Welcome

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

Monday, October 6, 2025

Reading pre-Moore Supreme - Supreme #25

 


This is a weird one. Issue 24 came out in February 1995 and issue 25 came out in May 1994, the same time as issue 12. It was part of Image's "Images of Tomorrow," where a bunch of comics printed their 25th issue as a peak ahead. Let's see how successful they were at predicting the future.

The story is by Rob Liefeld (fortunately not calling himself Ripley). The script, lettering and editing is done by Kurt Hathaway. Shawn McManus does the layouts and Corky Lehmkuhl does the pencils. And Norm Rapmund does the inks.  

Corky Lehmkuhl does fine in this issue and later did a little work for Marvel before eventually going into game design and is big in the Call of Duty series. So good for him.

We open it up with a guy who looks like Supreme tearing it up with some Army forces. But as we get closer, we see he has a beard and calls himself Simple Simon. As you may recall, Simon was Grizlock's old minion who eventually found Grizlock's weapons and attacked Supreme and Pitt and got captured. Presumably, he went to jail because we've never seen him since, and really haven't missed him.


As that goes on, we jump to an interdimensional location where a bodiless Supreme  desires to get back to his body.


Back at the Army base, Starguard--the superpowered team of Supreme's "children" from the future last seen in issue 7--bring Supreme with Thor's hammer through time to fight Simple Simon. Simon admits to stealing the bearded Supreme body from another dimension.


Supreme and Simon Supreme fight while Probe--the female Supreme of the future--flies off to Simon's base under Fort Knox. There, she finds Simon's sleep-like body.


Back at the Army base, Supreme and Starguard fight Simon Supreme. Simon Supreme overpowers Supreme and just as he's about to kill Supreme, the soul of the Supreme from another dimension shows up and retakes over his body. 

 

Probe shows up and explains that she used Simon's machinery to locate the soul and restore it to his body. Bearded Supreme leaves to his dimension and Starguard return to the future. 


So this issue would have made sense in 1994 when Hathaway was still writing the issues and Simple Simon and Starguard were still regularly appearing in the comic. By issue 24, everything had changed. It now feels very out of place and a lot like the stunt that it was.

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