The other Awesome comics: Fighting American

Welcome to the ongoing feature where I read the other comics published by Awesome that ran alongside Supreme. I read them so you don't have to! (You're welcome.) You can read part 1 here.

We've talked about archetypal superheroes, with Moore doing riffs on the Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman types of heroes. One he never worked with much was the Captain America type. Occasionally he wrote Diehard as a fill in for a war hero type, but it wasn't overt.

But Moore need not have worried; Rob Liefeld had his back. Enter Fighting American.

So Joe Simon created Captain America, the patriotic, secret-serum war hero in the 1940s. He was one of the first Avengers, as detailed in that movie subtitled "The First Avenger." He became a guy named Nomad for a while and fought some dude dressed up like a pirate. In other words, he was a well-established Marvel character. And because he created Captain America under work-for-hire rules, Simon never owned the rights to Captain America, allowing Marvel to get rich off the character.

He did try to rectify that in the 1950s, when he teamed up with Jack Kirby (look, if you don't know who Kirby is by this point, you might be beyond my help) to create Fighting American, another patriotic character. Initially the team thought they could just adapt the "serious" patriotic-minded Captain America stories for fighting communists, but the series quickly loosened up.

Simon said in 1989 that he felt the anti-Communist fervor of the era would provide antagonists who, like the Nazis who fought Captain America during World War II, would be "colorful, outrageous and perfect foils for our hero." He went on to say:

"The first stories were deadly serious. Fighting American was the first commie-basher in comics. We were all caught up in Senator McCarthy's vendetta against the 'red menace.' But soon it became evident that McCarthy ... had gone too far, damaging innocent Americans.... Then, the turnaround, [as] his side became talked of as the lunatic fringe.... Jack and I quickly became uncomfortable with Fighting American's cold war. Instead, we relaxed and had fun with the characters."

Published by Prize Comics, it was, contrary to standard industry practices of the time, creator-owned. It lasted only to issue 7, but made enough of an impact to be remembered decades later.

Fast forward to 1996. Rob Liefeld was hired to work for Marvel Comics on Captain America for the Heroes Reborn storyline. He lasted only six issues (Marvel said he left early because of low sales, Liefeld said because in 1997, the company, which had filed for bankruptcy, asked Liefeld to accept lower payment for his studio's work. He refused and was removed from the series).

Because he had almost two issues worth of drawings and no publisher, Liefeld reworked it into a two-issue miniseries (August–October 1997) for Awesome, written by himself (story) and Jeph Loeb (script), and penciled by himself and Stephen Platt.

Liefeld called Fighting American co-creator Joe Simon and Roz Kirby, widow of co-creator Jack, who agreed to license the character to him, but at a price Liefeld would not accept. Liefeld created the similar character Agent America, drawing "maybe three pinups and one poster image," but withdrew the character, he said, when Simon threatened to sue.

In fact, Agent America was referenced in Judgment Day and made it onto several of the miniseries' covers (all drawn by Liefeld).

Ultimately, Liefeld negotiated a new deal for Fighting American, but was then sued by Marvel. During the course of the trial, he said, his version of Fighting American acquired a shield. As one of the terms of the settlement, however, Fighting American was forbidden from throwing his shield like a weapon, to distinguish him from Captain America.

Thank god they got all that worked out and no lawyers starved during the process.


Liefeld recruited Platt (with his quite dissimilar art style) to do pages that intercut with Liefeld's main storyline. Liefeld's pages deal with a retired super soldier in the present who had become a farmer and doesn't want to go back to fighting. But the return of some of his old villains forced him to come back and team up with a new android sidekick in a teenage girl's form: SPICE.

Platt's pages, in jarring contrast, show Fighting American in pitched battle with forces explicitly stated to be communists in the 1950s. Except they don't look like Russians and we never engaged in full-on war with the Russians in the 1950s and as pictured, the Russians in this comic wore uniforms like Nazis and fly the Nazi flag. Um...moving on...

In the modern story, Fighting American is transported to a flying island, fights a communist version of the Red Skull (but made of metal called the Iron Cross) and the purple-colored Smash, and then leaves.

It's kind of fun seeing Fighting American interact with some of Moore's WWII-era heroes even though they're not really Moore's heroes.

Awesome followed it up with two miniseries. The first, Rules of the Game, picks up where the previous story left off, and surprisingly, it's wonderful. Loeb wrote it with art by Ed McGuinness. McGuinness's cartoony art style lets Loeb be silly with it. That breaks most of the similarity to Captain America and let's the series breathe on its own.

Loeb brought back ridiculous Russian villains from the Kirby and Simpson days (such as Hotsky Trotski - see that's how you do it), who are all trying to kill Fighting American for $10 million (now that they're all mafia goons and not communists anymore). Loeb realized that Fighting American wasn't meant to be taken seriously, and the series is richer for that. It's such a refreshingly fun jolt of energy that I'm almost tempted to recommend it even beyond just Moore's Awesome universe.

Awesome moved away from that template and followed it up with the miniseries Dogs of War, written by Jim Starlin and penciled by Platt. Gone is the android sidekick. Gone is the subplot about Fighting American having a long lost daughter. Gone is the bouncy, silly fun.

Now we get Fighting American as an idealist trying to survive in a world of modern espionage and mass murder.

I love Jim Starlin, but silly is not a word you'd use to describe his writing. While the story is well written and interestingly plotted, it was just such a stark tonal contrast. Page after page after page of killing, brutality and pitch-black morality is not what I was hoping for from an Awesome comic. And Platt's Jim Lee art style just adds to the heavy effect.

Written several years before Captain America's the Winter Soldier arc, Starlin wrote a similar story of a villain (No Name) who might be trying to kill Fighting American, who turns out to be his long presumed dead sidekick (Speed Boy). The pair are trying to track down a Russian arms dealer who is looking to sell a Soviet-era weapon of mass destruction that can kill based upon the pigment of skin. As I said, it's well written, the ideas are dark and clever, and Platt is a good match for the writing. It would have been a great Captain America graphic novel. Unfortunately, Dogs of War would go unfinished, so we never got a number of answers or resolution.

All this is to say, if you ever come across Rules of the Game in the cheap bin at your comic book shop, you could do much worse than picking it up.

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.