For the longest time, there was a rumor that after Awesome's financial implosion, that painter Alex Ross wanted to
do a series or
graphic novel called World War Infinity. Supposedly Alan Moore, who was
working on his ABC line at this point, might have collaborated, but Ross
would have been the primary creator.
Here's Rob Liefeld explaining the project's genesis:
"Alan and I are talking about a project that would team him with Alex Ross,"
Liefeld says. "It originally stemmed from me calling Alex and Alan in October
and telling them that if I only had a limited amount of dollars left to
publish comics in this business, I would give it to Alex and Alan and ask them
to do a book together. They both thought that was funny, and said they'd think
about it. It turns out that Alex really took to it and has talked to Alan
about it. Through their discussions, Alan really got interested, so it's
something that's in the development stages at the moment. Can't say if it will
happen for sure, but the possibility of it coming together gets better with
each day."
Later it seemed that Ross's Earth X writer Jim Krueger came on as to
help with the writing. Here's a bit more about the proposed series (from
Greg Williams' wonderful Supreme site), from a webpost in 1999:
ROSS, KRUEGER ON SUPREME
by Rob Allstetter
Awesome Comics' Rob Liefeld said that Earth X collaborators Jim Krueger and
Alex Ross will be working on a Supreme mini-series to be released next year.
"I'm a huge fan of these two gentlemen's work and we're going to be doing a
huge project with them in the middle of 2000," Liefeld said. "Alex Ross and
Jim Krueger are doing a Supreme Prestige Format, three-issue mini-series.
"I can't tell you the title, but Alex called me months ago and said, 'I've
created a hundred new characters for this series.' I said, 'You did not.
Don't tell me a hundred because I'll go repeat that.' He said, 'I'm telling
you, it's a hundred new characters.'
"It's a story I've never seen done in comics before. Alex will be doing the
third book. He's designing all the characters, painting all the promotion
pieces, he's painting all the covers and he's doing the third book of the
series."
Liefeld said he couldn't announce the other artists for the project's first
two issues because the deals haven't been signed yet.
"You're going to see a lot of build-up over the next year," Liefeld said. "I
think of it as our Kingdom Come. I'm extremely flattered that someone as busy
and talented as Alex and Jim have decided to do this for us.
"Alex has shown me some of the sketches and they will blow you away. Alex
continues to cement himself as one of the most versatile creators in the
field and this stuff is going to take him to the next level.
"He said, 'Rob, this will be the most controversial thing I've ever done.'
And I said, 'Well, if you're doing it with me, I can guarantee that will be
the case - whether you want it to or not.'"
For the longest time, I couldn't find anything that said what the project actually would be about. But recently, Ross appeared on the Word Balloon Comic Podcast (at about the 1:30:00 mark) and shared a bit about the project:
"...Later in that year of 1998, I was starting to push this idea towards [Alan Moore]. I forget how much I fully described to him in rough form. I had this thing called World War Infinity, where the Infinity word would be represented by the symbol instead of a Roman numeral. And it would have involved a sort of play upon the... making fun of things like Crisis on Infinite Earths and even Kingdom Come, the idea of just this constant warring amongst a multitude of superheroes. So using the Extreme Studios part of Image as sort of its own universe and having this constant war seeming to come to a full conflagration of everything getting destroyed and then everything is starting over again. So my concept was a play upon Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray movie. So, Supreme keeps reliving the same day but in the telling, it would be different artists doing different sequences of pages. My hope at that time was to have gotten the then-recently kicked off of Superman team of Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway and Jon Bogdanove and anybody else I could get in there, like Perez, thinking we could have this all-star kind of thing where we're making analogs for DC-type characters, have Alan write it, and then ultimately we would break into a sort of metaphor for... Supreme breaches from fictional reality into the real reality of publishing where there would be these analog characters for DC editors and management. So it would have been this sort of cruel thing... This was never drawn out. This was just described by me to Alan and to anyone else, like Rob, who would listen. And the idea was Supreme would basically complain to these men representing the writer, the editor and Paul Levitz, basically, "Why are you putting me in this constant cycle? Why doesn't anything ever change?" So it's kind of an open critique of the way comics are written, if not Superman alone. And Alan heard all this pitch, was open to it initially and then said it sounded like him criticizing the way other people write and he can't put himself in that position. And I thought, well, I'll put myself in that position. So then Jim Krueger and I were talking it over and we were possibly going to do that for Rob as well, so Alan kind of bowed out of it. I wound up getting so stuck in the development of Earth X with Jim that we had our table very full at the time. And then Extreme Studios went kaput, went away and then came back and then was very confused in this moment of stuff where we were building up to something and then the rug got pulled out by the people funding Rob's thing. I had no idea that he didn't own it completely. But you know, hard lesson. Luckily we weren't engaged in any deals so nothing had to go away. ... There's more to the story I don't want to tell so I should stop there.Let's make it seem like no hard, no foul. Nobody got hurt. Nothing happened. Everybody is glorious. ... It would have been a fun idea but it was almost intended to somehow knock then-DC because I was becoming critical of my own conflicts with them internally."
Bringing it back to Supreme, Ross did a number of sketches, most likely for World War Infinity,
which showed new uniforms for Supreme, Suprema and Radar. These sketches ended up being used by Awesome and Checker, even though they looked nothing like Moore's run.
What do you think? Could Ross's vision have worked or was it too meta?
