The
BEST Superman story that didn’t contain Superman
"The
Double-Exposure Doom/Land of a Thousand Supremes/The World Made New"
Writer – Alan Moore
Pencillers – Joe Bennett
and Keith Giffen
Inkers – Norm Rapmund
and Al Gordon
Colorist: – Ruben Rude
Letterer – Todd Klein
Assistant Editor – Brent
Braun
Editor – Eric Stephenson
August 1996
It
was low-hanging fruit.
Rob
Liefeld felt the Image universe needed a Superman stand-in. In October 1992, issue
3 of Youngblood, Liefeld introduced the world to Supreme, his universe's
version of a gritty, realistic Superman who spouted bible verses and had no
code vs killing.
The
world was underwhelmed.
I
mean we'd seen this all before, from possibly every comics company that ever
was: same power set (flies, super strong, super durable, fast…*yawn*) in the
same package.
Yet
in those days even stale concepts from Image were awarded series if they came
from a top-name partner who could capitalize on their success while continuing
to miss their own deadlines.
So
Supreme got his own ongoing, a lackluster, brutally slow affair that had many
rotating teams working on it. The character was shown as psychotic and thoroughly
unlikeable.
But
it was the 90's and people bought it anyway. At least in enough numbers so that
four years later, Rob Liefeld could entice possibly the world's best comic
book writer to take over. I'm speaking, of course, about Alan Moore.
There
were caveats to Moore's tenure that would make Liefeld regret bringing him on
board later. Moore was given complete control over the book and for Moore that
meant he could wipe the slate clean of Supreme and remove elements that he
didn't care for. And Moore didn't see much of anything worth saving from the
prior creative teams.
"Well, when I was
originally given Supreme, it’s so obvious that it is a Superman knock-off that
has been based upon a kind of half-baked understanding of the comics of the
mid-1980’s. It’s somebody who thought “Right, gritty realistic superheroes,
that’s the thing to do. How do you do that? Well you take someone like Superman
and make them a psychopath.” And so, he’d done that, and it wasn’t very
interesting, the character wasn’t very interesting, none of the writers who
worked on it seemed to be able to do anything with it because, actually, the
idea of Superman as a psychopath is not a very interesting idea, and it’s one
that other people had probably done better in other places years before. So
when he [Rob Liefeld] initially suggested that I might want to write the
character, I suddenly thought, “Well, how could I rescue this lame, appalling
Superman knock-off?” And I thought, well, perhaps if I were to make it like a
really, really good Superman knock-off, if I were to actually try -, because at
the time, I remember thinking that the regular Superman book actually was at
least as much of a lame Superman knock-off as Supreme was."
-- Alan Moore from George Khoury's
"The Extraordinary Works of Alan
Moore" care of J.R. LeMar's iBLOGalot.com site
I
love that he calls the character "uninteresting." The Crapbox has
several Supreme issues from before and after Moore's run and I can state that
everything done before or since to him is exactly that. Boring and predictable
and not enjoyable to read.
But
Moore's run is something so EXCEPTIONAL
that it NEEDS to be read. If you are a Superman fan and you haven't read The Story of the Year and The Return, you have missed out on the
best homage to silver and golden age Superman ever written. Those two
collections should be on every Superman-fan's bookshelf. They are MUST reading.
And
here, in the humble issue 41 I hold in my hands, a comic that I received in a
pack of 30-for-$5 comics, is the issue that kicks off Story of the Year.
Allow
me to whet your appetite for a REALLY good Superman tale…
Story
of the Year begins with Supreme arriving back to Earth from space. In context
of the character, that's exactly where Supreme should be, returning from an
alternate Earth after helping an alternate Supreme defeat the Norse god Loki.
He is shocked to find that the Earth appears like a double image, with one or
the other phasing in or out of reality.
A
perplexed Supreme flies in closer and uses his Micro-Sight to look at matter on
a molecular level. Everything is shifting between two realities. Note that he
doesn't seem sure he's ever used "Micro-Sight" before too. Supreme
appears to be having memory gaps as well.
As
he moves in to street level, noticing that everyone is frozen in the flux of
two Earths, he is surprised by three very familiar individuals. I love their assessment
of Supreme. That he has that "born yesterday" look and they say he might
be a "nineties model" with powers "so poorly defined as to be
virtually limitless."
An
apt description of the character. It's easy to say "Superman." It's
hard to actually distill what makes a Superman. Except Moore does just that, as we shall
see.
Anyway,
our guests end up being Supreme also. Just not THIS realities Supreme.
Moore still wants to show the Supreme character is in flux (just wait for the
understanding to kick in here in just a bit), and so has Supreme act like a belligerent
psychopath and attack them. Because that's what Liefeld's Supreme character was: a Superman that punched everything using his muscles instead of his brains. (as an aside, I love the black female Supreme
speaking in "honkey-jive" Blaxploitation speak.)
Luckily
for our trio of "not-Supremes," help arrives just as the real Supreme
is about to clean their clocks.
Help
in the form of a giant flying Supreme-mouse named Squeak The Supremouse.
Wait
until you see the size of the cheese.
With
Supreme no longer threatening everyone, their motives become a bit clearer. It appears
they are trying to get Supreme off Earth quickly. Their destination is
something called the Supremacy. With the real Supreme in a more agreeable temperament,
that appears to be likely.
The
rationale behind it all is to be off Earth before some kind of cataclysmic
"reset" happens. A reset that each of them seems very familiar with.
The
glowing portal takes them to a huge golden castle floating in emptiness, every
buttress bearing some kind of likeness of Supreme. It's sort of like Gotham
from the Batman & Robin movie only covered completely in gold paint.
This
is the Supremacy and it is here that Alan Moore unwinds what is perhaps my
favorite take on reboots.
This
is Moore's answer to what happens from a character's standpoint when a reboot
occurs or a new creative team comes in and changes the aspects of the
character. They don't just disappear. They are instead shuffled off camera to a
luxurious existence in a limbo realm with all their various incarnations. It is
deviously simple and allows Moore to reference Superman's various incarnations,
from his early Golden years to his Generations versions from the future.
As
they fly past the statue it moves. We learn this is Macrosupreme, who warns Supreme
to beware of Darius Dax. Dax is Supreme's version of Lex Luthor, a character
Moore would introduce later. By teasing it here though, it not only whets our
appetite but also allows us to put more of this realm's puzzle pieces together.
If there's a Luthor…then there will have to be some kind of Lois, and a Jimmy,
and a Perry, and a Legion, and a Phantom Zone, and a Kryptonite, and a Krypto
and…all of it, really. Once one domino falls, all of them fall.
They
arrive to meet the ruler of the Supremacy, the Supreme Supreme. I love that he
greets them with the words that it must be like a hoax or a dream, words that had been blazed across the fronts of years of comics in the 1960's.
Also
all of this has a very Kirby "Superman in Supertown" kind of feel
that works for me. Even as Original Supreme explains how the Supremacy came
together.
While
this makes perfect sense to the reader, Supreme himself is having a bit of hard
time with it. Supreme Supreme goes on to explain that when he was drawn into
the Supremacy, his whole origin and thus his whole planet were wiped from
continuity and thus ended up in the limbo realm.
I
admit to wanting to post all of the pages. Not because so much happens, but
just because Moore presents what is there with such nuance and relevance. Like
the subtle way he drops in the word "revisions" and how he insinuates that
Supreme's memories are only just becoming set.
He's
like a sculptor who knows what to keep and what to take away. The little
touches here with the subtle nods to Superman's history are so magnificently
done that you can't help but be in awe.
And
again we have more little hints of how far to the "Superman" mold Moore will be
taking his run on the book. Not only that but he gets to remove ALL traces of prior creators
fingerprints from it. Supreme #41 at any other company would have been a new
volume and #1.
Watch
here as he wipes out all of the prior cast so he can recreate them from
scratch.
Goodbye
Kid Supreme and "Probe". Who names a superhero Probe? Sounds like
what my doc keeps trying to schedule to have done to me since I turned the half
century mark.
As
all the Supremes ever imagined give a final fly-by salute to Supreme, his
timeline finally solidifies. And although he doesn't know what he will face,
Supreme has the courage to walk up the steps and through the portal which sends
him on his way back to…
…the
broom closet of the building where he works as Ethan Crane drawing Omniman comics alongside his
love interest Diane Dane and pal Billy Friday, all of them under the tutelage of Mr. Tate. This is Moore's Supreme universe
now. Only what he decides will go in will be present. The next twelve issues
were commissioned with Moore as writer. I cannot imagine the excitement that
must of filled readers of the book at the time.
Especially
seeing that the next issue would lead here…back to where it all began for Ethan…
Moore
said he had a specific goal in mind when writing Supreme and this tale. I'll
let him explain:
"And so, having
come up with what I thought was the core intriguing and whimsical idea of The
Supremacy, the idea that there was a some place where whenever a comic got
revised, all of the stuff that had been revised out of the book ends up in some
sort of limbo dimension. And that every conceivable misguided version of the
character exists there somewhere, out of continuity. And once I’d come up with
that fairly simple idea, I realized just how rich and funny I could make my treatment
of it. The idea of a planet with hundreds of Supremes, every conceivable
variation and where of course I could parody the various ills of the comic
industry and where I could play with wonderful ideas, you know? Which was
always the thing that Superman represented to me as a child. It didn’t
represent to me power or security or anything like that; it represented
wonderful ideas, ideas that to me at that age were certainly magical. Where, to
me, they provided a key to the world of my own imagination. As so what I wanted
to do with Supreme was to try and give some of that sense of wonder, some of
that pure imaginative jolt that I’d experienced when I was first reading
comics. I wanted to try and give that to the contemporary readership so they
could get an idea of what it had felt like. The kind of buzz that those
wonderfully inventive old stories and comics and provided."
He
did just that. I got such a tickle reading the TPB of these. Currently The
Story of the Year and The Return are out of print. However I cannot urge you
strongly enough to either seek out the individual issues (I've seen several in
the crapbox, so I know they aren't always bagged and boarded somewhere) or find both of those TPBs.
If
you are a Superman fan, it is a must. If you love Moore, you gotta have them.
Even if you are just a comic book collector, they are essential reading. Go.
Get. Them! Highest recommend.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.