its a disaster. Ala "The car built for Homer" or his remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Not a bad guy by any means, capable of writing good comics, it's just this wasn't one of them.
Blue Rose was so much better. But it should've been shorter.
*sigh* I forgot to add: Mean Supreme beating up Suprema for mildly annoying him is also absurdly stupid and OOC. In "Legend of Supreme" a woman chews him out, slaps him, throws coffee in his face and insults his entire ideology and worldview and he doesn't lay a finger on her or threaten her at all. He argues back and leaves peacefully. He also never showed any hint of racism or bigotry. He even went out of his way to save and protect people, even at his worst moments.
DeleteAll in all, when you start off your continuation of a fun silver age tribute comic by killing a dog, you should know you're doing it completely wrong. Nobody likes that!
The beating of Suprema and killing of Radar were unforgivable offenses in mind opinion, but I do enjoy the Ethan stuff and Darius Duck and all of that. It's weird, because it's like two comics, one I enjoyed and one I hated.
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