Elliot S! Maggin: SWAT! and the Seduction of the Innocent

So I came across this article at the always excellent Superman through the ages website about Elliot S! Maggin and the work he was planning on doing for Awesome. Maggin was a longtime Superman writer in the 1970s, who went on to write several influential Superman novels. He also happened to be good friends with Awesome Publisher Jeph Loeb, who convinced him to come and do some work for the company.

Maggin had the idea of playing on the ideas Moore had established in Supreme, especially in the 1950s. He proposed a 48-page one-shot called Seduction of the Innocent:

"It's Supreme and Fighting American and a lot of Alan Moore characters like Professor Night and the Fisherman and what was going on in the real world at that time. A major character is President Eisenhower. Some other minor characters are Bill Gaines, Jack Kirby, and [Red-baiting U.S. Senator] Joe McCarthy. It involves the Army-McCarthy hearings. I can't tell you what the story is about, but what it is really about is people with specific agendas imposing them upon the rest of the world in order to advance their own careers."

In Seduction of the Innocent, Maggin proposed that Supreme and the Fighting American find themselves the subjects of Congressional hearings, much as comic books were investigated in the real world by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The comic, of course, takes its name from the book of the same name, written by Dr. Frederick Wertham in the early '50s. Wertham's book purported to expose sexual overtones hidden in the comics of the day and claimed comics could and did cause children to become juvenile delinquents. The book led to Senator Kefauver's hearings, and it was these hearings that led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority, which set strict and often abusrd guidelines about what was and was not acceptable content for comics, which Moore's Swamp Thing was one of the first DC comics to take off of their cover.

"[Kefauver] was the guy that caused a lot of my friends to spend about ten years among the walking wounded.  Kefauver brought up this comic thing in order to get the [Democratic Party's] Vice Presidential nomination in '56, and this was a major tool in what he perceived to be his elevation in the world," Maggin says. "The way to there was to screw up the careers of a lot of guys.  And in the course of doing that, these [politicians] don't know what they are doing.  They don't know what they're playing with, the lives they're screwing around with." 

Maggin loved what Moore was doing in recreating a history for the Awesome heroes.

"A friend of mine who is a hot writer now with a larger company is saying things like, I wish this company wouldn't behave as if it didn't have a history.  And what Awesome is doing is creating their history.  They're doing it retroactively every day.  They're unloading the backstory.  And giving the public a chance to noodle around with history." 

Maggin also was working on a series called SWAT! which got a preview in the back of Fighting American: Rules of the Game #2. It's essentially Kickass before Kickass. Here's how Maggin explained it:

"Bruce Wayne without the fortune.  It's about the idea that you can be a superhero by training hard and being smart and going to the hardware store and buying lots of cool, cheap stuff.  It was created by Dan Fraga. He did a five-page promo on the idea and I said, geez, this could be really good.  And Dan said, I want to work with a writer.  So I said, okay, I can do that.

"It's about this 14 year old kid who has this mad crush on the head cheerleader, who is a head taller than he is, and his SAT scores are through the roof.  And she's got this notion that she is in the world to do good in it.  And that's what it is, these two kids that have decided that they are going to save the world.  Or at least their little corner of it.  And they do some good stuff.  They never get screwed up, because their hearts are pure.  There's nothing wrong with them.  They're like the Nineties' Billy Batson."

You can read the promo below. Nothing came of SWAT! or Seduction of the Innocent, as they were swallowed up in the Awesome financial crisis of early 1998.

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

Weekly Reading: Supreme #53

Supreme #53

Published by Awesome Entertainment in September 1997

The cover:

Title: 19th Dimensional Nervous Breakdown!

(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 back to Supreme. So now that he's gotten the Story of the Year and Judgment Day out of the way, Moore has established Supreme as a fleshed-out hero in a broad superhero universe. Gone are the flashbacks (though we haven't seen the last of Rick Veitch). And now it's time to play.

While working at DC, Moore never had a chance to write Superman on a monthly basis, and in some ways, I think everything Moore did to get Supreme to this point was so that starting from here, he could now write the Superman series the way he wanted to. And I'm not alone in saying that these are way better Superman stories than were being put out by DC at the time.

As you can see from the cover, Chris Sprouse has taken over as regular artist, and he has said in several interviews that he feels this issue was his best work on the series. I might disagree, as only he could have pulled off issue #50, but this one is a beauty.

The inside credits have changed a little, with a few new jokes from Todd Klein tossed in:

Apparently there's some debate about whether Supreme was popular enough to make it "worth publishing." Rick Veitch has said that sales on Supreme toward the end were regularly selling about 40,000 issues. Today, that would be one of the major hits in the entire industry, but at the time, that was a smaller audience. Awesome also had a major investor pumping money into all of the series, allowing Awesome to spend a lot of money, though it's doubtful they were making a lot of money. Anyway, I'll get into that more when we hit the financial crash of 1998.

So, the story starts with Ethan in a coffee shop explaining to Diana how he "heard" that Supreme tied up all of the loose threads from the end of the Story of the Year storyline. The first question I have is there anything more late-'90s than Diana's flower vest? Wow.

Anyway, we find out that Supreme is working on trying to retrieve Judy Jordan's personality from the empty shell of a body that Dax left behind when he shifted to MAGNO. Suprema comes and asks that Supreme deal with the villains in the Hell of Mirrors, who want Supreme to take Billy Friday away from them, as Suprema explains: "They're really anxious to get rid of him. Apparently he's been asking them questions about their childhoods and motivations." Hah.

Sprouse, unfortunately, still hasn't figured out Suprema's costume:

 

Um, no.

Billy, more concerned about his laptop communicator that he left behind, seems completely unhinged, so Supreme sends him to the Miskatonic Mental Institution for the Homicidally Distressed, which we get to see as a lightning bolt cracks behind it for effect. Moore is clearly enjoying himself.

Supreme then references that the Youngblood trial from judgment Day is just getting ready to start at the Citadel. The mention of superheroes causes Diana to pull out her make-ready of the latest issue of Omniman, except it isn't. It's this very issue of Supreme! We can see Ethan looking at this very page.

Concerned about revealing Supreme's personal secrets, Ethan takes it and runs off where we can see him thinking that he's reading his thoughts. It's very meta and very fun.

Supreme flies into Dazzle Comics and orders that they run the Omniman issue and not the Supreme issue, but a real life Omniman appears and tells them that he can't allow his secrets to be published like that.

There's a wonderful conversation between the two heroes.

Supreme: "B-But Omniman isn't real! You're just a comic-book character!"

Omniman: "Oh, and you're not? Isn't that you on the cover of that comic you're holding?"

Supreme: "Well, yes, but this is some sort of mistake. I'm not just a made-up fantasy hero..."

Omniman: "Oh, come on! In that outfit? What are you, the mailman?"

They decide to settle it by demonstrating their powers, which of course leads to a brawl between the two. Diana offers to help Supreme, as she's knowledgeable about Omniman's powers. It's a little odd that Ethan doesn't know, since he's been doing the art on the series for longer than she's been writing it, but maybe this is a subtle dig at how uninvested artists are on the series they're working on.

There's a wonderful bit as Diana and Lucas talk about the heroes fighting, with Lucas saying, "Believe me, Omniman coming to life and losing his marbles in downtown Omegapolis is the last thing Dazzle needs right now! I mean, with the industry in the state it's in..." He's interrupted as the heroes come crashing through into a comicbook shop. And then Carl Chamber, the new assistant editor shows up for his first day.

Carl's an interesting side character, as he's written to be a little oblivious, that he's a nice workplace foil for Diana. He very well could have been created just for the Civil War issue coming up, but I also think Moore had more in mind for him that we just never got to see. I hope so, anyway.

And then Omniman starts to break character and we learn that Omniman is actually Szazs, the Sprite Supreme. "I'm cute and I've got a big head!" he exclaims. And with that, he's already become a fan favorite. Szazs is competing in the Impolympics with the other imp, sprite and pixie analogs of the Awesome heroes to come up with "the most irrational and pointless stunt!"

I have to say I love the way Sprouse is able to mix his more realistic style for Supreme with a cartoony style for Szazs. It's a skill he'd Moore would make him use again in Tom Strong.

Szazs becomes a giant and wishes everyone could share his elevated view, but Supreme talks him out of making everyone into giants again. So Szazs makes a mirror image of the city on the sky, like something out of Christopher Nolan's movie Inception. Giant foam rubber clouds fall on the city, dampening Diana and the others on the ground.

Diana suggests that Supreme use the Supreme comicbook to see how to get Szazs to leave the dimension, which Supreme does. We find out that Szazs can only exist in prime-numbered dimensions, such as the three dimensions that we're able to see. Supreme explains that because we can sense time that we're in the fourth dimension, making Szazs disappear.

Moore sort of trapped himself by using up the fourth dimension explanation for this issues, meaning that if he ever had Szazs return, he'd have to explain the fifth and sixth dimensions, but I guess he was lucky that Supreme got cancelled first.

Anyway, the issue of Supreme remained as a memento, which Supreme put into his trophy room in the Citadel. We can see that the back of it is advertising the Judgment Day trade paperback (which never came out). We see Supreme talking to Die Hard, who then segues into explaining about the upcoming Youngblood murder trial. They walk toward the stadium, which we see being converted into the courtroom.

There's a nice bit, sort of setting the stage for the trial and why it's important to the Awesome characters.

Die Hard: "Well, whatever comic book I'm in has turned pretty grim recently. It'd be nice to just close the covers on it and begin a whole new chapter."

Supreme: "Look on the bright side. We've both been in this business long enough to know that no era lasts forever... even a dark one."

And right there is Moore's guiding principle on Awesome and comics in general. No longer is he content to complain about the dark state of comics. He's now working to start a new and better chapter. Though he may not have quite made it with Awesome, there's a strong argument to be made that Awesome created the foundation that he built his ABC line on, which opened the door to a better way to do comics and superheroes.

But we'll talk about that more later. For now, let's just enjoy this wonderful run of delightful comics.


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

The AAO honors Gil Kane

At some point I'm going to start talking about the AAO, the Awesome Army Online. The AAO was a fan group that took advantage of AOL and internet chat groups to discuss their favorite creators, issues, characters, etc. But they also started to put out fanzines for conventions. I sort of stumbled upon them just recently and found myself really digging in to the fan fiction of the Awesome characters (especially since we weren't ever going to see more about them from the official creators).

But as I said, I'll get into all of that another day. Today I want to highlight one special issue of the fanzine, called The Outpost, that they did immediately following Gil Kane's death. It's a beautiful tribute and makes a nice sort of epilogue to the Judgment Day: Aftermath framing sequence.

See what you think.