Okay, today I'm putting on my tinfoil hat and making some wild connections. Want to come along for the ride?
In the early 1990s, Alan Moore had been doing personal and creative work far from the mainstream, including From Hell, Lost Girls, A Small Killing, his spoken word pieces, and Outbreaks of Violets.
Outbreaks of Violets was created for the 1995 MTv Europe Music Awards, which decided to theme
their awards around the concept of comics. They approached him about
doing something along the theme, "Random acts of kindness." He wrote a
storyline for 24 postcards and the producers found 24 renowned European
artists and cartoonists to bring each one to life.
The work plays off our cynical expectations about the world and shows us
how doing things a little different could have produced the best world.
It's funny and wonderful.
In 1995, Moore was doing work on Spawn to raise funds, since his personal and creative work didn't pay very well. Spawn led to WildCATS and in 1996 to Supreme. Sometime in late 1996 or, more likely 1997, Moore wrote the script for Supreme #56, which featured the Ivory Icon's roster of rogues escaping his Hell of Mirrors and messing about in our world. The Televillain invades the Friends TV show. Korgo knocks out Bill Clinton and takes over the presidency with Hillary Clinton, and Optilux goes to a Bon Jovi concert and turns a few hundred audience members into light beings.
"Optilux has transformed about 200 members of a Bon Jovi audience into coherent light," Moore said in an interview. "Then he's captured them in the prism-world of Amalynth, and nobody cares."
It always struck me as odd that Moore chose Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi wasn't very popular in America at the time and seemed an odd fit with the Friends show, which was one of the top rated shows on TV. Looking at the band's Wikipedia page, their 1995 album "These Days" is described as "
a bigger success in Europe than in the United States." It wouldn't be until 2000 when they released the single "It's My Life" that Bon Jovi would see an upswing in popularity.
Maybe that's the joke and why no one cared in Supreme. But here's my tinfoil hat connection.
At that 1995 MTv Europe awards, Bon Jovi won "best rock" band over much more popular (in the U.S.) bands, such as Green Day, Oasis and Offspring. You can see them winning in this Youtube clip:
If you look closely at about 1:10, you'll see several copies of Alan Moore's Outbreaks of Violets on the floor (Thanks Flavio for pointing out this video). So maybe Moore was influenced by the awards to think Bon Jovi were more popular than they were at the time and decided to include them in Supreme? Maybe this was his way of paying them back for leaving his comic on the floor in that video clip? Maybe I'm making something out of nothing? (Yes, most likely that last one.) But I thought it a fun connection.
