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So a long time ago (the mid-1990s), the greatest writer in comics agreed to take over the writing duties for Image Comics' Supreme. He would radically reshape the character, the book, and due to forces beyond his control, a whole comic book universe. And it led to an award-winning run of comics, three additional titles (among several proposed) and ultimately led to the genesis of Moore's much better known America's Best Comics. And then it all went out of print and was forgotten by way too many.

Having gathered quite a bit of information about Moore's Supreme and Awesome runs, I decided to create a home for the forgotten Awesome. Over the course of a year, I put it all together here.

Each week I did a main "Weekly Reading" post that was a read-through of that issue. I followed that up with a couple of other posts about topics from that Weekly Reading or whatever else I came up with to talk about. You'll find the lost Youngbloods in the Youngblood section and the fan-edit of the last Supreme in After Awesome.

Below is the archive of posts broken up by book. Thanks for checking the site out!

Book 1: Supreme: The Story of the Year

Book 1: Judgment Day

Book 3: Supreme: The Return

Book 4: Youngblood

Book 5: Glory

Book 6: After Awesome

Book 7: 1963

Book 8: Night Raven

Book 9: A Small Killing

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Night Raven: Snow Queen, Part 1

How to read Night Raven


You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.

If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.

Snow Queen, Part 1


My Night Raven read throughs start with The Cure here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

In my imagination, I assume this is the story that Moore wanted to tell with Night Raven from the beginning, but needed the hero to become an immortal and still be active in modern times to do it, and so everything has been prologue for this. Is that true, who knows? I'm not sure Moore has ever talked in depth about his work on Night Raven, so maybe the legends are better than the facts.


The other nice thing about this series are the great black and white illustrations by Alan Davis. The Alans were working on Captain Britain at the time and Davis volunteered some drawings for Night Raven the same as Moore volunteered the stories so the magazine could stay afloat and let them do what they want with the good Captain.

Anyway, we're now up to the 1970s. I love the choice of narrator in a young, gay junkie who calls himself Cancer Divine and hangs out at a place called the Grease Gun. Can you imagine reading that in a mainstream comic magazine in the early 1980s? Cancer Divine is in the hospital, dying and telling the police his story. And what a story it is!

A while back Divine was hanging out at the Grease Gun and was feeling bad, so he struck up a conversation with a girl called Chinese White, an albino Asian woman. Chinese White was a depressive who loved talking about death. And as they were talking, the Snow Queen came in. The Snow Queen being the drug cartel-running Yi Yang, of course.

After a conversation, the two Chinese women left together. Meanwhile, Divine went to score cocaine from his connection, Spanish Eddy (who works for Yi Yang). As he's there, Night Raven breaks in and starts tearing through Eddy's men, even after a bullet goes through his chest.

Eddy spills the beans on Yi Yang and eventually pays for it with his life. But this is just the start:

"It was the first shot in a war. A war like you can’t imagine.

"A war between two people. Two people who weren’t human. Two people who were going to live forever. Two people who hated each other worse than anybody on the planet.

"A war. And New York city was the battleground.

"And me and Chinese White...

"Well, I guess me and Chinese White were just the first casualties."

It takes Moore a while for the story to get rolling, but Divine is quite the character and a refreshingly new voice to the superhero stories in the early 1980s. And I can't help but chuckle that the terms Snow Queen and China White are both nicknames for cocaine.

We'll see the war develop more next time.

Shameless plug


A friend and I are creating a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

Right now we're just putting it together digitally, but plan to do a kickstarter to get it published.

We'd love it if you'd take a look at miskatonichighcomic.com.

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