Weekly Reading: Supreme #52a - part 2

(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.)

Be sure to read part 1 for the main story.

One of the nice things about giving Alan Moore 80 pages to play with is that he'll play with all of them. He devoted 38 pages to finishing off the main story and 42 of them to all of the extra stories and various goodies, spread over the two issues. And while I appreciated the pin-up gallery we got in issue 50, all of the extras here feel as though they have a purpose and a guiding hand.

Let's see what he's given us, shall we?

We start with Tales of the Supremacy starring: Squeak the Supremouse in "What a friend we have in cheeses!" With art from his soon to be League of Extraordinary Gentlemen co-creator Kevin O'Neill, Moore tells a ridiculous story about a friendly baseball game between the 1950s-era Supremes and the 1960s-era Supremes, told through the point of view of Squeak as he assembles his '50s team. It's silly for the sake of being silly, and it works.

In the "Hole of Heroism" Squeak wakes up for "another >yeek< big day for the rodent of >yeek< righteousness!" His lair is filled with more trophies, including the Master Trap, house droppings, and a Mickey Mouse-shaped corpse on the tomb of the unknown rodent. My favorite is Missteria, a bizarre pair of womens' legs on a chair with tanks at the base and a cybernetic brain.

After a breakfast of supremium stilton, he's off to check on Fifties Supreme at the peak of Summit Supreme. We get another trophy room, with my favorite piece of signage in the Titanic: "Time Travel Rescue 1951-1912."

Squeak is concerned because Fifties Supreme is addicted to supremium, what he calls, "The White Death." Despite once sporting a "three-rocks-a-day-habit," he swears he's clean now. We even see a display of what supremium does to him, turning him into all different kinds of Supreme, including a foreshadowing (both for this story and LoEG) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Supreme.

Squeak heads off and rounds up the rest of his team, including Supremite, the Three Sergeants Supreme, a gross Fat Supreme and the green giant-brained Supreme-of-the-Future.

And then he meets up with the umpire: Grim Eighties Supreme, who is an obvious parody of Frank Miller. Oddly, it's most similar to his work on Sin City, which came out in the '90s, but whatever. It's kind of a tired parody, but just do like Squeak: shrug and move on.

They play ball and all is going fine, until Squeak realizes that his pitcher, Fifties Supreme, has secretly switched the ball for a supremium meteorite, which could prove disastrous. Squeak flies in front of the pitch and swallows the ball before getting hit by Sixties Supreme and sent flying out of the park.

Eighties Supreme comes to mourn Squeak in the hospital: "So. Supremouse. Death claims even you."

Oh no, it was just a few bruises. "But you're crippled for life?" Eighties Supreme asks, which again references back to The Killing Joke. No, Squeak is fine and will be back for the further adventures of the vermin of valor.

It's a joy to watch Alan Moore just be silly. Like MAD Magazine, which seems to inspire him, he's not as funny as he thinks, but enough jokes land to make the whole thing a lot of fun.

Then we get the special bonus feature! The Secrets of the Citadel Supreme cross-section diagram by Rick Veitch. There's the Hell of Mirrors and the Armory of All Worlds, Supreme's private quarters and the mythopoeic zoo.

 

On the inside back cover was the key to the diagram. 

Here are a few highlights:

•  6. Supreme's private quarters: A private haven amidst the bizarre bustle of Citadel life, in here the Gilded Goliath can sleep, rest and treasure those rare solitary moments. Equipment housed in the cybernetic bed will digitally record his dreams for posterity.
• 7. The doghouse supreme: Home of the indomitable Radar, Hound Supreme, these spacious quarters have room for dog toys from a dozen different galaxies, as well as Radar's very own ultrasonic Hi-Fi system and scent-surround television.
• 19. The stadium supreme: Even muscles charged with strength supreme need exercise, and it is here in the Stadium Supreme with its truly Olympian facilities that Supreme, Suprema and even Radar the Hound Supreme take their early morning run and workout to keep in shape.
• 20. Supremuseum of art: This room houses Supreme's unequaled collection of art and historical artifacts from countless different worlds, times and dimensions. Included are a portrait of a time-travelling Supreme undertaken by the artist Rembrandt, and a set of strange carnivorous landscape paintings from the Rigel system.

Man, I love this so much. It's so simple and fun and you can only do it in a comic. If I was 13, I would take this to my library's photocopier and blow it up five sizes and make my own poster out of it.


Next up is a retro Suprema story, this time drawn completely by Jim Mooney, who had worked on Supergirl for so long. Suprema is in the outer reaches of space and feeling tired and decides to stop on a backwater planet for a night of rest. She asks the yokel locals if she can do some chores to earn a night's stay. They doubt she's capable, but take her up on the offer.

Off to fetch some water, it gets colder and darker to the point she even sees a frozen bolt of lightning! Frozen, the yokel carries her back to the house where she develops a cold.

The next morning she offers to help build a stone wall, but the weather erodes the rocks almost as fast as she can put them in place. "It's a poor laborer who blames her tools!" the yokel mother complains. Suprema can barely get two rows completed.

Suprema, determined to show her strength, offers to lift the baby's snow globe from the table, but can just barely lift it. She then challenges one of them to arm wrestle, and they suggest the baby. It's all she can do to keep him from winning.

She's about to leave in shame, calling herself the "frail of failure," when the locals drop teir disguise to reveal the League of Infinity, who tell her that she's passed their test. The cold was the frozen ends of time and all she got was a slight cold. The wall had been accelerated by time, even though "billenia happened in seconds!" The snow globe was the entirety of the universe, and Suprema hefted it. And the baby was the total of all human evil, which she battled to a standstill.

And now Suprema is welcome to join the League of Infinity. There's a nice joke about how we'll find out more about Suprema's adventures with the League "in future issues of Actual Comics!" (the made-up equivalent for DC's Action Comics).

Finally we get three pages of details on Supreme's villains, with art mostly by Rick Veitch (Satana's is by Melinda Gebbie). I like this description of Korgo the Space Tyrant (though he looks nothing like the Korgo we saw in the main story):

"Brinn Korgo, a wealthy and pugnacious space-brat, became notorious while he was a teenager as Korgo the Space Bully, battling Kid Supreme with a power belt his parents bought him. In later life he grew to become the intergalactic scourge known as Korgo the Space Tyrant."

And this one for Satana:

"At first believed to originate in Hades itself, the she-devil Satana and her master Lord Sin were later discovered to issue from a region of the infernal realm that has shaped itself according to fears and fancies of late twentieth century America."

There's just so much fun to be found here. And I think that's at the heart of what Moore is doing here and with Awesome as a whole. The audience isn't really 13-year-olds. The audience is (mostly) guys in the 20s or 30s and up. But Moore is saying that while it's important to leave some childish stuff behind, you don't have to leave all of it behind. Especially if it's fun.

Of course, much later, Moore will have changed his tune and say that superheroes are "a cultural catastrophe." But there's a reason I'm chronicling this iteration of Moore's work and not the ones he is doing currently. There's a joy and wonder and basic positivity to what he's doing on Supreme that Moore will later reject, which is sad.

And it's not that I don't understand what Moore is saying about letting go of the old cultures, such as those of superheroes created in the early to mid-20th century, in order to make new ones that are more relevant to our times. I get that, and it's not a wrong sentiment. But there's also an inherent cynicism to what Moore seems to be creating now. Now he's writing about zombies and H.P. Lovecraft's monsters. Those stories never end well.

So, I miss that optimism, and it's what I feel when I read Supreme and the other Awesome books. I'll talk more about this in a later post, but I just don't think Moore has the basic optimism to go back to working on Supreme now even if he wanted to (which he doesn't). So let me say thank goodness that Supreme will always exist from the time he could.

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

Weekly Reading: Supreme #52a - part 1

Published by Awesome Entertainment in September 1997

The cover:

Title: The Return of Darius Dax!

(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.)

Here we are at the finish line for The Story of the Year! Of course, this being Awesome, there are a few strange things about it.

Originally, Moore planned that the end of this story would conclude in a gigantic annual, much like the ones he enjoyed as a child, containing a long original story, reprints, schematics or maps and various features. Somewhere along the way (at least several issues ago from seeing the in-house ads), Awesome decided to split up the 80 pages into two issues because their printer couldn't print an issue that big. Rather than making them issue #52 and #53, they decided to go the #52a and #52b route.

The problem, of course, was by this point variant covers had come into fashion. And variant covers for the same issues were often distinguished by letters, such as #1a, #1b, #1c, etc. So a lot of fans only picked up a single copy of either #52a or #52b and either missed the first part or second part of the story. Even to this day, when buying the series as loose copies, you have to make sure the seller is selling you a copy of each, because they often think it's just a variant cover thing.

(This also makes it a bit complicated for my weekly readings. I am going to treat each as a separate issue, and deal with one each week. Since they're long--40 pages each--I'm going to do the main story in this weekly reading and deal with the extras in a post later this week.)

Don't be fooled by this Chris Sprouse cover. As he said in his Modern Masters interview, he only handled the covers for these two so that he could get ahead on his work starting with issue #53. As we learn on the inside cover, J. Morrigan and Mark Pajarillo are handling the pencilling. Uh oh. Are we going to get good Mark Pajarillo (issue #48) or not so good (issue #49)? At least we get some nice Todd Klein work on the credits page.

We open this issue with a wonderful establishing shot of the Citadel under a blood red moon. This is clearly the work of J. Morrigan and is a nicely handled page. Supreme's now elderly former girlfriend Judy Jordan is reciting the elegy for Keats by Shelley about someone not being dead, but merely awakening from life. She is telling this to Hilda, who is translating it into reverse for Supreme inside the Hell of Mirrors where the pair imprisoned him last issue. There's another nice bit where we see Judy's shadow and it appears to be that of a taller, thinner man.

Supreme's not really listening, as he's getting pounded on by the villains he imprisoned in the Hell of Mirrors: the Shadow Supreme, the Televillain and Korgo the Space Tyrant. The Shadow Supreme goes to see why this old woman gave them Supreme and discovers that the old woman is the one who originally created him: Darius Dax! Korgo demands that Dax release them from the Hell of Mirrors, but Dax says no, that he doesn't want the competition, which, in a nicely handled moment, Korgo can appreciate.

And then we get to the portion where Mark Pajarillo took over and... okay, so it isn't going to be good Pajarillo.

Supreme wants to know what happened to Judy, so Dax tells his story. He starts from when a teenaged Dax stole the supremium meteorite from Dr. Wells in Littlehaven for his tremendroid, which we saw back in issue #42. Besides being defeated during that incident, the supremium radiation gave him lymphatic cancer. In 1967, the doctors in prison told him he had roughly a year to live.

So Darius wrote a special memoir with his time remaining, one that was a secret device containing all of his memories and personality in a special dust. As his body died, he sent the memoir to Judy, who opened the package and breathed in the dust. All that was Dax took over her body completely and eventually built the High Impact Lethal Defense Automaton (Hilda) and waited for Supreme to return.

The villains in the Hell of Mirrors decide to take Supreme to see The End. Dax, meanwhile, arms the Citadel with Korgo's planet smasher (referenced way back in issue #43)!

Morning is rising in Omegapolis and Diana Dane is eating a donut in a diner when Sally Crane approaches her. Sally says that she's looking for an apartment and that Ethan really likes Diana, as only Sally can: "See, Ethan isn't like me. He wouldn't even notice you were wearing too much make-up." They get interrupted when the Citadel drops its cloud cover and comes into view hovering over the city, and... oh... this is what we get:

 

Um... that's...something.

Anyway, Dax announces that unless he is put in charge of North America, it's going to get smaller, one destroyed city at a time. He then goes and switches bodies with Magno, the super humanoid, that Supreme brought back from the Allied Supermen of America's hideout in issue #44.

Suprema and Radar fly to the Citadel to confront Dax, though Suprema isn't so sure it is Dax, what with the voice being that of an old woman. "Trust me, mistress, I have an (untranslatable) feeling in my hackles. The meat of the voice is an old woman, but I'd know the bone of it anywhere. It's Dax," Radar assures her.

At the Citadel, they find Hilda with a Rigellian fission-bazooka. Hilda makes an electric bolt that knocks out Radar and his speakers and then threatens Suprema with the bazooka.

Meanwhile, Diehard and Glory turn up. Glory goes to confront Hilda while Diehard goes to check inside, but he quickly gets blasted out again. Dax in the Magno body comes out, eyes smoking green. Magno is quite the body, as it was designed to absorb the powers of the entire Allied Supermen.

And we're back to the work of J. Morrigan. Thank goodness!

The villains drag Supreme to the throne of The End, a presence we feel more than we see, as Moore wisely only lets us get glimpses of him. The villains offer to let The End finish Supreme, but he tells them, "You. Are. Specks. Go. Away."

They wonder at him not wanting to be involved at the end...

"The. End? This. Is. Not. It. I. Am. It." he yells at them.

It's a shame, but we never get to see more of The End. In my imagination, he's always sort of hovered over the ignoble way the series concluded. He was the villain Supreme couldn't finally defeat.

Sorry, I got off on a tangent there. This story ends as the villains decide to kill Supreme themselves while Dax is, no doubt, destroying the world. As the Televillain whines, "I wish I had a television" to see it.

It's kind of a weird place to end, especially with issue #52b basically taking up the idea of television right away. It makes me think that maybe Moore wasn't involved with the breaking of this story into two pieces.

Anyway, it's quite the predicament. Will our heroes prevail? What will happen with Dax and Hilda? Stay tuned for the next... no... for the same, but slightly differently numbered issue!

Look for a post later this week on the ton of extras that were packed into this issue.

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

The other Awesome comics: Introduction

While little changed in the pages of Supreme when Maximum became Awesome, with even the numbering staying the same (that they didn't relaunch it as yet another "First Issue!" seems surprisingly restrained, considering the comic scene in the late 1990s), that can't be said for the rest of the Extreme/Maximum books. Some series were cancelled while others were put on hiatus until after Judgment Day sorted out the new universe.

In a nice explanation for where Awesome was going to go, in a post-Image/pre-Awesome press release, Rob Liefeld explained the decision as a moving away from the darker elements of Extreme:

This is from the 11/27/96 Diamond Dateline.

EXTREME ANNOUNCES NEW PHILOSOPHY FOR 1997.

Extreme Studios-whose books will now be published under the Maximum Press
banner-has announced that its 1997 publishing plans will embrace a new
philosophy designed to reduce the amount of graphic violence, language,
and adult/mature situations that have characterized several of its titles.

"For the past two years," said Extreme Studios President Rob Liefeld, "I
have watched our titles and the subject matter they contain grow darker and
darker...I feel that we've gotten way too close to the edge and it's time
to pull back."

Liefeld continued by citing the bold, bright books that influenced him as
a young comics reader, such as The Legion of Super-Heroes, The Teen Titans,
The Avengers, and X-Men.  "When I look at our current slate of titles," he
said, "I don't see the same attributes that attracted me as a fan."

Liefeld assumed responsibility for creating so many books which glorified
the dark side of human nature, such as Priest, Prophet and Avengelyne.  "While
we realize there is a segment of fandom that craves the dark side," he said,
"we feel that shifting our focus towards a lighter, less menacing tone is the
right move for our company."

To that end, Priest, Darkchylde, and Celestine-Extreme books that, in
Liefeld's view, "explore and promote evil"-have been canceled.
Avengelyne, which Liefeld defined as a character fighting for good, will
be toned down and made more accessible for younger readers.

Other Extreme titles-such as Youngblood, Glory, Prophet and NewMen-will
become more prominent in the company's line-up, starting with the release
of Extreme  Genesis #0, which will introduce readers to these books and
explain how they exist outside the Image Comics Universe. (Previously
scheduled for a January 1997 release Extreme Genesis has been rescheduled
for February.)

As I talked about before, I believe Extreme Genesis was what eventually became Judgment Day.

(UPDATE: 5/8/18 - So my friend Rob explained that Extreme Genesis was not Judgment Day, but was a planned crossover among all Liefeld's comics, which at the time were being printed under the Maximum imprint, and would see the heroes 20 years in the future. However, some combination of Moore's Judgment Day plan, acquiring the license to Fighting American, and the offering of a lot of investor money made him abandon Extreme Genesis and the Maximum branding and create Awesome.)

Now Liefeld didn't completely stick with this pledge, as we'll see with Menace, Chapel and some of the other odds and ends that Awesome would put out (and that I'll talk about in a post later), but Awesome did put together a few titles at the launch of the company that were supposed to capitalize on this more broad-based appeal. Beyond Supreme, the other three main titles were Coven, Kaboom and Fighting American.

 

I've been reading them and will do separate posts about each series as well as a post about the other odds and ends Awesome somehow managed to let escape into the world. One consistent for all of these three other main series was their writer: Jeph Loeb.

One of Liefeld's coups in starting Awesome was to lure Loeb to come and be his publisher. Loeb, who wrote movies (Teen Wolf and Commando? Seriously, how did I not know this about Jeph Loeb before this?) and television (Smallville, Lost and Heroes), was doing very well in comics by the mid-'90s, having written Batman: The Long Halloween, for which he'd win an Eisner award. He also happened to have teamed up with Liefeld on the Heroes Reborn series of Captain America for Marvel (more on that when I get to Fighting American). At the launch of Awesome in 1997, Loeb wrote each of the three series that Moore wasn't doing himself. Some of the series are good and some are a little forgettable.

Don't feel bad for Loeb, though. After Awesome, he'd return to DC to work on a little comic you may have heard of called Batman: Hush with some guy named Jim Lee. Questionable career move there Teen Wolf guy!