Weekly Reading: Supreme #48

Supreme #48

Published by Maximum Press in May 1997

The cover:

Title: Just Imagine...

(As always: Supreme is currently out of print. There are a number of ways to read it, which can be found on the How do I read Moore's Awesome works page.)

Welcome to the last issue of Supreme under the Maximum imprint. Starting with issue 49, things get a whole lot more Awesome. This is a great issue for a lot of reasons, but let's get some of the housekeeping out of the way first.

We get a new modern artist this month in Mark Pajarillo. He had worked on some Image titles before this and would go on to work for DC for a bit before leaving the comics industry altogether to go into video game graphics. He's capable enough in this issue and has a few moments of real beauty, though maybe not for long, as we'll see later. Anyway, let's dig in.

We start with the first-person perspective of Glory as she flies to the Citadel and is greeted by one of the suprematons, who escorts her to the gathering of others. There, she finds Supreme, Mighty Man, Super Patriot, Die Hard and Roman, as Supreme is suggesting that The Allies reform to take on Hulver Ramik in order to rescue the souls of Twilight and Professor Night (as we learned last issue).

[As a side note, Moore didn't create The Allies. The Allies first showed up in Youngblood Strikefile #1, but the team only consisted of Die Hard, Glory and Super-Patriot. Later, Supreme was added (as seen in Supreme Glory Days)  and also Battlestone... but he was more just a government operative. Later, Roman was added as well. They planned an Image series to be written by Swamp Thing creator Len Wein, as see from the ad below...

 

...but it never came out. But leave it to Moore to turn them into a full-on Justice League analog. Thanks to Rob Messick and Derek Mont-Ros for the info.]

There are some nice little jokes and details in here, like that Glory flies by riding air currents and that Roman regrets having a mercave lair with a seashell throne. There's also some weird little bits with Super Patriot, who we can see electronically plugged in at one point, and Die Hard, who says, "When you suggested this mission back in Omegaopolis, I was skeptical. Now I feel almost a simulation of enthusiasm." So that's two of them that are cyborgs. Well, it was the '90s.

They then remember their first case from 1960, years after disbanding the Allied Supermen of America, when they battled Florax, a dominating space plant! And then we get our first Rick Veitch flashback...

...but not really. What we get is the cover, an obvious play off of The Brave and the Bold #28 (the first appearance of the Justice League of America), who battled the mind-controlling starfish, Starro!

In the Awesome Universe, The Allies were able to defeat Florax thanks to Space Hunter (a character we haven't met yet). And then we're back to the modern story.

I love this device for quickly flashing back to various points in the group's history. Moore and Veitch couldn't have gotten away with this in the first few issues of their run on Supreme, but now that we understand more about Supreme, his history and how the flashbacks work, they're able to create this shorthand and have the audience understand what's happening.

I remember the covers adding to the debate among fans about whether the characters realize they're comic book characters or not. However, the way that they talk about those flashbacks suggest that it's only the audience who realizes that they're referring to old issues and they just remember it as their pasts. Anyway, I'll look at more of these covers in a post later this week.

The gathered heroes don Supreme's headsets and prepare to enter thought space. The suprematons explain that they will keep a watch on things and report that Billy Friday has been rescued by Emerpus, the reverse Supreme, and is now in the backwards zone. What seems like a running gag will pay off, just wait.

And then the heroes enter idea space. I talked about the importance of idea space in a post last week, so I'll try not to repeat myself here, but I love this image of them entering the realm of thought. The strange mix of space and logos and faces, with the use of negative space is really alien, yet beautiful.

 

As Supreme explains, this is the local neighborhood of mind-space, focused on advertisements and celebrities. As Super Patriot says, "Almost like cyberspace." And yeah, if you thought of how a comic book illustrator might draw cyberspace, this doesn't seem far off.

They head through the area dealing with language, reasoning and numbers and then into a stormy area representing emotions. Super Patriot wonders why he doesn't remember this from when they faced Hulver Ramik before, which Supreme explains that they were pulled straight to Ramik's realm. There's a nice joke about Glory keeping the minutes to their old adventures (because Wonder Woman was initially just the secretary of her old team) that leads to another flashback.

These flashbacks are stuffed with bits of meta humor. I love how the casebook title is the same as the story's title. And Glory complaining about how she always used to get bound up in the 1960s. Anyway, we learn Ramik is a soul slaver, who sells souls to the highest bidder.

And now the heroes are swimming through the realm of archetypes and symbols, where we see plenty of religious symbolism. This is where many of the ideas in Supreme's mythopoeic zoo come from. But they're not the only creatures living here, as the heroes are attacked by some H.P. Lovecraft-inspired old thing. As Supreme explains, there is no time in idea space, so things come from the past, present and future to intermix.

And that brings up a time travel flashback from when The Allies met the Allied Supermen of America (a riff on Justice League of America 21, when the Justice League and the Justice Society met for the first time and proved so popular, they kept meeting).

Back to Idea Space, they find a cloud that starts to mess with their thoughts. They manage to push through the defensive barrier to find a hidden prison of souls of all the missing heroes. There's Professor Night, Twilight, Space Hunter, Janet Planet, Blake Baron - Occult Agent, Polyman, the Stormbirds, the Conquerors of the Uncanny, Jungle Jack Flynn, and the Fisherman, a forgotten member of The Allies.

Flashback to when he joined. The Fisherman was a wealthy playboy and angling champion who took to capturing criminals with his sidekick, Skipper. While an obvious play on the Green Arrow, Moore's love of the ridiculous silver age may have gone too far with the concept of the Fisherman.

The heroes head in to attack Ramik and his mercenary prison guards, but not until we get another flashback. The attack goes well, which infuriates Ramik, as he's just about to sell the superhero souls to his client. And flashback to the oddball case of Prismalo the Painter.

Back to Ramik's prison, the heroes have Ramik on the ropes. And that's when his client shows up: Supreme's longtime foe Optilux. But that will have to wait until next month. I hope you had as much fun with this one as I did.

From the ongoing "Adventures in bad promotion," we get five pages devoted to the upcoming Judgment Day miniseries. Five pages in which they use the same two images over and over again. Probably the most questionable thing they did was run the quote from American Entertainment (not from a review in an unbiased magazine, but from a company that hyped and sold comics directly) that "Judgment Day is Alan Moore's next Watchmen." I'm sure that line sold some comics, but it misrepresented exactly what Judgment Day was and was meant to be. How did they expect it to live up to the greatest graphic novel ever written?

As always, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for all of the details and references that I completely missed.

Magic, Glycon and Idea Space

So, you might have heard that Alan Moore is a magician (not the rabbit in a top hat kind). I wasn't really planning to get into this on a blog about the Awesome universe, but we've reached the point where it can't be avoided, so let's pull up our pants and dig in.

According to Moore, roundabout 1993, he was writing From Hell when he had an epiphany.

"The thing that turned me towards magic was a panel in From Hell where William Gull was saying something to the effect that the human mind is one place where all of the gods and monsters in human mythology are arguably real, in all of their grandeur and monstrosity. And after writing I thought, oh shit, that’s true. Now I am going to have to rearrange my entire life around this. There is no way to disprove it. I thought I was writing this great piece of Gothic villain dialogue. The gods and monsters inarguably exist and they are real. Because if they don’t exist how many people died because of them, or how many history changing things have been done in the name of these Gods that don’t exist? If they don’t exist why do they kill so many of us in their name?"

"It seems to me that much of science doesn’t like to even accept that there is anything going on inside our heads and wants to base it all upon hard proven laboratory things. But the mind is the only thing that we have any direct experience of. We don’t perceive the world directly. We perceive our perception. We put together these weird jigsaw puzzles made from the light on our retina, the sound waves in our eardrums, the texture of our fingers. And moment by moment we are kind of compositing this together on some big screen that is reality. That is what we see. If we have a flaw in any of our perceptual systems than that will become part of our reality. I suppose magic was an attempt to kind of see if I could take my relationship with reality any further into any different areas."

So, on his 40th birthday, while "pissed" at his pub, he declared himself a magician. But the best way to understand Moore's magic, or at least the best way I've been able to understand it, is through his god, Glycon. Glycon is a snake puppet.


Here Moore explains it (and I stole the quote below from the wonderful Periodic Fable):

"In my own experience – and this is where we get into the complete madness here – I have only met about four gods, a couple of other classes of entity as well. I’m quite prepared to admit this might have been a hallucination. On most of the instances, I was on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the logical explanation – that it was a hallucinatory experience. I can only talk about my subjective experience, however, and the fact that having some experience of hallucinations over the last twenty-five years or so, I’d have to say that it seemed to me to be a different class of hallucination. It seemed to me to be outside of me. It seemed to be real. It is a terrifying experience, and a wonderful one, all at once. It is everything you’d imagine it to be. As a result of this, there is one particular entity I feel a particular affinity with. There is a late Roman snake god, called Glycon. He was an invention of the False Prophet Alexander. […]

"Anyway, the false prophet Alexander is a Moon and Serpent hero, a saint if you like. He was running what seemed to be a travelling Seleni medicine show. He would do a performance of the mysteries of the goddess Soi. The only reference to him is in the works of Lucian, who calls him a complete charlatan and fraud. At some point, Alexander the False Prophet said he was going to preside over the second coming of the god Aeschepylus [or Asclepius], the serpent god of medicine. He said this is going to happen at noon tomorrow in the marketplace. So everyone said, 'sounds good,' and they all went down there. After a little while, they said, 'Come on, False Prophet Alexander, where is the second coming of Aeschepylus?' At which point, the False Prophet Alexander bent down, reached into a puddle at his feet, pulled up an egg, split it with his thumbnail, and there was a tiny snake inside, and said, 'Behold the new Aeschepylus,' took it home with him, where over a week it apparently grew to a prodigious size until it was taller than a man and had the head and features of a man. It had long blonde hair, ears, eyelids, a nose. At this point, he started to exhibit it in his temple, providing religious meeting with this incarnate god. At which point, Lucian said, it was obvious, 'I could have done that.' […] He got the snake’s head under his arm, speaking tube over his shoulder, child’s play. And he’s probably right, that’s probably how he did it.

"If I’m going to adopt a god, I’d rather know starting out that it was a glove puppet. To me it’s a real god. There’s nothing that precludes a glove puppet from being a real god. […] But a god is the idea of a god. The idea of a god is a god. The idea of Glycon is Glycon. If I can enhance that idea with an anaconda and a speaking tube, fair enough. I am unlikely to start believing that this glove puppet created the universe. It’s a fiction. All gods are fiction. It’s just that I happen to think that fiction’s real. Or that it has its own reality that is just as valid as ours. I happen to believe that most of the important things in the material world start out as fiction. That everything around us was once fiction – before there was the table, there was the idea of a table, and the idea of a table before tables was fiction. This is the most important world, the world of fictional things. That’s the world where all this starts."

Moore's god is the god of ideas, or more importantly, the god of stories. Because stories are magic. People order their lives around stories and they believe their lives are stories. We see stories that have been structured by writers and editors and we call them the news and they shape how we see the world. We read stories and we call them history and they shape how we believe. The act of storytelling, creating belief out of words, that is magic to Moore:

"...it is my position that art, language, consciousness and magic are all aspects of the same phenomenon. With art and magic seen as almost wholly interchangeable, the realm of the imagination becomes crucial to both practices.

"The kabbalistic lunar realm of the imagination is called Yesod, this being a Hebrew word which means ‘Foundation’. This suggests that the imagination is the sole foundation upon which all our higher mental functions are dependent and, also, through which they are accessible. Magic, in our formulation, seems intimately involved with creativity and with creation, in whatever sense we mean those terms."

Put in other terms, he describes the magic on a Goodreads chat:

"I don’t know what happens to me when I write, because I’m not sure if we have adequate language to describe, even to ourselves, what it is to use language in a purposeful way. I know that my consciousness, if I am immersed in writing something demanding, is moved into a completely different state than the one which I inhabit during most of my waking life. Neither is it like dreaming, having much more focus and control. If I’m writing, as I often do, something which requires messing around with the structure or vocabulary of the English language, then I find myself entering some very unusual mental spaces indeed. Writing the Lucia Joyce chapter of Jerusalem, ‘Round the Bend’, I found myself in a kind of synaptic cascade-state that had a delirious, mind-expanding bliss to it. By contrast, writing the collapsed future-vernacular of Crossed +100, I found myself ending up slightly depressed just by the experience of having a limited language with a subsequently limited number of things that the characters could think, or feel, or conceive of. What I suspect is happening is that, as started earlier, our entire neurological reality can be seen as being made from words at its most immediate level. When you descend into this level of our reality, the code of our reality if you like, then whether consciously or not; whether deliberately or not, you are working magic. So, the answer to your question as to what happens to me when I write, is the most banal and useless answer you will ever get from an author: the magic happens. I hope that the fact that it’s me saying that and that I mean the above statement with absolute conviction, along with all of its potentially frightening implications, will be enough to make it sound a little less fatuous."

But what does that have to do with the Awesome universe!?! Bring it back to the superheroes, damn you!!!

Alright, alright. Well, if stories are magic, they have to exist somewhere. If I have an idea of Supreme and you have an idea of Supreme, and they're pretty much the same idea, where is that idea? Is it two separate ideas in each of our heads? Or it it in a single location? And if it's in a single, communal location, where is it?

And so Moore came up with the concept of Idea Space. The place where every thought and idea that mankind has coexists. He explained the concept in an interview with Eddie Campbell that appeared in Egomania #2 and in the wonderful A Disease of Language hardcover:

“Obviously there is more to our experience of a place than the bricks and mortar. Our reaction to various locations seemed to me to depend upon the richness of the web of association that we connected w/ these sites…. If you are a practicing magician or poet [then] you have a web of symbol systems w/ which to decode even chance appearances in this area...

“…this hypothetical “space,” which I have labeled Ideaspace…. Maybe our individual and private consciousness is, in Ideaspace terms, the equivalent of owning an individual private house… the space inside our homes is entirely ours, yet if we step through the front door we find ourselves in a street, in a world, that is mutually accessible to everyone…. This would explain dubious phenomena such as telepathy or knowledge-at-a-distance…. The actual ideas represent the equivalent of solid objects in terms of that space. An idea may be a pebble, a rock, a mountain or a whole continent in terms of its stature…. Distances could only be associational in Ideaspace. Lands End and John O’Groates, while famously far apart in the physical world, are usually mentioned in the same sentence and thus are right next to each other, associatively speaking…. Time, as a phenomenon, doesn’t apply in the same way to the realm of the mind as it does to the time-locked material realm. We can think as easily about events ten or twenty years ago as we can about something that happened this morning, or we can think about something that might happen tomorrow…. If this were so, then this would explain, at a stroke, such phenomena as ghosts, premonitions, apparent memories of previous lives… even… de-ja-vu.

“Ideaspace, where philosophies are land masses and religions are probably whole countries, might contain flora and fauna that are native to it, creatures of this conceptual world that are made from ideas in the same way that we creatures of the material world are made from matter. This could conceivably explain phantoms, angels, demons, gods, djinns, grey aliens, elves, pixies…”

To all of our benefits, Moore decided to make this the underpinning of the Awesome universe, as shown in Supreme #47 and even more in #48, so we get to picture it. It will also give us a way of understanding how the gods exist when we get to Judgment Day and Glory.

The fabric of the Awesome universe is made up of ideas. As we've seen in the pages of Supreme, his backstory is comic books. His history is made up of stories because they're made up stories. So of course his whole universe would be based upon the rule of Moore's concept of magic.

Again, imagination, ideas and stories are central to the work Moore is doing in the Awesome universe, and for the first time, we get a real sense of how important this work is to Moore. It's simple to write off these works because they're superheroes and aren't as important as his monuments, such as From Hell or even as obviously personal as Promethea, but they are a lot more personal and important to understanding Moore's worldview than many people think.

He built this universe based upon his own core concepts of magic and creativity. For the first time, we were given a view into what Moore believes is the fabric of human existence. The fact that it's a fun story only makes it even better magic.

From The Killing Joke to Dick Sprang

One of Moore's best known--and most regretted--works is Batman: The Killing Joke, a savage little tale of the Joker permanently disabling Batgirl in order to drive Commissioner Gordon crazy. It was at the peak of Moore being sick of working for DC Comics and right after he had written the paragon of dark and gritty comics in Watchmen. Years later in the pages of Supreme, Moore wrote about Batman again, this time as Professor Night, but this wasn't a grim and gritty Batman, this was a silver-age version. As he said in an interview (formerly on mania.com and now on inverse.com):

"I’ve never really liked my story in The Killing Joke. I think it put far too much melodramatic weight upon a character that was never designed to carry it. It was too nasty, it was too physically violent. There were some good things about it, but in terms of my writing, it’s not one of me favorite pieces. If, as I said, god forbid, I was ever writing a character like Batman again, I’d probably be setting it squarely in the kind of 'smiley uncle period where Dick Sprang was drawing it, and where you had Ace the Bat-Hound and Bat-Mite, and the zebra Batman—when it was sillier. Because then, it was brimming with imagination and playful ideas. I don’t think that the world needs that many brooding psychopathic avengers."

You can find out more about the hilariously-named Dick Sprang here, but he was one of many artists who did the ghost art for Batman because Bob Kane put in his contract that Batman was to be credited to him even when he didn't do the art. He was also Kane's favorite "ghost."

Sprang came up with the Riddler and the 1950s Batmobile. He's well known for that smiley, lovable Batman at the start of the 1960s TV show. Sprang used to study the way children read comics in order to experiment with page layouts and panel to panel transitions, hoping to create "the most suspense and the most fluidity to keep the pages turning."

Once comic conventions started to become a thing, the artists behind Bob Kane became better known, and Sprang became a well-known figure. In later years he put out two wonderful lithographs that capture his version of Batman so well, and you can see why Moore would rather play in a world of so much invention and imagination.