These Comics Are Awesome: Renegade Reviews the Alan Moore Supreme

[Rebel the Wolfgirl]

So, to tie into my first new (and currently only) SBC lit in a while, Supreme: The Ivory Icon, I'll be taking a look at the comic run that inspired that series (and, if I'm being honest, my favorite comic book series of all time) - Alan Moore's Supreme, which ran for 63 (as well as a fanmade 64th) issues from 1996-2012. Every 2 weeks, I'll be taking a look at 1 issue, reviewing it as well as giving my overall thoughts about comics history (particularly the Golden and Silver Ages) as a whole.

Before we start, however, let me give some context as to what Supreme is, how Moore came to be involved in the series, and what he set out to do with it.

The Pre-Moore Supreme: 1992-mid 1996

Supreme was created by Rob Liefeld and introduced in Youngblood #3 (published in October 1992) as a grim and gritty version of Superman, as if the name weren't obvious enough. Suffice to say, before Moore came along, Supreme wasn't exactly consistent either in powerset or motivations (sometimes calling himself an angel of God, and sometimes considering himself a god) and as for his stories, they were pretty fucking bland (pardon my French, but it's true). Hell, Liefeld's Supreme didn't even get a consistent backstory anyway until the 3 issue 1994-1995 miniseries The Legend of Supreme, wherein he was a criminal imprisoned in 1937 for killing a couple of attempted rapists before being subjected to a government experiment wherein he literally dies and comes back to life as Supreme, then fighting alongside the Allies in WWII before leaving for several decades in space then returning in 1992.

Did I also mention that during these pre-Moore years, Supreme died, was brought back to life, lost his powers, then died again? No? Yeah, that's the kind of thing we're dealing with here. And not just in-story either - the rudderless chaos of the initial run extended to behind-the-scenes issues as well; the Liefeld era went through an astounding number of writers and artists, dropping plots like flies and tangling them into incomprehensibility. And yet, all that started to change when Moore came onboard in mid-1996.

 

Alan Moore and How He Came to Write Supreme

Now, I'm fairly certain Alan Moore and his work from the 80s needs no introduction: Swamp Thing, The Killing Joke, Watchmen, the whole shebang. So in the late 80s-early 90s, Mr. Moore had left the comic mainstream and went indie, working on a number of titles like From Hell, Big Numbers, and Lost Girls. But unfortunately, doing indie comics back then, especially before Image Comics came about and proved it could be successful, was a big financial risk, one that Moore ended up suffering from. Thankfully, however, all wasn't lost: Todd MacFarlane, creator of Spawn, decided he wanted to get Moore involved in the newly founded Image and so asked him to write an issue of his comic. Moore, deciding to get back into mainstream work, accepted the offer and that issue led to Moore heading the (sadly unfinished) 1963 miniseries; a pastiche of Silver Age Marvel. This comic arguably laid the groundwork for what Moore wanted to do with Supreme, but more on in a bit. Soon enough, Moore's Image work extended to doing a couple Spawn miniseries as well as doing a run of Jim Lee's W.I.L.D.C.A.T.S., which was at the time considered Moore's worst work and something the man ultimately wasn't exactly pleased by either; he only did it because of a budding friendship between himself and Jim Lee. Just as it seemed Moore losing his groove was becoming more apparent, an offer came up: why not work on one of Rob Liefeld's characters with full creative freedom? Moore, naturally, decided to choose Supreme.

 

Moore's Vision for Supreme

Given free reign to go hog wild, Moore decided to do something new and fresh with Supreme; he had decided that, ultimately, the issue that had plagued his W.I.LD.C.A.T.S run was that he was merely giving what he thought the fans wanted to see with comics. With Supreme, Alan Moore decided that in order to get his glory back, he'd do the comic in a way he'd want to see a comic done; in this case turning Supreme into a tribute to the Superman of his boyhood, the classic Mort Welsinger era of Superman from the 50s and 60s. To quote Moore himself:

Quote

I decided that I’d rather liked the old Superman, that I’d rather enjoyed that rich mythology and continuity, all those kind of stupid but enduring elements, you know? Krypto the Super-dog, all of the old fashioned stuff that had so much more charm than the modem incarnation of the character. And so, having come up with what I thought was the core intriguing and whimsical idea of the Supremacy, the idea that there was 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. And 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 had provided.

With that idea to bring back the wonder and whimsy of the Silver Age while also being a comic for the modern day, Alan Moore decided to throw out everything that came before in regards to Supreme, while also managing to build upon it (if only in a vague, "broad strokes" sense) to create something new.

And with that, join me on the 27th as we look at the first issue of Moore's run, Supreme #41, "The Land of a Thousand Supremes!"