Alan Moore Obscurities: Supreme - The Return (#53-56, The Return #1-6) PART ONE

"By the Merciful Magellanic Cloud, what's happened to everything?" - Supreme

Let's kick off the new year with a two part look at the second compilation volume of Alan Moore's time writing the Rob Liefeld Superman expy Supreme while also working for Liefeld's Awesome comics label.  Or was he?  The first twelve Supreme issues I covered in my look at The Story Of The Year told a tight overall story while turning Liefelds psycho Superman into a old skool Superman pastiche with various aspects of Golden and Silver Age Superman being explored.  Now it's no secret that Liefeld's company was in some financial trouble by then, and Moore had some scathing things to say about Liefeld's management at the time.  Which might explain why these ten issues have a more chaotic feel to them. The first four concluded the main Supreme series, then the second six which were published when Moore had long ago left to work for ABC comics became Supreme: The Return.  I get the feeling when I read this volume that Moore, who usually has such firm control of how his stories would look just faxed them the scripts and went back to drawing up his plans for the ABC comicverse, I have no evidence but it sure feels that way. The issues also had lateness problems, the first in this volume is dated 1997, three years later we get the final issues of The Return, three years to produce ten comics, tsk tsk.  All-in-all behind the scenes was something of a clusterfuck for example there are eight pencillers and six inkers credited across these ten issues, including Rob Liefeld himself, but are the stories still worth reading?  Let's find out first with the final four issues of Supreme's original run and  the first issue of The Return, because the story started in #53 concludes in The Return #1. And in a few days time the rest of the issues making up The Return.

We find out after the defeat of his arch-enemy Darius Dax that Supreme has spent his time fixing up the Citadel for a while.  He also has the aged comatose body of Judy Jordan, the woman who Dax took over so he could live on past his first death from cancer.  Supreme is trying to find a way to retrieve her original personality which Dax overwrote with his own.

Suprema, his sister, comes and tells him he is needed in the "Hell of Mirrors" where he had placed writer Billy Friday after he became a huge bulk of limbs from his exposure to Supremium.  He's actually back to normal now, and the other villains contained in the mirrors are demanding he be taken away.

Suprema: "They're really anxious to get rid of him.  Apparently he's been asking them questions about their childhoods and motivations."

They let Supreme retrieve Billy from the Hell of Mirrors without incident although Supreme feels a bit sorry for him because he'd been through such a lot recently.  When he leaves the mirrorworld, he hysterically demands they send him back to get his laptop, but Supreme and Suprema gently lead him away. Supreme decide to send him to an expert in "super-power breakdowns" and Billy ends up at the "Miskatonic Mental Institution" under the care of the Batman expy.  By the way, Billy Friday is almost certainly a parody of arch-enemy Grant Morrison who made his name with the Batman graphic novel "Arkham Asylum".  Tee flippin' hee.

We return to Supreme who is in his civilian disguise as mild-mannered comicbook artist Ethan Crane telling all this to his writer Diana Dane, although she doesn't know he is Supreme.  Diana then pulls out what should have been an issue of "Omniman" but somehow it's turned into a comic about Supreme.  Ethan starts to panic saying it could reveal all Supreme's secrets and they must stop it going to press.

Supreme meets Omniman.

As he runs, he takes off his suit and turns into Supreme, he arrives at Dazzle comics and his editor is as suprised as he is to see the comic has changed. But when Supreme says they must run the original Omniman plates, the supposedly fictional Omniman appears and says he couldn't allow anything to compromise his secret identity.

Supreme says he can't be real, but Omniman says that Supreme is the comic book character.  Supreme says it's a mistake, "I'm not some made-up fantasy hero".  Omniman insults him so an annoyed Supreme suggest they fight it out and Omniman delivers a huge punch which smashes Supreme through the walls and into the pavement.

Diana has just arrived.  Supreme says she should stay out of the way, but she says she's the Omniman expert and she knows all about the powers Supreme doesn't have like "Omni-ventriloquism, Omni-exhalation".   This distracts Supreme and he takes another hit from Omniman's super-breath.  Oniman asks if he's had enough and is ready to crawl back into his comic?  Supreme say he know's Omniman isn't evil, "you're just badly written" and he punches him.

Diana and the editor watch as Supreme and Omniman duke it out.  The editor say with the industry the way it is this is the last thing they need.  As the fighting pair crash back into the offices, an assisstant editor called Carl Chambers arrives and asks if they are their models.  When told they are real he exclaims:

Carl: "Boy, that's incredible.  I never realised... I mean, I always thought the artwork on these character's anatomy was ludicrous, but they're actually built like that!"

Very droll Alan.  Anyway suddenly Omniman grins at Supreme and says he's given a "tremendous performance" and he transforms into a super-deformed version of Supreme, he is actually the imp "Szazs" who says he's now a "shoo-in at the Impolympics!"

Szazs.

Szasz explains that the Impolympics is a competition between each super-hero's personal imp antagonist, "there is only really one event, and that's to see who can come out with the most irrational and pointless stunt." He thought up the Omniman routine for his opener and now he's going for gold to reward all the patient weeks he spent in "nuisance training." He grows to huge size as Supreme flies Diana to a safe place.  He then flies up and tells Szazs to cut it out.

Supreme: "Earth's changed since the sixties!  Nobody finds this kind of stuff funny or appealing any more!"

Take that, the nineties! Szazs shriks back to his normal size, then transforms the sky into a reflection of the city.  Supreme tells him people will go crazy trying to navigate the mirror-sky.

He then flies down to Diane and she tells him if he still has the Supreme comicbook he can flip to the end and find out how he defeats Szazs.  Supreme reads it nothing that even this moment is in it now.  He defeats Szasz with a "logical proposition".  Szaz flies down to see what Supreme is up to.

Supreme tells him that Szazs can only exist in prime-numbered dimensions and that logically they are actually here in the fourth-dimension not the third because time is the fourth dimension.  And as four is not a prime number, Szazs shouldn't be able to exist here.  Szazs starts fading away:

Szazs: "No! It can't be!  You're disproving my existance with a syllogism supreme!  I'm becoming completely... unbelievable..."

And he pops out of existance and the city returns to normal.  Supreme still has the comic, but he says Szaz always leaves a souvenir of his visits and the real comic is back as Omniman again.

Moore can do postmodernism too!

We then cut to him at the Citadel, finishing off telling his story to the android and member of Youngblood, Diehard (who also starred in the Prophet reboot I covered on this blog).  This then leads into a discussion of the murder of one of the team by another and the trial they are going to have. This was covered in the Moore penned miniseries "Judgement Day" also covered by me, ages ago.

As they walk through the Citadel, Diehard comments that whatever comic book he's in has "turned pretty grim recently" and he'd like to close the covers and begin a whole new chapter (which I believe is reference to Moore's aborted run on Youngblood).

Supreme: "Look on the bright side.  We've both been in this business long enough to know that no era lasts forever... even a dark one!"

Diehard agrees and says it's no use worrying about what might happen, the future has already been written right? Supreme says that it might not have been written but it's definitely being advertised.  And that brings this chapter to an end.

The next chapter starts with a poem about Judy Jordan which recaps her story which was told in The Story Of The Year.  We see how wrapped up she was in her love of Supreme and weeping when she reads he's leaving Earth for a while.  Left aging and lonely she recieves a book from Supreme's arch-enemy Darius Dax who infused his conciousness into dust and when she opens the book the dust takes her over and she is left paralysed on the kitchen floor as Dax slowly takes her over, and she dies...

... but then she wakes from the blackness and see's Supreme looking down at her.  We then see that he's resurrected her mind and put it in a new and young looking robot body. Actually it's one of his Supreme robots, "S-1".  He tells her she looks wonderful.  She is completely bewildered.  She says one minute she was dying on the kitchen floor and now she alive and twenty-five years younger, "oh god! What's happened...?"

Chris Sprouse didn't draw this issue, Rick Veitch did and OMG Rick I know you can do better than this!

Supreme's super-dog Radar tells her what happened to her, and if she checks the room next door she'll discover it was true.  And she looks, seeing her comatose body in its seventies.  Radar says it's been thirty years since she opened the book and it's now 1997.  Radar say that Supreme found echos of her in her aged body once Dax was gone from it.  He rebuilt her mind like an electric jigsaw puzzle. Also, "he thought you might prefer a younger, friskier body" so now she's a Suprematon.

He tells her that her body is the most advanced robot there is and only S-1 is close to it.  She's now strong, fast and almost indestructible.  Judy says this isn't what she wanted, she wanted to be Supreme's wife.  He can't love her as either a robot or an old woman, so "what point does my existance have?"  Radar says Supreme couldn't bear to see her "consigned to oblivion".  Tearfully she ask to be left alone, she needs to have time to think.

Later we see Radar and S-1 discovering she has gone.  She has also taken the hero costume from an exhibit and we see her clad in it and flying over the city.  She flies to where Suprema is saying she is "Super-Judy" and starts dealing with the emergency Suprema was dealing with. Suprema objects saying Judy has no training as a superhero.  Judy just sneers that she's afraid of the competition.

But she almost allows a passing plane be hit by the space debris, so Suprema yells at her saying she doesn't "have what it takes as a cheesecake champion!"  Judy says super-heroing is her new career.  They bitch at each other about their costumes and when Suprema tells her the Suprematons are disposable an angered Judy punches her right in the face.

Dat ass.

Judy says she should pack up and go, Omegaopolis has a new "dame defender".  Suprema is pissed about her costume getting messed up and does a flying smash into Judy's stomach.  She flies them both up to the moon so they can fight without wrecking the city and they really go at each other until Judy is rendered unconcious and a regretful Suprema takes her back to the Citadel.

S-1 and Suprema bring Judy back round and Judy apologises for lashing out at Suprema, "I just felt so frustrated and angry is all."  Suprema realises her pain is also being caused by not being able to be loved by Supreme in return and she gets mad at Supreme for not taking that into account. Supreme himself appears saying he needs to face up to that.

He and Judy go and sit in the roofgarden.  He apologises for not being there when she woke up, he was dealing with a rogue comet. He tells her that the body she has is more than just a robot, but she snaps "what' the point of giving me life if you can't give me love?"  He says he thought he did what was right.  She hugs him saying he always does that and she isn't really angry at him just the ridiculous situation she's now in.

They walk through the Citadel and Supreme says he still loves her, but circumstances are different now, she still has the same personality just not the same organic body.  Then S-1 approaches them and Judy says to let him speak because he seems different from the other Suprematons.  S-1 says he is different, his mind is an exact digital copy of Supremes and he alone amongst his fellows knows independent conciousness.

He then says that for a great many years he has loved Judy and now would "know no greater happiness than if you would consent to be my wife".  Supreme wonders if he is lapsing into the robot madness again which he had while Supreme was in space and recreated all Supreme's family and friends on the Citadel.  S-1 tells Judy this and that when Supreme reprogrammed him he didn't remove his love for those people.  Supreme says he doesn't understand, but Judy does and looks at S-1 with a curious expression on her face, then she asks Supreme to leave them and as he turns away they kiss.

We then get an epilogue.  Supreme is now Ethan again and is telling this story to Diana and Carl.  S-1 took the name "Talos" from the metal man of Greek legend and Judy made him a new costume  They married in the Citadel stadium, "Suprema was maid of honour.  Radar was Best Dog".  Diana wants to know what happened next.  Supreme lent them his deep space vessel and learned from it's log when it returned unmanned a week later.

This was the last we heard of them.  Still it's sweet all the same.

He doesn't know how physical their relationship was, but maybe androids have "more options for mutual pleasure and communium than us organic beings."  Eventually they found an uninhabited planet and they have started building a civilisation there, populated by their "digital children".  They are going to call they planet "Suprematonia".

Back in the office Carl says it's taking him a while to adjust to all this casual talk of superhero antics.  And Billy Friday has contacted them from Miskatonic Asylum still anxious about his laptop communicator.  Diana says he's still in trauma.  Ethan just mulls over the fact that at least they know somebody far away got a happy ending, and we finish on an image of Talos and Judy kissing on their new world.

The next chapter begins with Ethan waking up and putting on his Supreme outfit which ominously has the Confederate flag's starry blue cross on it.  Then he puts on his civilian clothes and sets off for work.  The bus stop is labelled "Whites Only" and when he arrives at Dazzle comics, Carl (who is black) is mopping floors.  Ethan asks Carl if he thinks things are a bit odd around the city today.

Carl speaks in a thick accent that he knows nothing and wants no trouble.  Ethan asks him if this is some sort of joke, but then Diana arrives and has looks like a Southern Belle with accent to match.  She orders Carl to get back to work and when the editor arrives turns out she's married to him.  She says to him that Ethan is acting peculiarly, "talkin' with coloureds an' everythin'!"

This really jolts Ethan, he asks if this is really Dazzle comics and that they all work on Omniman.  The editor says he's been drinking, Ethan draws their most famous character, "Klansman". Ethan reads it in horror then leaves, turning into Supreme as he does so.  He heads for the Citadel as someone points to him and calls him "The Supremacist."

Hah as if America would ever tolerate being ruled by a racist elected along a right wing populist agenda.  The very idea!

He arrives to find the place looks different and he is greeted by a stereotypical black servant, "Ro-Boy, R-1". Supreme finds everything is nightmarish because his hall of exhibits covers adventures he never remenbers happening. He decides to check what's going on from outside time, and heads for "The League of Infinity's Time Tower" (the League are an expy of DC's Legion of Superheroes).

However the Time Tower is shattered.   The various members are standing of different pieces and Supreme is told that one of the League has betrayed the "oath of infinity".  He's altered time and history has collapsed upon itself.  They remember the old history, but are unsure why Supreme still does.  He wonders if it's because he has gone through a reordering of history during his trip to the Supremacy in the first chapter of The Story Of The Year. Turns out the member who changed history was Wild Bill Hickok who changed who won the American Civil War.   When Supreme asks how and why, Future Woman tells him to get comfortable and she'll tell him the full story.

Wild Bill was born in 1837 and fought for the north during the war.  When it was over he settled down as the Marshal of Abilene.  He actually got along with the Texan cowboys who fought for the Confederates and they respected him. He had a crush on a woman called Jessie Hazel, a  dance-hall girl. Unfortunately so did the co-owner of the tavern she danced in, Phil Coe who hated Bill as did the other tavern owner Ben Thomson.  A feud that started over a petty event.

With Hickok and Coe in love with the same woman, "something had to give".  One night Hickok accused Coe of cheating at cards.  There was an explosion of violence, and Coe was killed as was one of Hickok's deputies.  This made something inside Hickok snap, "he went berserk and drove all the cowboys out of Abeline that very night".

And this didn't win him his love.  Hazel called him another "damn Yankee" who'd humiliated her people.  He still tried to court her, over the next four years he grew more desperate and unbalanced.  With his access to the Time Tower as one of its "most trusted founders" he decided to prove to Jessie Hazel he loved the South as much as she did.

Those captions were impossible to read unless I scanned and brightened them. Grumble.

He went forward in time and took plans for a crude nuclear bomb and then went down to the time of the Civil War and gave those plans to the Confederates.  They built it and smuggled it into Washington in a covered wagon.  Using a primitive radio crystal transmitter General Lee triggered the explosion himself, "the unconditional surrender of the Union forces followed the next day."

We return to the destroyed Time Tower and Supreme is aghast at what happened, slavery is still legal and Atlanta is the capital of the USA. Future Woman says they have to do something, Supreme ask what can they do.  Then a goth looking woman called Witch Woman says that they must repair the rend in time before Wild Bill "worked his mischief." They must cut the thread to stop the rip in time ever started.

Future Woman realises she means they should kill Wid Bill.  They take a vote and it carries, so Supreme flies Future Woman with him to Wild Bill's time of the tower.  As they fly down Supreme says he has a no-kill policy but his gut is telling him Witch Woman is right.  Future Woman says that it would save so much tragedy but they must make sure they kill the right one.

They find two doors one for each strand of his life, Future Woman identifies the correct door which is the North dominated one in 1876 and Witch Woman conjures up some period specific clothes for them and the other members of the League who have come with them. As they walk out into Abeline, they begin to remember how Wild Bill originally died, shot because he had his back to the saloon door.  Maybe they are here to provide the reason why a hyper-cautious man like Bill would drop his guard like that.

Witch Woman makes Future Woman look like Jessie Hazel, she walks in and says to Wild Bill that she loves him.  He gets up and smiles at her and one of the League (who looks a lot like young Wild Bill) shoots him in the back. They rush back to the Time Tower which is now mended and Supreme's costume is back to normal.  They head up to the League's 24th Century headquarters and see there is a memorial statue of Wild Bill is there.  Future Woman says they all have statues, even members who haven't joined yet.

Time is repaired, all is well.

Supreme bids them farewell and heads back to 1997. He arrives back at Dazzle Comics as Ethan.  Diana tells him that Bill is still bugging them about the laptop communicator he left in Supreme's mirror prison.  Carl orders them to get back to work and Diana says he treats them like slaves, which gets her a strange look from Ethan.  This chapter ends inside the Hell of Mirrors and Billy's laptop communicator is discovered by the villains in there.

Inside the Citadel two Suprematon's are doing some monitoring of what everyone is up to in the various rooms of the place.  Then they see the "Televillain" and chase after him saying he should be imprisoned inside the Hell of Mirrors.  The Televillain then disappears through a TV monitor.  The two Suprematons figure out that he must be involved in a jail-break and we cut to them both smashed to bits by the rest of the villians now freed from the mirror prison.

While Shadow Supreme tramples all over the androids wrecked bodies, "Korgo" who is a viking-esque villain says it's good to be free again. Other villains emerge, including "Sentinel", the murderer from Judgement Day who just flies off.  A female one called "Slaver Ant" says she'd like to go and find some children for servants.  But for now she'll hang out with Televillain and they both find the "Prism-World of Amalynth" and then they find a big crystal next to it and Televillain cackles and tells Slaver Ant to fetch the others, "tell them it's showtime."

Shadow Supreme, Korgo, Televillain and Slaver Ant.

Round at Ethan's place, Diana is there helping him with his reference files.  Diana asks if he has any life outside of drawing Omniman.  She turns on the TV saying he should watch Friends.  She describes it to him while he starts watching.  Suddenly the Televillain appears on the screen and interacts with the actors... magically somehow because it's not broadcast live is it?

Televillain: "I'm here to deliver a message to the networks.  Basically, I get a million dollars, or I kill your ratings...like this".

Then he shoots Monica execution style then says if they don't pay up tomorrow or he whacks "Commander Picard and the fruity robot guy."  Hey now, Picard is a Captain and Data is an android not a robot.  Destroy crappy sitcoms as much as you like but hands off Star Trek: The Next Generation!

Ethan calls up Youngblood HQ to ask if his sister Sally (ie: Suprema) is still there.  But he is told she has gone to meet Radar at the Citadel.  As Ethan leaves, the TV announces that the cast of Friends are all OK and just as puzzled as everyone else regarding the interruption.  Ethan heads out saying he has to warn Supreme about the Televillain.

The Televillain returns to the Citadel where he picks up the large crystal, he, Slaver Ant, Korgo and the lionheaded "Vor-Em" leave Shadow Supreme hunting down and destroying Suprematon and head back to Earth.  Meanwhile Suprema has returned to the Citadel and calls out for Ethan.  But she comes face to Shadow Supreme standing by Radar's corpse, "by the way... I killed your dog... eventually".  Suprema is horrified and says "oh my God."

A genuinely horrible moment.

Shadow Supreme snarls that god is dead, his god was Darius Dax and she and Supreme destroyed him.  He punches her round the room saying that when he and Korgo rule the Earth she can be their concubine and they'll share her.   But then Supreme appears and lays into Shadow Supreme saying, "leave... my... sister... alone" punctuating his words with punches.

With Shadow Supreme knocked back down to Earth, Suprema says she'll deal with the rest if Supreme handles the Shadow Supreme.  He decides to review their cases to see how they came to be in the Hell of Mirrors, which he built in 1954, in the first places.  And that sends us into a flashback drawn in the Silver Age style.

He is showing Judy's nephew and niece around the Citadel and takes them into the Hell of Mirrors.  In there are villains who are too evil to keep anywhere else.  The glass is special, it's a barrier of hard light between here and another world.  He discovered the glass in 1954 when he investigated the disappearance of a professor called Daniel Dodgson.

He found out that the old mirror in his study could be walked through into another dimension which was like that described in "Alice Through The Looking Glass."  The professor was a descendent of Lewis Carroll, real name Charles Dodgson.  He rescued the professor from the Jabberwock and took him home.  Then he was given the mirror and was abl to duplicate the glass and have it open in a different area of the same realm, and that's how he constructed the mirror prison.

Our one flashback this time.

The first he imprisoned was the space tyrant Korgo.  Then Vor-Em a freelance executioner hired by Darius Dax to kill him. Then he trapped the Shadow Supreme and the Televillain and more recently Optilux a being made from light who he isn't sure the prison will hold.  Finally he caught Slaver Ant who stole children to rear as servants.  He has imprisoned Supremium Man II but he tricked his way out. Also Emerpus the reverse Supreme tred to "un-jail" the mirror villains, but he and Suprema stopped him.

The boy asks wouldn't it be safer to execute all these villains but Supreme says it goes against his sworn oath not to kill.  The girl then finishes this flashback with a groanworthy pun saying that the villains are in "no better place for them to reflect upon their crimes."

Back in the present Supreme says Optilux did escape, (see The Story Of The Year) but the rest had stayed put until today.  Shadow Supreme is rampaging down below, so Supreme goes down to face him while Suprema goes putting out the fires he's started then she'll go deal with the rest.  They others are tough, but nowhere near as powerful as Shadow Supreme.

She finishes dealing with the fire and finds Televillain sitting on a TV aerial.   She asks him where the others are. He tells her Korgo and Vor-Em decided to go to Washington and Slaver Ant is off looking for children to enslaves.   He also tells Suprema that he's set up a guest act in Omegaopolis stadium, and he points down to a shining blue figure standing on the stage inviting everyone to become light.  It's Optilux.

Optilux.

And that brought the first run of Supreme to a close with a cliffhanger.  Over ONE YEAR LATER the story was finally resolved not in issue #57 but in a new series called Supreme The Return. So we continue this story with issue #1.

Korgo has arrived at The White House and has demanded that the President - a this point in time it was Bill Clinton - come face him.  So Bill and Hilary go to meet him as we see a smoking heap of what was Presidential security behind him and Vor-Em.  Korgo demands that Bill face him in a fight issued under the "Formal Rules Of The Cosmic Dictators Guild".

Bill tells him that the President doesn't engage in brawls on the White House lawn.  "What's the matter? Scared?" taunts Korgo. Bill blusters at him and Korgo mocks him further saying he's going to cry and run and tell his mother. This makes Bill mad and after more taunting, he lays a punch on Korgo's face.  This doesn't hurt Korgo who then knocks Bill out with one strike and he declares himself America's 43rd President.  He then declares Hilary his wife number one and demands she make his supper then "have yourself perfumed and brought to my chamber.  We have a new Dark Age to celebrate". 

Satire for the Liefeld generation.

Meanwhile Supreme is still battling the Shadow Supreme, Supreme thinks to himself that they are too evenly matched and at this rate they'll be fighting forever.   He suddenly flies away only to do a fast U-turn and smash back down into Shadow Supreme and driving them both through Earth's crust.  He then uses the Earth's core magnetic field to hold him and flies back up to aid Suprema against the rest of the super-villains.

Meanwhile we see Slaver Ant using her chemical scents to turn loving parents against each other and in the process make off with their babies.  She notes Suprema hasn't appeared yet.  Suprema is tied up trying to figure out how to defeat Optilux, a being made entirely of light.  She thinks to herself that the audience is rather badly dressed but then has an idea, she sucks up the adhesive glitter the audience members were wearing and blows it at Optilux where it starts to break his signal up.

This causes Optilux to drop the "photo-plasmic convertor" he was holding and it has just enough mass for Suprema to pick up, he demands she give it back but she fires it at him and blasts him back into Amylynth.  Supreme arrives and she says that she sent him back there but not before he'd sent "a few hundred Bon Jovi fans there as well".  Uh... was Bon Jovi still a thing in the late nineties?  If they were I don't think they'd be  appealing to the youth anymore.  Supreme responds "Oh well. Can't be helped".  Heh.  Heh heh heh heh, nice one grandad.

He asks if Televillain is still around and Suprema points him out nearby, asking if she should send him to the prism world too?  Supreme says no, they shouldn't burden that place with too many nuisances.  He then uses an electric charge to zap the Televillain and fry his circuits so he can't "network" any more.  Then a crowd spot him as the person who shot Monica and they start beating him up. Suprema says they can leave him with his new friends for now, "nobody told him it was going to be this way..."  Alan.  STOP IT NOW.

Suddenly the Shadow Supreme burst up through the ground. Suprema tells Supreme that he killed Radar, but suddenly Radar appears:

Radar: "When a dog is mad, mistress, you must pay no attention to its bark. You must be merciful... and put it to sleep."

Supreme says that Shadow Supreme must have wrecked a Suprematon Decoy and lied about it to demoralise them. Well no one told the colorist as we saw an awful lot of blood round "Radar's" body.  Still I'm glad Radar isn't really dead.

Go get him Radar!

Shadow Supreme says he will kill Radar for real now but Radar says he knows that he relies on Supreme's no-kill policy to keep him safe.  But he is a dog and then he launches himself at Shadow Supreme and starts mauling him.  A somewhat shocked Supreme calls him off, an injured Shadow Supreme flies off and Supreme tells Radar to follow him while they deal with Slaver Ant.

Then they see a news report on a TV in a TV shop.  In a hastily convened press conference by "First Lady, Ms. Hilary Rodham Space-Tyrant" she says that there are many positive aspects to Korgo's new administration including the new president's "radical views on health care."  When asked about Korgo's record of scouring entire galaxies leaving no survivors she accuses the media of being too downbeat and that there won't be any more "bimbo scandals" surfacing.

The TV also reports a spate of child abductions which galvanises the pair into going to look for Slaver Ant.  Turns out she's pretty easy to find using their super "scent-supreme" which detected her formic acid.  And they recapture her without a fight.

Meanwhile Radar has chased Shadow Supreme to the White House, he arrives and whines to Vor-Em that he's hurt.  Vor-Em says he is Vice President now and too important for this.  But then he sees Radar and decides to help Shadow Supreme. Then Supreme drops Slaver Ant in-between them, Shadow Supreme and Vor-Em both crash into her and pick up her aggression causing scent and begin fighting each other instead.

Vor-Em and Shadow Supreme go at it.

As they battle, Supreme tells Radar that Suprema is busy reuniting the kidnapped babies with their families and then "scraping up what's left of Televillain".  He says only Korgo is left to deal with, but he surrenders to Supreme willingly.  Under his breath he asks Supreme to make his capture look convincing:

Korgo: "Just make this look good, all right?  Then put me back in the mirror.. anywhere away from that woman!  Gods, I thought I was ruthless!"

Alan, are you a time travelling Donald Trump supporter? So Supreme complies and lays him out with one punch.  He tells Hilary that Korgo is defeated and it was a wise choice playing along but she can rejoin the real President now. "Huh? Oh, him.  Yeah, sure.  Whatever" she responds. In the background Radar is dragging an unconcious Shadow Supreme up to the Citadel while Supreme picks up the similarly KO'ed Vor-Em and Korgo.  And that brings that plotline to an end.  Bet the people who waited over a year for that were pleased.

If I can describe my journey through these five issues as anything it would be increasingly as a chore written while looking longingly at my Xbox One.  The tone is all over the place and much of the humour is derived from rather hypocritically denouncing the very Image-led movement Moore had been a part of.  For all his spiteful stabs at Grant Morrison, Morrison spent the nineties working on exactly what he wanted to work on within the mainstream and indeed his mid-nineties reboot of the JLA went a long way to signalling that the Dark Age of comics was going to be coming to an end combining as it did a retro feel feel with a modern outlook.  The rest of the humour in this veers from actually pretty funny to stuff that makes you groan like when your dad makes a joke. The more whimsical stuff about contrasting the modern era of comics with the Silver and Golden Age is pretty much gone now, with only one flashback this time.  And the art, oh my lack of God it's bad. Chris Sprouse did four of these issues and I have no doubt he was most likely tailoring his preferred style to appeal to what was perceived to be the style Liefeld's readership wanted.  Compared with his work on Tom Strong which is beautiful stuff it's clear who is to blame for this and it's not him, and not really inker Al Gordon's either as he inked Tom Strong as well so all-in-all I blame Rob Liefeld for this crappy art even though he had nothing physically to do with it.  I have no excuse for the Rick Veitch issue as he inked it too and isn't known for pandering to an audience, a dreadful lapse there. As I said in the intro, considering the chaotic circumstances at Awesome comics and matching the release dates with the artists implies that issue #1 of The Return was written and arted on time but for some reason sat on and slipped out over a year later under a rebooted title.  Even though it was the conclusion to what became the final issue of the first series.  Crazy. I think it's fairly obvious as well that once The Story Of The Year arc was concluded Moore didn't have a clear idea of where to go next with the series, and we'll see how things pan out in the final five issues of Moore's run on Supreme in a few days time.

Alan Moore Obscurities: Supreme - The Story Of The Year (#41-52) PART TWO

"This is starting to frighten me!  Where in the name of goodness is Supreme?" - Suprema

The second half of my look at the first collection of the first twelve issues of Alan Moore's run on Supreme.  Originally conceived as a kind of "dick Superman" by Rob Leifeld, an angry, XTREME, superpowered murderer, Moore jettisoned that entire backstory in his first issue and rebooted Supreme as a much more traditional Superman pastiche.  His secret identity is Ethan Crane, who draws a comic called "Omniman" for Dazzle Comics.  He has huge gaps in his memory and the gimmick of the series is that when something or someone triggers a memory we get a flashback in the style of old Golden and Silver Age comics drawn by the talented Rick Veitch which contrast nicely with the VERY 90's artwork of the present day sequences as drawn by several different artists in the Image style.  In the first half of my look at this volume we were introduced to several different characters:  Judy Jordan his girlfriend back in the 40's now an old woman with a grandaughter, Billy Friday a British comicbook writer who accidentally mutated himself and is currently inside Amalynth the light world for his own safety, Diana Dane a fellow employee at Dazzle Comics and now the new writer of Omniman and finally Suprema his adopted sister who has similar powers who he rescued from Gorrl the Living Galaxy.  He also reclaimed his Citadel Supreme in the skies above the Earth from his robot S-1 who'd gone mad with loneliness and created a family using robot duplicates of his parents and a young Judy. We also saw him take on his arch enemy Darius Dax in flashback, but Dax is long dead in the present day.  Or is he?  Time to read on and find out.

Suprema and Radar the Hound Supreme have got back into crime fighting with aplomb as the pair of them take down some hostage taking bank robbers in Omegapolis.  Ethan meanwhile is visiting the home of some old friends in the neighbouring Star City.  He arrives at a posh looking manor and is greeted by an old man called Pratap who recognises him and says "I always knew it would be you who finally came to their aid."

Professor Night and Twilight.

It turns out that this is the home of a Batman and Robin pastiche, "Professor Night" and his female sidekick "Twilight".  But for the past thirty years they have been in a strange state.  They are not dead, but their hearts do not beat nor are they breathing. Pratap has laid them out in the basement and taken care of them ever since he found them like that.

He says on the final night they were alive they had returned home agitated and started looking up something in the "Night files."  Pratap found them an hour later collapsed and lifeless.  The debate who of their enemies might have done this and this sends Ethan into another flashback.

We see the villain "Jack-a-Dandy" playing host to a visit from Darius Dax.  Dax has a plan, he has invented a machine that can switch the life forces of two people, a "Transferratron".  Jack asks if that would mean he's end up facing Professor Night with the power of Supreme, but Dax says Night wouldn't be able to control those powers.  So Jack agrees and they issue a challenge to their two opponents.

Supreme, Night and Twilight arrive at the place they have been directed to, and Dax activates the Transferratron. Supreme tries to fly and falls on his face, while Night ends up catapaulted into the air by his new strength.  Jack uses his "sleep snuff" to incapacitate Supreme but Twilight intervenes so the two villains scarper.

As Twilight helps Supreme up, Night starts blasting things with Supreme's super laser vision.  Keeping his eyes closed they all get into the Night Wagon:

Night: "How humiliating.  We've been defeated by each other's powers."

Twilight uses the Night file's computer to discover Jack-a-Dandy's secret hideout then says she has an idea of how to get their powers back in the correct body.

Fooling the enemies.

They travel to Jack-a-Dandy's hideout and find him celebrating with Darius Dax.  With Supreme and Night wearing each other's costumes and Night having dyed his hair white they fool Dax into thinking their changeover had come undone, so he activates the Transferratron again but this time it puts Supreme and Night's powers back in the right bodies.

Twilight then commandeers the machine and switches Dax and Jack's personalities.  Dax is overcome with foppish ennui while Jack can't deal with all the ideas for giant robots and time machines and so on that fill his head. Dax and Jack go to jail and the flashback ends on a laugh.

Ethan changes into Supreme and travels up to the Citadel to start figuring a way to help Night and Twilight out.  S-1 passes on a message that Billy Friday had a disagreement with Szazs the sprite Supreme and is now in the ninth dimension.  Supreme puts on his "Ideospatial Imaging Helmet" to find his friend's lost conciousness.

There is no soul...

He travels mentally through Idea-space and finds the dual conciousness of Night.  He moves inside it, he pokes around his memories, his emotions, his fears but can't find his soul.  He looks harder for it and is confronted by a huge stone block floating in nowhere and scrabbles to get the Imaging Helmet off.

Supreme: "That horrible absence!  That gaping spiritual void!  I didn't see anything of Taylor's soul... Taylor's soul is gone!"

He says to Pratap to show him the last thing Night looked at before he found him lifeless, he thinks he might have recognised the stone glyph where the soul should have been.

It turns out it was the record on "Hulver Damik:  The Slaver Of Souls".  Supreme realises this wasn't a personal enemy, but one Night had made through his "group affiliations".  Damik was a major enemy of the sixties incarnation of the Allied Supermen of America which was called The Allies.  Damik has taken the souls to sell them and so Supreme gathers the currently active members of the Allies to help save them.

The Allies arrive at the Citidel Supreme unsure of what Supreme has planned.  While they admire his base of operations, memories flood back to them.  There is no full flashback this chapter just spoof front covers interspersed in the narrative as they chat and remember stuff.  They recall reforming as the Allies when a giant plant called Florax invaded Earth.

Travelling Idea-space.

They all sit down where Supreme has set up the helmets that'll allow them to access thought space.  While they are in there S-1 will watch over them.   S-1 also passes on the note that Billy Friday has been rescued from the 19th Dimension by Emerpus the reverse Supreme and now he's in the backwards zone.  Supreme sits down, the headsets activate and there they all are:

Supreme: "In the realm of thought, swimming in raw naked conciousness itself".

This is humanity's shared mind-space and as they start to move through it, they reach the part that is human emotion.  Glory doesn't understand why they didn't see all this the first time the bought Ramik down.

Supreme says it's because they were pulled directly into his kingdom by his mind hooks.  And we are shown another front cover with the Allies as slaves under Ramik. Glory rather sardonically points out that from the forties to the sixties "I was getting tied up every other month. I mean was that just me?  Did you guys get it too?"

Supreme says "uh no".  And they fly on into the realm of archetypes and symbols.  The creatures from Supreme's mythopoeic zoo come from here.  This ocean of ideas has sea creatures.

Supreme: "Sometimes I think every angel, demon, god or monster mankind ever dreamed of came from here."

Then they are confronted by a many tenctacled beastie.  They are aggressive so the Allies start fighting them. They realise the monsters actually come from the beginning of the universe.  Supreme says that for them past, present and future are happening at once.  He uses his plasma beams to force them to retreat back into the void.

Squids from the Id!

There's another flashback cover to when the Allies via time travel teamed up with The Allied Supermen of America to fix a problem with the timeline.  They ended up teaming up with themselves via visits from the future or parallel worlds that soon they only knew who was who by minor costume changes.

Supreme says he enjoyed the team-ups, did they continue into the seventies after he left for space.  Might Man says no, they broke up at the start of the decade, "the seventies were sort of.. bleh."  They keep travelling, entering the mind fogs, and finally find a large structure "the Alcatraz of the Soul!"

Supreme scans inside and finds many people in glass tubes, including Professor Night and Twilight and to his surprise, every vanished sixties hero is there too including "The Fisherman" and we get a front cover showing him joining the Allies.

They decide to split into teams, as the powerhouses, Supreme and Mighty Man will go in hard while the others come at it from different directions.  Supreme and Mighty Man then fly down and attack.  The others drop down to give some ground support.

Ramik is there and doesn't want his deal messed up and sets his Soul Snares on them.  But Supreme's laser eyes can deal with them.  The Patriot wonders why Ramik has waited so long to sell the souls, but Supreme says time passes differently here in Idea Space, "what's years to us, may have been weeks to Ramik".

Ramik knows he's outnumbered and surrenders to them.  He says once the Allies disbanded they were "easy pickings".  Supreme wants to know who the client was and what fee he offered.  Ramik says it was someone too big and powerful to argue with and tells Supreme to look around.  He does so and is greeted by Optilux the entity made entirely of light.

Optilux.

Supreme says he thought Optilux was dead, it says no, it became a higher form radiance, "I became spiritual light".  Supreme wants to know why he's been having Ramik collect souls.  Optilux says it is for a "higher purpose".  It's encased each one in cylinders of highly refractive glass, the stored energy will power a machine he calls:

Optilux: "My Rapture Engine, to transform the entire universe into sublime, ethereal luminence that I am already become.  Now I think that's a highly spiritual motive".

The Allies, hearing this attack, but shooting at light is useless. He starts "disintegrating them" and even does it to Supreme.  Who then wakes up on a bed with Glory.

Supreme says they are lost in Optilux's thoughts now.  Glory asks if it is a "mind maze" and Supreme says yes and the others will be trapped in mazes of their own. He also warns Glory that sometimes mazes are inhabited. Optilux fashions creatures out of his photo-plasm.

They are then attacked by manta-ray looking light creations.  They avoid Glory, who says being the daughter of a Goddess has its advantages and Supreme fights them off. They reach the end of the maze and are confronted by an huge expanse of yellow mist.  Glory says they are in for a long, boring walk so Supreme can tell her about Optilux as they travel.

He tells her that Optilux was a messianic alien who turned himself into light and wanted to turn everyone else too, trapping whole worlds in refractive prisms. "His apparent suicide was the reason I left Earth in 1969".  We then get a flashback to the start of "Supreme: The Space Years".

Feels like a Jim Starlin parody here.

It begins with Supreme facing down Jack-O-Lantern who is protecting "the secrets of Eternity" (making him an obvious expy of The Spectre).  Then it jumps backwards to Supreme leaving the Earth thinking he needs to "find himself."  His friends had moved on, his enemies disappeared or like Dax, died. "Strange,  I never thought I'd miss them" he thinks.

He is looking for the threshold of awareness, an answer to the riddles of God, death and existence. A reason for us our universe to be.  But then Jack-O-Lantern confronts him saying Supreme most not come any further, "The threshold you seek is one the living may not pass. Go back."

Supreme refuses, saying he's come this far and attacks Jack-O-Lantern. He passes through Jack into a weird dimension, "the borderlands of being".

Jack-O-Lantern: "I want you to understand the sheer impossibility of what you are seeking.  Beyond these margins, nothing human can survive".

Supreme says he's not human and attacks Jack again who just reforms each time.  He multiples himself and gives Supreme a powerful beatdown.

Supreme spins superfast and knocks Jack off him and stuns him momentarily which gives him enough time to glimpse behind the curtains of knowledge and existence.  It completely overwhelms him and he passes out.

Jack stand over his body saying the abyss gazed back at Supreme and now his memories are gone, he'll have long years of amnesia and recovery ahead of him.

Jack-O-Lantern: "The light I serve burns low, 'tis true. And flickers in the winds of change... yet may its waning light find you, for you are lost...and all the world's made strange".

And the flashback comes to an end. Supreme says he roamed the universe having adventures.  Glory says he was lucky missing those decades, "everything in the seventies had to be relevant and the eighties we're just plain depressing" (a reference to comics discovering social issues in the 70's and darkening and becoming more adult in the 80's spearheaded by some chap called Alan Moore).

They finish walking and Supreme realises he can disrupt the maze with enough electro-magnetic interference. He does so and they find the others and then are standing in the hallway full of heroes in tubes.  He smashes them all and Professor Night thanks Supreme for coming to the rescue.

All the heroes attack Optilux but he just absorbs all the attacks.  Then Supreme has an idea.  He uses his laser vision to melt the broken tube glass into a large glass crystal.  He then baits Optilux into attacking him by telling him he restored Amalynth to material form. Optilux attacks Supreme full on but hits the big crystal he's holding and gets trapped inside, "his light will rebound in here forever" says Supreme.

Trapping Optilux.

All the rescued superheroes can now return to their bodies, and the Allies take off the helmets and find themselves back in the Citadel Supreme.  The Optilux crystal Supreme sent through has also arrived and is in the trophy room.  They all bid their farewells, and Suprema tells Ethan has had several calls from a woman called Diana.  Supreme realises he's got to race to the meeting with her over the Omniman comic.  He flies off.  Suprema notes she's seen that flustered look in his face before. Radar agrees, "he's fallen in heat."

Ethan arrives at Diana's flat, she is happy to see him and gives him the latest update on Billy Friday's situation.  Apparently he annoyed Emerpus so much he sent him back to Earth but in the wrong time period, so Zayla Zarn of the League of Infinity is looking after him now.  He's still faxing the office with his experiences, although he's sounding more unbalanced. "Or maybe it's a British thing" says Diana.

She and Ethan sit and start going through her Omniman notes.  She wonders what a superheroes love life would be like.  Ethan tells her Supreme did an experiment in 1962 to find out what would happen if he got married using a "Possibilitron".  And we get a flashback as he checks out what would happen if he married Judy Jordan.

Unfortunately it doesn't go too well, they are happy at first but she quickly ties him down into a stereotypical domestic existence where he is unable to be a superhero because he's always doing chores and being exploited by their "good" neighbours.

Back in the present, Diana laughs at how fifties that idea was that women wanted to emasculate their men.   She then returns to her Omniman notes and says he couldn't romance Linda Lake without giving away his secret identity, he must have human needs.  Ethan looks longingly at her and says "yes, yes he does."

Diana Dane, his secret love.

Diana stands up and says maybe Omniman should ditch his human girlfriend for someone more exotic.  Ethan then tells her that Supreme carried on his experiment to see what would happen if he married the angel Luriel from his Imaginary Menagerie.

Another flashback.  This marriage also doesn't go well.  She can't visit Earth without people mobbing her for blessings and forgiveness so Supreme sets her up with lots of TVs in the Citadel.  She gets depressed by all the news she watches and starts moulting her feathers. She finally dies in his arms saying "this world of matter and madness" have killed her. Supreme grieves hard but still wants to try for romance.

In the present Ethan says that ruled out relations with beings more celestial than Supreme. Diana thinks Linda Lake is looking like the best option, that a relationship between a mortal and immortal is sexy. Diana wonders though if there is something else they could try, another super-type.  Ethan says Supreme tried that with the final part of his romance experiment.

Superhuman lovers tiff.

We get a flashback to Supreme marrying Glory.  She however starts messing around refurbishing the Citadel to meet her needs.  They end up a bickering couple who take their fights to the meetings of the Allied Supermen.  They end up having a huge fight that destroys a large portion of Omega City.  Supreme then turns off the Possibilitron saying for now the only woman for him is Miss Liberty, the statue.

In the present they decide a human woman would be the best for Supreme.  As Diana talks through the scene where they get together, Ethan starts sneaking an arm round her shoulder. But when she pauses and says the relationship would be dishonest, he pulls it back. She says her not knowing who Omniman really was would be unfair.

She decides Omniman would decide at the last minute that he isn't in a position to become intimately involved.  Ethan looks sad. He leaves her flat looking downcast and when Diana asks what became of the sweethearts of Supreme he responds, "they all got along fine without him".

We end this chapter with Judy Jordan and Hilda.  Hilda has done a drawing which turns out to be a very detailed one of the Citidel Supreme.  Judy tells Hilda to fetch her coat, "you and grandma are going visiting".

The next chapter begins with a purple cyborg thing attacking the Dazzle comics office thinking Omniman is real and that Diana is Linda Lake, he grabs her and Ethan slips away to change into Supreme.  He deals with it easily and rescues Diana, "Cyberzerk" collapses into a pile of junk.

90's villains are rubbish.

Supreme and Diana look down at the wreckage and Supreme starts to reminisce about old enemies to her.  He says he had enough colourful enemies to fill a whole wing of "Supreme World" and starts another flashback to the early sixties, where he's taking Judy Jordan for a tour round the Pallisades which have been converted into a Supreme theme park.

He takes her round the "Hall of Villains" and we get to see some of his foes. Stupendo the Simian Supreme sits at the entrance.  He is friend with Supreme now and compliments Judy on her dress.  The rest of the villains are waxworks, there is Darius Dax, Emerpus the backwards Supreme and Szazs the Sprite Supreme.

Judy is bored and asks to go back to the main hall, then notices the Dax and Emerpus waxworks have switched places.  Supreme says she's imagining things. She wonders if any of his enemies could be hiding here, he dismisses her "female imagination".  They go and look at Optilux, the scientist who converted himself into living light.  And the Televillain, a TV repairman who made a suit that allowed him to invade TV programmes.

Judy still thinks she senses someone following them.  Supreme shows her a model of Supremium Man who fells from the skies in 1956 (the one who gave Suprema her powers). They take a look at the Shadow Supreme a shadow copy of Supreme created by Darius Dax.  Then Judy notices Emerpus has appeared again.

Emerpus comes to life as does Shadow Supreme and freaks Judy out.  But Supreme laughs and says they were acting as a diversion to stop them reaching the main exhibit before it was ready.  And he takes Judy into a room entirely devoted to her, she forgives his prank saying it's a wonderful surprise.  And the flashback ends.

Supreme looks a bit sad at the quality of enemies around now in the 90's and bids Diana farewell.  Meanwhile Judy and Hilda are outside, Hilda says the Citadel Supreme is above them now.  She holds onto Judy and blasts off into the sky, they land outside the front door and Hilda uses her powers to unlock it.

Hilda makes short work of the Suprematons.

Hilda then smashes up all the Supreme robots while Judy sits and watches. Supreme arrives at the Citidel and spots the pile of smashed Suprematons, then hears a voice from the Hell of Mirrors room calling out for help.  He walks inside, spots Hilda but before he can do anything Judy presses a button and Supreme is sucked into the mirror prison.  In some distress he asks why they are doing this because he doesn't have his powers there and he'll be at the mercy of the other prisoners. Judy says to Hilda to tell Supreme "Judy's not who he's talking to."

Several of the imprisoned baddies congregate and take a hold of Supreme. Judy, with Hilda translating it into backwards speak so Supreme can understand it, tells him a story about "the greatest man who ever lived. His name was Darius Dax".  Dax made a big mistake when he was fifteen, he stole a lump of Supremium from Doc Wells (see part one for details of that escapade).

Some people exposed to Supremium got superpowers.  Dax however got lymphatic cancer.  In 1967 he was told by prison doctors he had a year to live. So he built a device that would "digitise and record his memories and personality: his entire mind!"  The computers he did it on were minute, smaller than dust, he put them on the pages of a book, mailed the book to an old friend and then he died.

The book went to Judy Jordan.  When she opened it she breathed in the dust and it started disconnecting her brain linkages and creating new ones.  It took two days to erase Judy's personality and five to rewire her as Darius Dax.  Her body was on the kitchen floor for a week.

He then spent the years watching and waiting.  He built Hilda, "High Impact Lethal Defence Automaton", and she located the Citadel using the drawing she gave Ethan which he put on a wall there.  Dax then leaves Supreme to the mercy of the other prisoners in the mirror world.  He tells Hilda he's going to drop the screens round the Citadel and arm it with the "Planet Smasher".

We then cut to Sally introducing herself to Diana who is eating in a cafe.  She wants to know if she can help Sally find a place to live, when suddenly everyone starts looking at the sky.  The Citadel is hovering right over Omegapolis and Dax makes his demands:

Dax: "Here's the basic picture: by noon, North America will either be mine or it will be smaller.  Then, one pulverised city per hour until surrender."

Dax then decides to take on a more suitable body and transfers his conciousness into the body of Magno which appears to be just lying around the Citadel.

Radar and Suprema to the rescue!

Suprema and Radar go flying up to the Citadel.  Hilda is waiting for them and tells her Supreme is in the mirror prison. She then zaps them and blows out Radar's translation speakers.  Then uses a huge gun to take down Suprema. 

Diehard and Glory also arrive at the Citidel.  But Dax in Magno's body incapacitates Diehard and zaps Glory.  Supreme meanwhile has been dragged to a mysterious being sat on a throne.  We don't get to see its face, and it tells them to get lost, now is not the right time for it to kill Supreme. So the others decide to do it themselves and drag him away.

Down on the ground, Suprema has recovered and uses a live news broadcast to send a message to Zayla Zarn for help from five hundred years in the future. She flies back up joining Professor Night and Twilight who are also coming to the rescue.  Using coordinated eye laser beams Suprema and Radar take down Hilda.

Dax has decided to destroy Omegapolis anyway, but before he can do so, the League of Infinity, with Billy Friday appear.  As the League battle Dax, Zayla Zarn puts Supreme's enemies on pause and gets him out of the mirror prison.  Coming out his wounds heal and his powers come flooding back and he flies at Dax delivering a massive punch to his face.

Pow! Right in the kisser.

Realising he's outnumbered he jets off and makes his way to where the Supremium isotope is being kept.  He picks it up, Billy Friday is nearby and suddenly starts mutating into the many armed creature.  Zayla puts a forcefield round him to stop him expanding any more.  But Dax has absorbed the Supremium saying he wants to "become the Supremium!"  Supreme has a strange feeling of deja vu.

He starts glowing gold then he suddenly falls through a hole that appears under him, which transports him to Littlehaven in 1958.  He was the Supremium man that gave Sally her powers. They see him absorb the Supremium isotope back then and see him become a lump of Supremium that goes back further in time to Littlehaven in 1925, where Ethan got his powers.  And thus a timeloop is created and closed.

The book ends with Supreme having Judy's body kept somewhere safe and comfortable so he might be able to restore her mind somehow.  He goes to the Time Tower to see off the League and waves to himself further down the stairs in 1930's. Supreme then takes to the Citadel balcony to reassure the people of Omegapolis that everyone is safe now and that the ordinary folk of the world are the reason why he does what he does.  The end.

The Good Guys triumphant.

That's not the end of Moore's run on the series.  There is another volume to go, but unlike this one which tells a rough twelve part story, the next scripts are something of a jumble and lack the flashbacks done in a different style.  But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.  As for this volume, studying it more closely for these posts has made me find more enjoyment in it than I had before.  There is a lot of fun to be had spotting which characters and storylines he's pastiched and Moore nails the old style dialogue as accurately as Rick Veitch portrays the art.  There's some interesting seeds of things Moore would go on to explore in more detail in later works.  I'm thinking here mainly of the journey into "Idea-space" the Allies go on that seems to prefigure a much more detailed journey through the realms of thought that Promethea would show.  Setting the whole thing up as a time-loop is a very Moore touch as well and I find it fascinating that he made the decision to feature Golden and Silver Age style flashbacks in a comic that was published by Rob Liefeld's company of all people.  I can't help thinking it didn't find a particularly receptive audience amongst the "Image" fandoms and those people who would appreciate the retro-sensibilities would have been repelled by the very 90's style framing sequences.  Still Supreme is an important part of Moore's canon, showing not everything he did during the 90's that wasn't From Hell or Lost Girls was tossed off without much care.  It's a tough collection to track down, but if you're a Moore fan and want to see something a little bit out of the ordinary by him, it's worth trying to get a hold of.

Alan Moore Obscurities: Supreme - The Story Of The Year (#41-52) PART ONE

"I don't know if I'm one thing or another... just like that Eastern Seaboard that I see beneath me" - Supreme

So, we're back with Alan Moore and back during the 1990s when he worked doing superhero stories to keep food on the table while he pursued his two real passion projects From Hell and Lost Girls.  This time it's the collected edition of the first twelve issues of his run on Supreme for Rob Leifeld's studio Awesome Comics I'm looking at, the studio Leifeld set up after his split from Image.  Supreme is generally regarded as the best of Moore's superhero work during this period, although personally I enjoyed his WildC.A.T.s run a lot more.  Supreme was originally conceived by Leifeld as a Superman expy who had anger issues and killed people and so on.  Handed over to Moore, he chucks all that out of the window in the first issue and reboots Supreme as a much more traditional Superman clone, with the stories taking place in both the present where he, in the guise of his alter-ego comicbook artist Ethan Crane, spends each issue remembering parts of his new past which form a commentary on comicbook history and are beautifully drawn in different period and genre appropriate art by chameleonic artist Rick Veitch contrasting with the "Image" style of the modern day sequences drawn by a variety of artists. As I am not a huge fan of Silver Age whimsy done straight I find some of this stuff a little hard to swallow, but Moore was correct in predicting a backlash against the dark anti-heroes of the late eighties and early nineties was coming which also resulted in more well known works such as Kingdom Come and Grant Morrison's retooling of the Justice League.  If you want to know more about pre-Moore Supreme, may I direct you to his wikipedia page, but really there is nothing about him that lasts into Moore's version.  So let us continue.

The world is changing.

It begins with Supreme in space above Earth, but something odd is happening.  It's flickering between two versions of reality.  He also has huge gaps in his memory and his identity seems "confused and insubstantial".  Then he is accosted by three people who also wear the Supreme uniform.  A young looking one, a black woman and a simpler looking version of himself.  He attacks these false Supremes but is then punched hard by a large mouse in a Supreme outfit.

He comes around quickly and the Supremes take him through a portal to "The Supremacy" to keep him safe while "the Flickering" settles down. The Supremacy is a huge island of golden buildings hanging in a white void.  The young one says in 1940 it was nothing, just ask "Original Supreme" about it. He himself is a 1960's "Son of Supreme" and the black woman is "Sister Supreme".

They are welcomed by a huge stone Supreme who laments he got one appearance and that was it for him. It also warns him about "Darius Dax".  Supreme asks Son of Supreme what he means and Son of Supreme says in his reality Darius Dax might not even be his arch enemy. They land and are greeted by "his majesty Supreme the Fifth of the 1960's Silver Dynasty." Supreme is introduced to him as the newest one.

A place of muliple Supremes.

His Majesty and Supreme take a walk and His Majesty fills Supreme in about the Supremacy and how there can be multiple Supremes.  Every version of him ends up in the Supremacy after a "Revison" but it's unusual for a new Supreme to visit the Supremacy before the Revision takes place.

Original Supreme takes up the story, he was born in 1920 and was given superpowers as a child from a form of mysterious metal. He lived a double life fighting crime as Supreme and working as a reporter in his secret identity.  Then one day with no warning he was flung into Limbo along with bits and pieces of his world like the paper he worked for.

Soon other Supremes and their supporting casts arrived, but they were really able to create the Supremacy as it is now when His Majesty, whose backstory was that he was an alien, arrived with his planet that they were able to turn into the Supremacy they are in now.  Supreme is confused, he at least remembers he's been Supreme since the 1940s. But he can't remember much more:

Original Supreme: "Your past hasn't been written yet! You probably popped into being a few weeks back!"

His Majesty takes Supreme to ride in a coach pulled by a sentient horse, the whole Supremacy wants to honour his inaugration as the newest Supreme.

Supreme party!

A crowd of Supremes and their supporting casts await.  Supreme is introduced to Supremes Gold and Silver.  He then meets a couple of the supporting cast of the Leifeld Supreme and Sally Supreme, or Suprema.  His Majesty tells Supreme that multiple varient Supremes seem to pop up before a Flickering takes place:

His Majesty: "It's as if the universe is desperately trying out new variations to get things right. Before it gives up and starts again."

They meet up with the huge brained "Supreme-of-the-Future" who says he's studied Revisions and thinks that they are either a ripple effect from the creation of the first Supreme or  reality has always modified itself at intervals and the Supremes are the only ones who notice.

It's time to say farewell, the Flickering is finished.  So Supreme goes through a golden portal and walks out of a door in the comicbook company office he works for.  After his editor mithers him over getting the next issue of "Omniman" done, he checks his wallet to find out he is called Ethan Crane and goes to the address listed where he picks up a photo of him with his deceased parents outside their store and looks thoughtful.

Supreme's new reality.

The next chapter starts with Ethan travelling to his home town to search for familiar things.  He discovers a grafittied sign saying "Welcome to Littlehaven.  Home of Kid Supreme" and goes looking round the nearby pine forest. He comes across a crater in the ground and suddenly he remembers.

We get a flashback, to Supreme's origins done in the style of the Golden Age of comicbooks.  Ethan is five and goes off into the woods playing with his dog Radar.  Then a meteorite made of white metal falls and starts affecting him badly.  Radar manages to drag him back to the house.

Ethan's hair has turned white and his parents take him to Doc Wells to check he's OK.  Doc Wells says he's returning to normal and he dresses in a safety suit and goes and retrieves the mysterious metal.  He names the metal "Supremium" saying it shouldn't even exist to Ethan's parents.

Supreme gets his powers.

Ethan then starts exhibiting superpowers like X-ray vision and superstrength.  His parents take all this in their stride and make him a suit to wear so people won't know who he is.  And Radar the dog starts showing superpowers as well.  "For many years the Boy of Bronze keeps up an amazing dual existence. Protecting Littlehaven as Kid Supreme".

He creates a secret base under his parents house with robot doubles to fool people.  He even gains an arch enemy in the form of Darius Dax.  One day his parents tell him they're adopting another child and we meet Sally.  At this point in time he decides to leave home for the big city, he creates a base in orbit round the Earth and declares on his final visit to Doc Wells that he is just "Supreme" now.  The boy has become a man.

He fights on the world stage now, including the escalated threat from Darius Dax.  He has a secret life as Ethan, who works for a radio station, and when war breaks out he joins up "a beacon of hope in a darkening world."

Judy Jordan appears.

Back in the present, Ethan is wandering round Littlehaven's main street. Then an old woman accosts him saying she is Judy Jordan.  Ethan pretends to be his own son to account for the age difference.  She says she runs the Supreme Museum now. They go inside and his memory is triggered by a postcard in there and he has another flashback.

Darius Dax has built a robot that has Judy in its claws.  Ethan watches from the crowd and thinks he'll have to give away his secret identity to save her, when another teenage boy dressed as him confronts the robot.  The robot drops Judy and Ethan goes to rescue her but time suddenly stops. A young woman appears and calls herself "Zayla Zarn" from the 25th Century.

She is part of the "League of Infinity, youths from many ages who have banded together to fight crime across time."  He is taken through a door into their time tower.  The Big Bang is at the bottom of the tower and the end of the universe at the top.  They point out his future self higher up and they wave to each other.

Two Supreme in different time zones.

They intervened this time because Darius Dax had stolen the Supremium meteorite so they had Boy Achilles pretend to be him to keep him safe.  They return to the frozen battle and Ethan positions himself under Judy to catch her. Boy Achilles smashes up the robot and takes Darius Dax away, then returns and Ethan is officially inducted into the Infinity League.

We return to the present and Judy takes Ethan out to the cemetary where his parents are buried.  Judy tends the graves as well as the one belonging to Darius Dax.  She says he wasn't all bad, at the end before he died he sent her a religious book.  Judy's grand daughter Hilda runs up and gives Ethan a drawing she has done of Supreme and he says he'll pass it onto Supreme.  He returns home and ponders what he has learned and what is still missing from his memories.

Hilda gives Ethan a picture.

We then get a look at the front cover of the comic Ethan draws called Omniman.  The writer is a English one called Billy Friday and his style is somewhat familiar...

Omniman: "You'll never truly kill me, Great Unwashed. Any more than you could kill Jean Genet, Isidore Ducasse or Malarme!  Not while I can still unnngh.. tear my own heart out in a final statement that juxtaposes art, mysticism and absurdism!"

Sick burn, Alan. Back in the office, Ethan and Diana are discussing Omniman's new direction.  Diana (who writes Warrior Woman) isn't sure about resurrecting Omniman as a Hezbollah extremist.  Billy dismisses her opinion saying this clear out and reboot of Omniman is the way to go.  Diana and Ethan go to lunch and asks Ethan if all British writers are like that.  Ethan just says he met Neil Gaiman at SDCC once, "he seemed stressed."

They part and Ethan gets into his Supreme costume and flies up to his fortress on the sky, "The Citadel Supreme."  He unlocks the door and goes inside and starts wandering its halls as the past slowly starts coming back to him and we get another flashback.

It begins with Supreme takng his co-workers up to the Citadel in his disguise as Ethan Crame.  The robot Supreme is with them and Ethan is flying them all secretly. This is an exculsive for K-Zam the radio station he works at.  But the Citidel is already open and they find a note saying there is a puzzle to solve.

A clue!

Ethan goes off to look and takes over as Supreme. There then begins a tour of the Citidel. "The Hell of Mirrors" where he imprisons all his superpowered foes.  "The Prism World of Amalynth" a planet turned into "coherent light" by the villain "Optilux."  Then the "Menagerie" of lengendary creatures that only exist in "myth-space".

He goes to check the Time Tower.  Aladdin is on his way up and says no one else is in the tower presently.   Then he checks the hall of armaments taken from alien invaders and the sample of Supremium he's synthesised.  He checks the note again and says it all makes perfect sense.  He flies his friends back to the Hall devoted to the "Allied Supemen of America."

The real Allies are hiding amongst the dummies and said they wanted Supreme to show off his detective skills.  He noticed that the note was an acrostic that spelled out "Allies." Supreme goes to "find" Ethan and returns with S-1 his main robot double and they fly back to Earth, the adventure over for now.

The puzzle revealed.

In the present Supreme gets a nasty surprise, he suddenly comes across his dead parents, Judy looking young and Radar his dog.  Then he is confronted by himself who accuses him of messing with his family.  They fight and in the confusion Supreme punches Radar's head off revealing it to be a robot.  "Supreme" keeps attacking and Supreme punches his head off as well, it was "S-1" his prime robot double.

His parents and Judy realise they too are robots and ask to be deactivated which he does, holding Judy sadly as she "dies". Then he sticks up the drawing Hilda did of Supreme and back on Earth Hilda says she has the "strangest feeling" her drawing has been hung up...

Supreme vs. the crazed S-1

The next chapter begins with Diana telling Ethan that Billy Friday is leaving Omniman and she'll be taking over as the new writer.  Apparently the owner of Dazzle comics didn't want Omniman to be an anti-Israel terrorist.  Ethan is distracted though and tells her he has a few loose ends to deal with first before they work together.  She says she has to get ahead on Warrior Woman first, but is looking forward to doing a superhero comic with him, "you just seem to have a real feel for that stuff."

We then cut to Supreme in the deserted base of the Allied Supermen of America.  He starts to have a flashback to them all gathered together to celebrate the new year into 1950, when three witches appear and offer to take them to the future.  This flashback includes material done in the form of E.C's horror and humour lines.  Supreme and a couple of others volunteer to check out Earth in the fifties.  They find it a blasted atomic wasteland, with the pathetic remnants of humanity scraping to get by.

1st Witch: "This is what America will be afraid of in the fifties. Red attack! Nuclear doom! Radiation! You inspired people through a war, but can you give them hope against terrors like these?"

Defeated the Allies ask to go back.  Then we return to the present and Supreme has sent out the call to assemble the Allies.  Glory is the first to arrive.  He says it's good to see her after all these years, she thinks they met recently but her memories are kind of blurry.

Glory in classic Escher Girl type portrayal.

Then Doctor Rocket and his wife Alley Cat arrive and after a quick catch up ask what he wants with them.  Supreme says he's been reading about their last adventure in 1949 and needs to know more of what happened.  So they continue the story.

A second witch takes the next group through.  This time they see human depravity in all its unpleasantness.  A woman is setting up something to kill her husband, the police chief is her secret lover, her son on heroin and the final straw, when they go to warn the husband they find him and his friends are part of the Ku KluX Klan and are lynching a black man, which the Allies puts a stop to at least.

The Allies are out of their depth.

As the witch gloats that they aren't cut out for life in "Gainesville" (a nod of the head to Bill Gaines E.C. editor in chief) and they agree, "we fight super-foes not social nightmares."  And they return just as downcast as the first lot.

"Those were strange times" mulls Supreme in the present.  They fought together during the war, but afterwards it felt like the war had been their only reason for existing. After that they sat around waiting for stuff to happen.  Then Mighty Man flies in carrying in Waxy Doyle. He says "the 1950's happened."

The final flashback takes the form of a charicatured comedy comic.  Glory runs the home and Supreme is her henpecked husband.  She kicks him out to find a job and he runs around in his spotty boxer shorts looking for work as he bumps into charicatures of other members of the allies.  The 3rd Witch then returns them to normal and they sign off with this message:

Witches: "Not only will the fifties be too weird for you.  Not only will the fifties evils be beyond you.  But worst of all, the fifties will laugh at you. So long Antique Surplus of America!"

And the Allies see in the new year in somewhat subdued fashion wondering if it might be time to find new careers.

And thus dawns a new decade...

In the present we are told the Allies disbanded within six months.  Most left superheroing, although the big names like Supreme and Glory carried on.  Glory says she found herself  minding a bunch of prep school girls called the "Danger Damsels" and Supreme says he was always being transformed by different types of Supremium.

A quick catch up as to where all the others are: Roman, Diehard and Super-Patriot in teams now. Professor Night dropped out of sight. Blackhand is in hospital after a stroke and Storybook Smith lost his magic book in 1958 (see Judgement Day).  As for Jack O'Lantern, "who knows?"

Fully caught up the others bar Glory leave.  She gives Supreme a peck on the cheek saying no one will mind him taking some souveniers from the base. He returns to the Citidel Supreme, gets suited up and closes off the science labs as he is about to do some tests on the artifical Supremium in there.

The next chapter starts with an unenthused Supreme taking Billy Friday up to his Citidel Supreme.  We hear in voice over that Billy has started a new comic based on his life, and a good beginning would be to see Supreme's base so can Ethan ask Supreme if he'll take him there.  So for the good of the company Ethan agrees.

Billy Friday comes for a visit.

Billy runs about the place saying how classic it all looks, "is it a post-ironic statement?"  Sourly Supreme tells him he's doing some important experiments right now and could he excuse him.  Billy keeps poking around and when Supreme is not looking gets inside the room holding the Supremium and leans on the case holding it, then sneaks back out.

Ethan is discussing the radiation from the artificial Supremium with two robot doubles, a reprogrammed S-1 and S-2, he's trying to induce a "violet" stage in it.  Then turns his attention back to Billy.  He takes him to the arsenal and Billy asks him what the radiation is, and Supreme tells him its beyond imagining and we get another flashback.

It's Sally's birthday and Supreme and Radar return to his parent's house to celebrate. Then a man, glowing white and violet falls from the sky.  The radiation from him makes Sally "feel funny".  Supreme tells her to get inside and he'll deal with the glowing man.  But the man turns Supreme into a ventriloquist's puppet.

Supremium Man.

Supreme quickly turns back and goes after the glowing man who says oddly, "you're no match for me in any decade!"  And he turns Supreme into steam.  Supreme uses the cold from an ice-cream truck to become liquid so he won't disperse, then goes back to normal.

The glowing man is heading for Doc Well's place.  He breaks in and turns Supreme into a 2-D image.   Doc Wells says that when Supremium turns violet it causes unpredictable effects.  The glowing man rips open the vault holding the meteor and it is violet too.

Glowing man: "Of course!  All Supremium resonates in unison.  In a sense there is only one isotope of it, spread through time."

But then as he absorbs it he becomes smaller and denser until he disappears, from his view space-time is collapsing and he falls right through reality.  Back with Sally and his parents he notes her hair has turned white as well although no superpowers... yet.

Back in the present Supreme wants to get back to his work and so palms Billy off on S-1. They carry on with the tour, then Billy says there is something wrong. And he starts to grown extra arms. S-1 calls over the intercom for Supreme.  Supreme comes to see what has happened and finds Billy is now a mass of limbs and he's multiplying exponentially.

Billy Friday gets out of control.

As Billy gets bigger he poses a real danger that he might destroy the Hell of Mirrors and let the supervillains out.  So Supreme uses the Photon Convertor and turns him into light and this transports him to Amalnyth. Supreme realises he'll have to explain this to the people at Dazzle comics.

Down there, S-1 shows them a two-way video link he's set up so Billy can communicate with the outside world.  He seems happy with the situation, "I can't see how I could be more post-modern if I tried!"  He'll fax them the first issue soon.  The editor thinks this could be a selling point, "even Shooter never thought of this one."

Out on the roof, S-1 bids Diana and Ethan goodbye.  Diana notes how alike they look, although Supreme is taller.  She asks if he had a female side-kick or counterpart and Ethan says she did, "her name was Suprema".

The last chapter we're looking at today begins with Supreme flying through space, as he does so we see a newspaper cutting telling us Supreme is leaving Earth and Suprema will take his place.  He's flying at lightspeed now and flies out past the Galactic Rim.  And he is thinking of her, which starts another flashback.

Suprema is tied to a wheel in hellish landscape while her arch enemy Satana disguises herself as her to take her place.  It began with Suprema hearing someone call for help. A voice leads her down into a magma filled underground canyon.  Suprema says she'll take the girls place because she can't be hurt.

Suprema in trouble.

This proves to be a bad idea as the girl turns out to be Satana and now Suprema is trapped and can only use her X-ray vision to see Satana disguised as her catapault a kitten out of a tree (nooo!) and heartily snog Sally's boyfriend.

Then Lord Sin appears, and when Suprema tells him Satana used deceit to swap places, he says that's against the rules and lets her go.  But as the two Supremas fight and he looks on, he can't tell which is Satana until Suprema catches the kitten who was flung from the tree earlier (yaaay!).  This proves she is the real Suprema and Lord Sin carries off Satana.  Suprema returns the kitten and scolds Sally's/her boyfriend for enjoying the kiss a little too much.

Back in the present, Supreme realises that "Gorrl the living galaxy" is behind Suprema's disappearance.  The newspapers he checked said Suprema gave herself up as a companion for him so he'd leave the Milky Way alone.  Using the isotopes of Supremium in Suprema's body he is able to track her.  He finds someone but it isn't Suprema, it's Radar, his metabolism slowed to a crawl so he can survive out in space.

Radar the Hound Supreme.

Supreme revives him and using the vocoder thing round his neck, Radar tells Supreme that Suprema's home is in a black hole.  He tried to warn Suprema but Gorrl crystalised the ice round him and left him adrift.  He asks how long it's been and Supreme says thirty years.

They finally make it to where Suprema is sleeping on a four poster bed.  Radar licks her hand and she wakes up, surprised to see Supreme back from space so soon.  Supreme tells her because of time dilation with the black hole, thirty years have passed outside.  He's going to take her home, but Gorrl has other ideas.

Gorrl.

Supreme, Suprema and Radar manage to escape the black hole.  But Gorrl speaks to them using a pulsar.  He wants Suprema as his companion.  Supreme manages to convince it that it should return to its own kind. He's worried they will reject it but Suprema says that's where he belongs.  And it departs, "goodbye my starry darling" says Suprema.

Suprema asks what Earth is like now.  Supreme says it's worse than ever  "Littlehaven's a ghost town.  Glenvale's gone".  Her boyfriend is middle aged and likely married now.  "Drat" she says.  They fly back to Earth and use Radar's collar radio to let people know they are coming and when they get there a welcome parade in Suprema's honour is in progress.  She is still remembered with warmth, things aren't all bad.

Welcome home Suprema!

So we're halfway done.  It's all very... clever.  Moore doesn't tend to do such obvious meta-commentary usually so this is something of a departure for him and I do get a kick out of the the little nods to the odder aspects of comic's long history.  The first chapter with The Supremacy and the "Revisions" is a great idea for explaining how a universal reboot might be interpreted by the people it's happening to and who are aware of it. The digs at Grant Morrison via the writer Billy Friday are hilarious, considering how intense their feud has got in recent years.  As Morrison was writing "The Invisibles" at the time, a series somewhat notorious for being intensely postmodern, autobiographical and hard to follow it's got to be him being depicted here.  And ironic as well as Morrison would go on to bring us the "JLA" which was a similar restating of traditional comicbook values.  While the Image style modern day set artwork by various artists is OK (and now is as dated as the pastiches are), I can't praise Rick Veitch enough for being able to channel the various Golden and Silver Age styles as well as the EC horror and humour comics for the flashbacks that trigger Supreme's missing memories.  It really is good stuff.  Moore is also doing us his customary world building by giving us his version of the Legion of Superheroes, Supergirl and the Justice League into which he's incorporated Glory, a Wonder Woman knock-off and another of Leifeld's half arsed creations that much better artist and writers have improved on.  There's a background story going on as well which will come to a head at the end of the first twelve issues so check back in a few days time when I finish this volume off.