Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Comic Books >

Supreme and the Retro Comic: Who exactly is this being made for?

01:49 / 15.11.04

So, I'm almost through Supreme: The Return, and I'm really liking the book. The Return is even stronger than Story of the Year, and is full of really interesting ideas about superhero comics. However, as much as I like the book, I'm left wondering who exactly Moore is writing this book for. He was so notable for being a pioneer in making comics mainstream, it seems odd to make a book that's so reliant on people knowing the tropes of superhero comic books, and being able to appreciate a pastiche of their characteristics.

While Watchmen is obviously partially reliant on knowledge of superhero history, it also works a story in its own right, as does Miracleman. However, Supreme would probably make no sense to someone who's not at least familiar with the Superman mythos, and the traditions of 50s comics. Which brings up the question, why would Moore write this? People criticize John Byrne for writing stories that are really wrapped up in continuity, and have no mainstream appeal, but Moore gets away with writing something that would have basically no chance of appealing to someone who's not already a dedicated comics writer.

The obvious reason for this is Supreme is great, while Byrne's work is generally considered pretty bad, so Moore is able to get away with it, but at its heart, books like this and Tom Strong seem more like Alan just writing love letters to his youth, as he revels in the purple prose allowed by the format. I'd compare Supreme to something like Animal Man, which also relies on superhero traditions, but is far more universal and accessible to someone outside of comics. Animal Man is about all fiction, Supreme is really just about comics.

So, that's sort of a ramble, but how do people view Supreme and Tom Strong, and the retro pastiche is general. Where's the line between poking fun at the conventions of something that's bad, and just being bad yourself.

Spyder Todd 2008

05:00 / 15.11.04

I think it is a love letter to Supes, but I think it's also proof that no one should ever write Superman EVER unless they're Alan Moore. No one at all. Sorry, but you people suck, so because you're not Alan Moore, you're fired. I'm talking to you, Chuck Austin.

****(Possible) SPOILER ALERT****

On a similar note, I just finished The Return. Yay. Please tell me that there's more after the Kirby issue. Please. There's obviously a plot planned and all set up for a grand finale. Can we see it?
Either that, or the whole point is that it's a circle (Last page of the chapter 10). That would be cool too, but I like the idea of 1000 Supreme's taking on 1000 Dax's...

05:59 / 15.11.04

Frank Zappa said, it is not necessary for the world to end in fire or ice. The other two posibilities are nostalgia or paperwork.

06:01 / 15.11.04

why would Moore write this?

Well, the simple answer is that he really, really needed the money. The Nineties up to that point were hardly his most financially successful years: Lost Girls and From Hell are no-one's idea of commercial blockbusters, and he'd more or less given entirely on writing the for the relatively lucrative superhero market.

I doubt Moore would have had anything to do with Liefeld had his small-press work been keeping him and his family afloat. I think at that point he'd decided that he wouldn't be working for DC again, and he's never worked for Marvel, so Liefeld was the pretty much the only person that would be able to pay him a living wage.

Of course, Moore is incapable of writing a story that's not at least interesting, and Supreme is, as Patrick says, a tremendously entertaining comic about comics, at least on a surface level. I'd go further and argue that in their own ways Supreme and Tom Strong are as concerned with the same Big Themes of magic and reality as the more obviously magical Promethea. I've got to go to work now, unfortunately, so I'll come back to this later.

I will say, however, that the Kirby issue is just perfect. It made me go all misty...

Dan Fish - @Fish1k

12:27 / 15.11.04

There were to have been 2 more issues, featuring all out war between the Supremacy and the Dax equivalent:
http://platinumstudios.com/titles/awesome/issues/str_7.php

and

http://www.alanmoorefansite.com/features/index.html

Issue 63: The Clash of the Supremacies, Part One
Diana Dane, having visited the Supremacy, has realized the Supremacy works just like comic book continuity. So she has a wonderful idea: Omniman, the hero she writes about in the comics, will go to the Omnigarchy and meet all the old Omnimen.

The comic is published to great acclaim. Darius Dax buys a copy, and realizes that this is too close a coincidence. This has been written with inside info from Supreme! From that, he deduces the existence of the Supremacy, the counterpart to Daxia.

Dax goes back to Daxia, tells them there's a Supremacy, and they all decide to attack Earth to lure the Supremacy all into the open, where they can finish them once and for all.

Issue 64: The Clash of the Supremacies, Part Two
"My 24th issue of Supreme," Moore said proudly, "would have been a huge battle with all the Supremes vs. all the Daxes, taking place on Earth but spilling over into the Supremacy and Daxia. A big, Kirbyesque war of the worlds; that might have been the one where we used Alex Ross' beautiful painted cover showing all the Supremes, including ones I hadn't invented yet when I saw it."

"And that would have been it," he says.

But by then, it would be the middle of 1999, and doubtless [Moore would] have thought of something else.

22:28 / 16.11.04

I finished The Return last night. I guess I wasn't expecting a big ending, since I knew the series had been cut off, so I wasn't as disappointed as with the ending of say, Twin Peaks, where I just needed to know what happened next. It's not one of Moore's great works, but it's definitely one of the few recent superhero books that does something new with the genre. I've got the first two Tom Strong trades borrowed from someone, so I'll be reading those next.

02:48 / 17.11.04

I'm probably in the minority here in that I think Supreme is quite a bit better than Tom Strong. Supreme is way joycore and unrestrained, and goes quite ludicrously over the top at times. Tom Strong, on the other hand, falls kind of flat, IMO. Sure, it's "silver agey", but it's so deliberately and self-consciously so that it comes off as affected and unspontaneous. Feels like a sort of assigned class exercise in silver age comic book writing, complete with checklist of elements to include.

03:05 / 17.11.04

I understand exactly how you feel. I've got nearly all my ABC hardcovers, and Tom Strong, though intelligent, is rarely... sharp? We all once dissected the validity of Superman continuity changes and I felt the overall and unstated consensus was that Superman, as an ICONIC and therefore INTRODUCTORY superhero, should remain steadfast and smart, but never too deep or too drastic. Tom Strong is, in that regard, EXACTLY what Superman ought to be. I've never read Supreme, but I'd assume that it's what Superman is when it's inverted (-and that's the sharpness?).

04:00 / 22.11.04

I just read the first Tom Strong trade and coming off Supreme, it feels very pedestrian. Supreme always seemed to acknowledge that it was being written in a post-Watchmen era, and was just aware enough of its own inherent ridiculousness to be entertaining. Tom Strong feels more like the retro strips from Supreme. It has very little character development, and just feels, I guess dumb is the word. There's some interesting concepts, in the Modular Man and the Aztec issue, but it just feels uninvolving. I can see what Moore is trying to do, and it's something similar to Supreme, but Supreme had such a broad canvas, starting right from the first issue with the Supremacy, not to mention the fact that the Ethan/Diana relationship has so much more depth than any of the stuff in Tom Strong.

With Tom Strong, I feel like Moore is trying to be retro and pulp rather than just focusing on writing a good story.

05:47 / 22.11.04

Just to clarify, I get what Moore is trying to do, and to some extent, I think it's similar to what Morrison was doing with JLA, which is to just tell a straightforward superhero story, with soap type character interactions. But, there's no real reason for the reader to care about Tom Strong or his family. Characterization is stripped to the bare minimum, and that doesn't work for me, but I guess it works for others.