Weekly Reading: Supreme #43

Supreme #43

Published by Maximum Press in October 1996

The cover:

Title: Obscured by Clouds

(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.)

If you want to know what the late-90s were like as far as comic collecting, just point to this: three issues in and they've already changed the name and the publisher! The name change won't stick, so don't get used to it. Actually, the publisher won't either, but at least that I explained in a post last week.

Anyway, even with all the changes to the cover, Alan Moore and company keep rolling on inside. So let's get to it.

We start with this wonderful splash page at left. Omniman is the name of the Superman knock off that Ethan Crane draws in Supreme. Omniman's death has been engineered by British deconstructionist writer Billy Friday.

This splash page was drawn by Dan Jurgens, who is tweaking his nose at his own work in the sales-exploding Death of Superman arc a few years before at DC Comics. There, Superman died in a fistfight with a space alien named Doomsday.

Moore is tweaking his own nose at the onset of British comics writers who would follow him from Britain after his success on Swamp Thing and Watchmen. If you're into that whole Moore vs. Grant Morrison thing, this can be marked down as one more battle in the last war of Albion.

We get to hear Billy Friday expand on his desire to destroy all the wonderful old marvels of Omniman's silver age, including Omni-Dog's rape ordeal. (Fear not Alan Moore fans, that's the only rape reference I remember for the rest of the series.) There's kind of a lot to unpack there, especially about Moore's involvement with the decision by DC Comics to jettison all the silver age Superman marvels, so I'm going to save that for a post for later this week.

It's pretty funny stuff, and highlights the separation of what's going on in mainstream comics that Moore is pushing so hard against.

Alright, let's get away from the Moore fan references and just read the darn comic.

In the last issue, Supreme started to remember about Radar, the dog Supreme, S-1 and the other robot decoys, and the Citadel, Supreme's secret hideout in the clouds. Supreme sets out to remember what he can as he flies into the clouds.

He quickly finds the Citadel and opens it with a lightning bolt from the friction of rubbing his hands together.

It's been a while since I read this, but I'm not sure I understand the style of the captions on these pages. It's written as though Supreme is a robot, talking about his amnesia as though he had memory banks. It's an odd choice that I'm not sure works entirely.

Supreme wanders through the second trophy gallery in as many issues. But since these trophy galleries are awesome, I'm not complaining. There's Stupendo, the Simian Supreme! And an image from the first broadcast from the Citadel in 1958, which prompts this issue's Rick Veitch flashback.

Supreme had taken his K!ZAM co-workers to the Citadel to do a broadcast. But once there they found evidence that intruders had broken in. The whole plot is basically a wonderfully hokey way to watch as the characters explore the Citadel and see all the various rooms. Apparently, this is based on another wonderfully hokey story: "The Super Key to Fort Superman!" which I'll talk about later this week.

We see the Hell of Mirrors, where he keeps his rogue's gallery confined, as well as the Prism-World of Amazlynth, a planet turned into coherent light. We see his galleries of friends: the Allies and the League of Infinity, and enemies: the League of Infamy! There's even an imaginary menagerie, filled with mythological animals, such as mermaids and dragons, from a place called Myth-Space.

Myth-Space will become important later, as you'll see.

Supreme figures out the mystery, as he realizes that it's just a prank, played by his friends Professor Night and the Allies.

Moore does a wonderful job of educating us about the Citadel, while at the same time, leading us further down his story, as now that we're curious about the Allies, he'll explore more about them in the next issue.

Back in modern time, Supreme is startled by his father! Dumbfounded, Supreme is taken aback even more when his mother and Judy Jordan... no, Judy Crane turn up! But the Cranes are dead and Judy Jordan is an old woman in Littlehaven!

Another Supreme turns up and we get a fist fight Supreme. We also get our first modern take on Radar, who will become a fan favorite.

Interestingly, Radar was introduced last issue as a brown dog whose fur turned white when exposed to Supremium radiation. Somehow he's now become a dalmatian. (Maybe they were afraid to have a white dog that looks exactly like Krypto - Superman's dog?) It's best not to dwell on these things for long, especially when he says dialog such as, "That's it, master! He has his tail between his legs now!"

Poor Radar doesn't last long as the real Supreme hits his head clear off, revealing him to be one of the robot decoy suprematons. Supreme then does the same to S-1, who he realizes did all of this because he's the only decoy capable of free will, setting up his own dollhouse in the sky, never telling the other suprematons that they weren't real.

There's a disturbing little seed in this. If S-1 was the only one capable of free will, he was living with four other suprematons who weren't capable of free will. Granted, they didn't know they weren't real, but even if they did, they had no choice but to live out this sad little scenario.

There's a lovely, heartbreaking moment, where Supreme has to turn off the other robots impersonating his parents and former love.

This is what Moore does that keeps me reading whatever he writes. He's taken the ridiculous, but toned it down, and gave it room to be heartbreaking, too. There will be a nice callback to this Judy suprematon in Moore's second year that is one of my favorite issues.

Anyway, from this scene of the real Supreme mourning the fake Judy Crane we jump to the old woman Judy Jordan and her granddaughter Hilda, thinking about where Supreme is at that very moment.

Then it's on to the letter's page! Fans could write in and interact with the editorial staff, thanks to a design by Todd Klein. (Klein also suggests that Moore may have written all the letters himself--though I tend to doubt it--as that was a practice by some creators back in the day.) 

I wanted to highlight a few questions, as they'll become relevant as we continue these weekly readings. Here's the bit about Curt Swan contributing to Supreme:

Here's something about Extreme Genesis, which I had assumed was what became the upcoming Judgment Day miniseries as after Judgment Day, Moore would write proposals for Youngblood, Prophet, New Men and Glory (but more on those later). However, my friend Rob explained that Liefeld had different plans. Extreme Genesis was going to be a reworked Extreme 3000, which Liefeld had started in Team Youngblod about a Badrock from the future. Extreme Genesis didn't fare any better.

And then they leave us with this nice little in-house ad, because nothing brings readers back to the pages of Supreme like the image of our hero decapitating a super pooch! 

Anyway, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for all of the details that I completely missed.

Image, Extreme, Maximum and Warchild

Today let's talk about the exciting world of Image Comics, its history and financial practices...

Wait! Come back!

Okay, so this wasn't exactly what I was looking forward to thinking about today either, but I promise I'll keep it brief and it gets weird and funny by the end.

The original Image founders

Image was founded in 1992 by several high-profile illustrators (Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino and Whilce Portacio) as a venue where comics creators could publish their material without giving up the copyrights to the characters they created, as creator-owned properties.

They each set up studios where they all did their own thing, at first trying to interconnect the Image Universe, but ultimately setting up their own little universes. Liefeld set up his Extreme Studio, where he put out Youngblood, Supreme and other titles.

Titles thought not to fit with the Image brand were self-published under Liefeld's separate imprint: Maximum Press. These were financially supported separate from his Image/Extreme titles. These titles included Avengelyne, Law and Order, Black Flag, Risk, and licensed properties such as Battlestar Galactica.

The Image creators weren't known for having managerial or production experience, and a lot of the titles fell behind schedule and it was a mess for distributors and retailers. Disagreements between partners began to develop. Several of the partners complained that Liefeld was using his position as CEO of Image to promote and perhaps even to financially support Maximum Press. The other partners discussed ousting Liefeld from the company, and Liefeld resigned in September 1996, giving up his share of the company.

So what does this have to do with Moore or Supreme or Awesome? A lot, in fact.

Moore had been doing his own thing since leaving DC Comics, creating Lost Girls and From Hell among others, and returned to find that Image had completely shaken up the comics industry. Moore saw the Image founders as rebels, bringing change to the corporate industry, and was wooed into working for some of the separate studios.

In 1993 he wrote issue 8 of Todd McFarlane's Spawn and would eventually do some spinoff work for McFarlane on a character called Violator (god, this is worse than the financial analysis). He also wrote a self-owned retro miniseries called 1963 with Rick Veitch and Stephen Bissette.

1963 was an important touchstone on the way to Supreme as Moore and company were recreating comics from the 1960s, in much the same way as they would later recreate Supreme flashback stories. The intent of 1963 was to create a group of heroes from silver-age comics who would then battle the Image heroes of 1993. Of course, there were all kinds of production delays and fallings out among the Image guys (as well as between Moore and Bissette) so by the time Moore started writing the script for the final battle, it had all unraveled. The series ended on a cliffhanger of Youngblood's Shaft kidnapping a 1963 hero for a reason we never found out. (Spoiler alert... oh wait, nevermind.)

The next year Moore would put out a miniseries mixing his McFarlane work with another of Liefeld's Youngblood characters in Violator vs. Badrock, seen at left. (Please, can we go back to talking about how Todd McFarlane originally envisioned Image as a comic book creators' union? That sounds interesting, right?) Well, the only point I'm making is that Moore had produced a couple books with Liefeld characters prior to Supreme.

He almost produced one more: Warchild.

In 1995, Maximum Press promoted a series written by Moore called Warchild. According to the wonderful Glycon website, Liefeld gave an interview (posted on OC Weekly) that revealed some details:

"'He once called us up to tell us that he had just been in the dream realm and talking to Socrates and Shakespeare, and to Moses, dead serious, and that they talked for what seemed to be months, but when he woke up, only an evening had passed, and he came up with these great ideas. And I’m tellin’ ya, I think it’s shtick, dude. I think it’s all shtick. I’m gonna start saying that stuff. Cuz you know what? It makes you instantly interesting. Like "O yeah, last night I was hanging out with Socrates. Came to me in a dream. We played poker . We dropped acid." That’s the kinda stuff Alan would say all the time, and he’d say "Oh, I’ve been practicing dark magic."'"

"Liefeld goes on to describe a comic book pitched to him by Moore that he still owns the rights to, entitled Warchild. Written shortly after Moore saw Pulp Fiction for the first time, it's a knights-of-the-round-table concept set in a Tarantino-esque inner city gangland setting.

"'I have him on tape for 4 hours just talking about it; it’s my most cherished possession.

"'You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Alan describe the heroes – this is in the near future – getting trapped in an amusement park in Compton, where one of the rides you go on is a drive-by shooting.

"'A couple of the artists I gave it to handed it back. The first ten pages is some of the most difficult, visually, it’s hard to crack. We’ll probably publish it in script form. I can’t crack this, life’s too short.

"'There’s standing atop a building, looking in through the window at a certain angle, while the person is sitting doing their hair looking at themselves in the mirror...and the panel descriptions, you go, how do I shoot this? I could shoot it with a camera, but like all the storyboards? It’s just very difficult.

“'He’s a genius, a showman, a shrewd businessman, and a whiner. I have no intention of working with him again.'”

Moore disputes having some of these discussions:

"'OK. I’ve never spoken to Rob Liefeld at all in my life. I don’t ever remember ringing the Image office. I have had some conversations with [Image partner] Eric Stephenson, er –'

"OK.

"'For the record I have never had conversations with Socrates, Shakespeare or Moses.'"

Anyway, the ad for the series is above. Suffice it to say, this series never came out, to this reviewer's dismay:

In WARCHILD, a young warrior-boy (called Sword) and his cyborg guardian (called Stone) and their companion Merlyn (who is the famous mage, but inhabiting a female's body) team up to have adventures that circulate around battling villains The Black Knight and Morgana Ley Fe.I initially purchased this because of an advertisement I saw in a mid 90s Image comic announcing a project called WARCHILD written by Alan Moore and drawn by Rob Liefeld. I do not know if such a book ever existed, or if perhaps things got changed around in the planning stages (IE... Alan Moore telling Liefeld and Image to ram it where the sun don't shine), but in any case, this book--the book I ended up with, was created and plotted by Liefeld, written by Eric Stephenson, with art by Chap Yaep and John Stinsman, with some other inkers.

It's a medieval knight sword-n-sorcery fantasy adventure, something that might make a dazzling FX anime, but leaves a lot to be desired in the brainfood department. I don't share people's total criticism of Liefeld's art, but I never thought much of his (so-called) writing/plotting ability. As I mentioned, I bought this book expecting to get Alan Moore writing and Liefeld's art. I ended up getting neither (although, Liefeld drew alternate versions of the covers to the individual issues that make up this compilation). I have seen Chap Yaep's art before (Youngblood/Xforce, Youngblood) as well as Eric Stephenson's scripts (SUPREME), so I gave the book a chance.

First of all, I wasn't always sure if I was reading a period piece, or simply an adventure taking place in some alternate reality. After awhile, I didn't really care. There was plenty of action, but I found myself not really caring about any of the characters. I read the book simply to get to the end (so I could read other books). I did not find this a terribly engaging adventure. Like so many of the failed Image projects, the action was fierce and fast, and the art looked dynamic enough, but there just wasn't much imagination or creativity to it. Definitely not something I'd save to reread somewhere down the line.

If you're a fan of this kind of fantasy, and you're willing to pay 6 bucks (plus $4 shipping & handling), then have at it, knave. But I think this story will simply bore you and have you craving something really exciting--like seeing how many bites it takes to get your fingernails down to the nubs that you're used to having.

Much, much later, people would bug Liefeld and Image's Eric Stephenson about the Warchild scripts. Various rumors have popped up over the years about how it was a four issue series and the scripts were for more pages than the standard 24. Was Liefeld sitting on a potential masterpiece? Why haven't they published it in the last 20 years?

Here's Stephenson's response:  

"Well, I think you may be over-calculating how many of those scripts actually exist... There are two scripts for Warchild."

So Moore never finished writing the series. Did Liefeld tell him to stop? Did he just decide to do Supreme instead? Who knows? But don't expect Warchild to ever be produced or completed. If we're lucky, maybe the scripts will be released or leak out and we can all look back and wonder why we thought Tarantino was so cool in the mid-'90s.

Anyway, that's the long form reason why, starting with Supreme #43, the book came out for a while by Maximum Press instead of Image Comics. Moore eventually used this break as an opportunity to create a whole new universe. But that has to wait for another Day.

We're so close to Awesome, I can almost taste it!

Well, I think you may be over-calculating how many of those scripts actually exist. Alan wrote a total of eight Youngblood scripts, three of which have been illustrated, to date. There are two scripts 

The Ridiculous Retro of Righteous Rick Veitch

As we see from Issue #42 on, Rick Veitch's retro flashbacks bring the depth and warmth that make Supreme something special. He's the artist who serves on the series the longest and is probably the most vocal advocate for the series after it's gone. So, let's find out more about him.

Veitch had already developed a unique comics voice before he came into contact with Alan Moore. He produced some great comics for Marvel's Epic line, including The One.

He'd go on to work with Moore on his legendary Swamp Thing run, as well as a couple issues of Miracleman. He'd go on to write Swamp Thing after Moore left, before he had his own falling out with DC Comics.

From Wikipedia: "When Moore left the Swamp Thing series after issue #64, Veitch took over as writer, dividing art duties between himself and Alfredo Alcala. His Swamp Thing stories took a similar approach to Moore's, combining horror-fantasy, ecological concerns, and an encyclopedic knowledge of DC Comics fantasy characters; he gradually turned his attention from the DC Universe to history and mythology, using time travel to introduce his hero to a variety of legendary figures. This was to conclude in issue #91. Difficulties arose after Veitch's plan for issue #88, a story in which Swamp Thing met Jesus Christ, was scrapped by DC President Jenette Kahn. Although DC had approved Veitch's initial script for the Jesus story, the topic was later deemed too inflammatory and was cancelled at the last minute. The publisher and writer were unable to reach a compromise; Veitch quit, and vowed never to work for DC until the story saw print."

He'd go on to work with Moore on 1963, Supreme and Greyshirt from Tomorrow Stories. He's done a ton of work since.

He's also got a great blog going here. On one post about the secret development of Marvel's The Sentry, he talked about the nature of the retro work he did on 1963 and Supreme:

"I’d been involved in two major retro projects (1963 and SUPREME) in which Alan Moore and I had developed a sort of “deadpan” approach to the genre. Then and now, most retro stories you see tend to be over-exaggerated. The dumbness is caricatured; played for laughs in both the writing and art. Alan and I believed such an approach was to be avoided; that in fact the mad random lunacy of a Mort Weisenberger SUPERMAN or a Lee/Kirby THOR needed no exaggeration at all. It was this close-as-you-can-get-it mimicry approach that I wanted to bring to SENTRY..."

At the time, he was also selling Supreme pages:

Bah!