Weekly Reading: Supreme: The Return #4

Supreme: The Return #4

Published by Awesome Entertainment in March 2000

The cover:

Title: And Every Dog its Day

(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.)

And then another four months later, now in the year 2000, we get this issue of Supreme. Well, at least I finally got my Radar-centric issue at last.

Matt Smith is handling the front story again while Veitch handles the backup League of Infinity (yay!) story. Interestingly, there was a report in The Ivory Informer fanzine that Brent Anderson was going to do the art this issue.

We start in the offices of Dazzle Comics, where Diana is talking to Ethan about how Supreme dropped her off after their kiss and has seemed distant.

Ethan: "Uh, well, maybe he's hesitating because of unresolved complications..." Ha.

Carl enters with his dog, Oprah (really, Alan?), who is clearly pregnant and going into labor, even though she wasn't pregnant yesterday. The pups start flying out of her, literally, and punching holes through the building into the night sky.

Ethan sneaks off to become Supreme and investigate the mess as superpuppies burst through buildings. I love this bit of caption: "How can the pearl paragon possibly prevent this plague of paranormal pooches?"

Supreme rescues a car from one puppy who was taking it to bury in the backyard. A cop is trying to stop puppies from stealing dinosaur bones, but his bullets bounce off the pups. Supreme thinks he knows the problem.

Back in the Citadel, Radar tells Suprema that he's decided to take a long walk to Betelguese because he knows he's been a bad dog. Supreme comes back and tells Suprema that after 70 years, Radar has discovered sex and left Omegapolis overpopulated with flying puppies.

Supreme: "Sally, think about it: there are hundreds of them, they can fly, and they're not house-trained. How adorable is that?" Ha.

Supreme quickly brings Radar back and demands an explanation. Radar explains that he decided he would like to mate and had a relationship with a sweet borzoi for a fortieth of a second. He then moved on and had relations with 378 dogs!

When asked what made him act that way, Radar replies, "it was overhearing you and Miss Dane mating that gave me the idea." Ha!

Supreme tries to downplay this with Suprema, "I just gave Diana a kiss before I flew her back to her apartment and..."

Suprema: "I can imagine the rest, thank you! You men are all alike!"

While I was reading this bit, I was chuckling away so much my wife asked me what I was reading.

Me: "Um, it's a superman-like story about a superdog that has supersex with tons of dogs and floods the city with superpowered puppies." It's funny even trying to describe it!

Supreme and Radar head into the city to take responsibility for Radar's conquests. The puppies have grown at superspeed to one-year-olds. Soon they could be old enough to breed themselves!

Radar asks Supreme to turn his speakers to the ultrasonic level, so only the pooches can hear him. He barks some untranslatable barks and soon all the dogs are chasing him.

Supreme: "What did you say to them!"

Radar: "Uh, well, I promised them all free capes and radio collars if they'd follow me." Ha!

He decides to lead them to space to get the aid of Talos and Judy: "I'll need someone with thumbs to make all the capes."

He decides to colonize Fidor, a world of superdogs: "I'm sure that with encouragment they'll make as good a job of it as bipeds have."

Man, this issue is so great!

Supreme tells him good luck and when he gets back, Radar is going to see a vet from Vega about some surgery supreme!

We're back at Dazzle comics and Ethan is telling Diana about the new civilization. She's complaining that she still hasn't heard from Supreme. She tells him about her ideas for Omniman, namely writing about a Supremacy-style limbo of Omnimans. "Maybe even Omnibunny!"

She's excited about the idea but angry at Supreme. Ethan tries to talk her out of it, but she declares: "Right when I think I'm getting somewhere with him, he acts all strange and runs away, just like... you?"

And she gets it.

But more on that next week when Billy Friday returns!

In the backup story, "First presented in Advantage Comics #306, March 1963," we get the League of Infinity trying out some potential new members. The applicants get a tour of the Time Tower headquarters before they each present their qualifications.

First up is Chu-Ko Liang, who built a walking wooden ox and magnetic men of metal, as well as devised an array of eight stones that an opposing army got lost in. Next is Siegfried, who is invulnerable and can understand birds from slaying a dragon and trolls. Then comes Mata Hari, the queen of spies. Next is Wilhelm Reich, the Orgone Lad, who uses the power of blue orgone energy that permeates all things. Finally is Pilot X-U, who aided a dying alien and was bestowed with the power of light to make lasers and holograms.

The League shows the applicants to a waiting area in a garden while they make their choices. Pilot X-U is confident he'll get picked and wanders off by himself, while the others have their doubts. But, as we see when Pilot X-U is alone, he gloats that he'll use the League to get his vengeance on Kid Supreme.

Called back in to see the League, Pilot X-U is told to stand apart from the others. While he thinks this means he is the only new member, in fact, he is the only one not accepted. It turns out the others were suspicious of him, so Chu-Ko had Siegfried talk to the birds in the garden, who overheard Pilot X-U. Mata Hari snuck into the eague's files to find out Kid Supreme's villains. She and Chu-Ko reasoned the villain's identity by rearranging his name to Optilux!

After he attacks the others, Siegfried stabs him through with his sword, but that just releases him as light. Orogone Lad uses his gun to cancel out Optilux's orgone radiation, making him disperse. And so, all the new members of the League celebrate.

In the back of the book, there's an ad for a big epic battle called "Extreme Forces," which was to feature Supreme, Youngblood, Glory and other Awesome heroes:

 

Jeph Loeb, Ian Churchill and Rob Liefeld were to have created it, but then again, it never came to anything (as these things so often don't). Supposedly, it was to have all the characters come together to fight an ancient evil being named Skornn.

As always, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for more details and references and please help me by letting me know anything I missed that can be added. Thanks!

The Big Chill at the top of the Time Tower

I've mentioned several times (and will mention several more) that I love the League of Infinity and their Time Tower. It was a great device introduced by Moore to drive particularly fun stories. As the Time Tower appeared in this issue, I wanted to use it as an excuse to ask the question, what's at the top of the Time Tower? What happens at the end of time?

It just so happens that Alan Moore wrote a story about a Superman stand-in at the end of time in 1997, at the same time he was writing scripts for Supreme. It's just that he was doing it for Jim Lee's Wildstorm with the character Mr. Majestic.

Moore had written an arc on Lee's WildC.A.T.S immediately prior to starting work on Supreme, and you can see him starting to deal with superheroes in a retro way in those pages. While, in my view, it wasn't completely successful, Moore was happy with Wildstorm and Lee to continue doing odd stories for the company.

In February 1997, Wildstorm Spotlight featuring Majestic came out. It's a one-shot drawn by Carlos D’Anda and inked by Richard Friend.

 

As cold entropy is enveloping the universe, only a small band of survivors are left, including another cosmos' superhero, an intelligent strain of syphilis, a vampire, the wandering Jew, the spirit of arithmetic and a few others. Some decide to stay and die while others decide to move on.

Majestic flies Manny, the wandering Jew, and Eucrastia, the vampire, with Simberleen the syphilis in her blood, on. They detect a radio signal coming from the darkness. They find a Dyson sphere and after finding it empty, form a ship to continue on.

The whole thing reads like a poem: "And so it is that we continue down the chill black River Styx where once poured great cascades of star... We see death's ultimate kingdom in that sparkless dark where nothing can be seen."

Majestic offers his blood to help Eucrastia survive and is now a carrier for Simberleen. Manny decides to stay within a giant iceberg that is producing small bits of light. Majestic remembers that both he and Manny shared a world for a while, but can only remember that the world began with an E.

Majestic, who has spent all of his days as a warrior, doesn't know what to do at the end now that there is no more war.

Eucrastia: "And what of love?"

But he had been too busy for love. But he assumes love led to no point.

Eucrastia: "Then you are wrong. Love is not war. Love is not struggling towards a goal; towards a point... Love is the point."

It's such a beautiful little moment.

They have sex as she drinks his blood, penetrating each other. (Moore can't help himself, sometimes.)

The syphilis has a say about the moment, too: "Don't pin your hopes on love. Syphilis is by far the safer bet, between the two. Love is not nearly so contagious... and love won't last forever."

So, even at the end of the universe, Moore maintains his cheeky sense of humor.

As Eucrastia lay dying against Majestic's heart, golden tendrils grab onto her and drag her away. Majestic dives into the gilded fur after her, diving toward the center, coming upon someone he knew a long time ago: Spartan, the robot.

 

Hadrian kills Majestic, absorbing his consciousness into the robot's programming.

Hadrian tells him that his friends are also there and are preparing for the final moment of entropy. Majestic wonders why since it will mean the end. Hadrian tells him that as temperatures drop toward absolute zero, conductivity increases, so in that final moment, the entire universe will become a superconducter where the weakest impulse will be amplified across eternity.

So a new universe will be born from this single thought. As final darkness descends, Majestic thinks: "There really should be light."

And there was.

So the universe ends. So the universe begins. As with all of Moore's best time stories, there's a loop and the ending becomes the beginning. So too is it with the end of time.

I've talked before about how this was a period of optimism for Moore and few stories epitomize that as much as this one. It's such a powerful little story about the final victory of love and how this all-powerful being now understands love and is ready to begin again.

The Grim '80s and Women in Refrigerators

I don't want to dig too deep into this, but the '80s were a bad time to be a supporting character in a comic book:

• There was Karen Page, Daredevil's ex-girlfriend, whom Frank Miller had become addicted to heroin and eventually sell Daredevil's secret identity to the Kingpin.
• Jim Starlin killed off the second Robin when the Joker forced his mom to hand him over and then beat him with a crowbar before blowing them both up with a bomb. Readers could vote for whether Robin would live or die by calling in to a 900 number. The killers won.
• We've already talked about Moore's Killing Joke and what he did to Batgirl.

The '90s didn't start off much better, with Ron Marz writing a story about Green Lantern Kyle Rayner's girlfriend being killed and stuffed in a refrigerator by the villain Major Force.

One interesting thing that came from this last one was that comic writer Gail Simone created a list of fictional female characters who had been "killed, maimed or depowered," in particular in ways that treated the female character as merely a device to move a male character's story arc forward, rather than as a fully developed character in her own right.

When the list was circulated, several comic book creators indicated that the list caused them to pause and think about the stories they were creating. Often these responses contained arguments for or against the use of death or injury of female characters as a plot device.

Marz replied, too: "To me the real difference is less male-female than main character-supporting character. In most cases, main characters, 'title' characters who support their own books, are male. [...] the supporting characters are the ones who suffer the more permanent and shattering tragedies. And a lot of supporting characters are female."

Simone maintained that her simple point had always been: "If you demolish most of the characters girls like, then girls won't read comics. That's it!"

There's been a strong push lately to try to increase female readership and strengthen the female characters in comics. Maybe the comics industry understands what Moore understood in the late '90s: the grim '80s should remain in the past.