"identity, reality, and ideas"

I’ve been re-reading Alan Moore’s Supreme and I decided to share some thoughts I formulated during the reading. Beware: the following article contains massive spoilers about the series, so unless you're already familiar with it, read at your own risk

Alan Moore's first issue

As a comic book reader I seldom read good news these days. So it was with joy that I read weeks ago that Alan Moore’s Supreme run is finally being completed. When the series was cancelled abruptly back in 2000, Alan Moore was one issue away from concluding it. According to Erik Larsen, he intended Steve Moore, his long-term friend, to take over. But then Rob Liefeld’s Awesome Comics, which published the series, went belly up, and the two Moores moved on to create America’s Best Comics. But I’m sure I wasn’t the only fan who hoped one day the run would be finished. Now after eleven years waiting, the conclusion is nigh.

In preparation I’ve been re-reading the series. Supreme is a series more often talked than read. It’s not difficult to understand. The 23 issues were collected in two TPBs by Checker, but they’re considered to be of poor quality and one is even out of print. Supreme is a bit like Moore’s legendary Marvelman run: famous but hard to acquire. Unlike Marvelman, however, Supreme was never very influential. That’s a pity. It was a beautiful series that should have played an important role in the regeneration of superhero comics in the 21st century. It was as intelligent, densely plotted, funny, humorous and dramatic as anything Moore ever created. It was also a throwback to the past at a time when superhero writers were too embarrassed of their colourful traditions and history. Like Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, everyone praises it, but the point fell in deaf ears.

Supreme is often considered a love letter to the Silver Age Superman and his mythology: the Solitude of Fortress, Smalville, Lex Luthor, Lana Lang and Lois Lane, the 5th Dimensional Imp Mr. Mxyzptlk, the Legion of Super-Heroes, the mild-manered civilian identity, the different types of Kryptonite with their reality-changing powers, the adoptive parents, Supergirl and Superboy, the JLA, the World’s Finest team-ups with Batman… all these elements are deftly explored by Moore in the series. It’s a meta-commentary on Superman, yes. But surely if this were all it’s about, I don’t think anyone would love it so much. Aping old Superman stories and concepts only gets one so far and its' hardly brilliant. A comic book needs more substance than that.

So there are two themes I’d like to discuss here that are seldom brought up in relation to Supreme: identity and the nature of reality. Moore would later explore them Promethea. But much of his work for Image in the ‘90s was a preparatory sketch (in his few issues of Glory, a Wonder Woman knock-off, Moore wrote laid out ideas that he reused in Promethea, for instance) and fascinating in its own way.

In Supreme #41, the first issue written about Alan Moore, Supreme has just returned from a sojourn in deep space, only to wonder whether he’s arrived on the real Earth or whether he’s just looking at a copycat or an alternate world. The Earth in front of him is super-imposed with another one, as if two images were trying to converge to create one whole, bringing to mind Crisis on the Infinite Earths, the event that changed DC’s continuity and altered the identities and origins of its superheroes. From the first page Moore’s run is concerned with reality vs. fiction, double images, copies, memory and identity. As Supreme flies down towards Earth, he reflects about ‘memory gaps’ he’s been experiencing and ‘alternate Supremes’ he met in past adventures. A caption box informs us that Supreme recently had adventures involving a False Earth and Counterfeit Supremes. So it’s no wonder that Supreme feels his identity is ‘confused and insubstantial.’

Supreme #41

This is possibly Moore poking fun at Rob Liefeld’s original version. When Supreme debuted in 1992, he was an ill-defined character with little back-story. In Liefeld’s original stories, he was just this guy who wore his costume, didn’t have a civilian identity, and just fought other heroes and villains without a break. In #10, Supreme is interviewed on TV by a journalist, and Liefeld, in urgent need of an origin, just grafted Captain America’s origin on his already derivative character: he was now a cheap Superman knock-off who had gained his powers during World War II after volunteering to secret army experiments. World-shattering stuff. He didn’t even have an actual civilian identity until Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming named him Ethan Crane in the 1994 mini-series Legend of Supreme. For most of his existence, the character was an empty vessel. Supreme, with his poorly thought out origin, constant revisions and malleable back-story, was perfect for Moore to explore ideas of identity, reality, memory and continuity.

Legend of Supreme #1

As Alan Moore’s Supreme investigates the two super-imposed Earths, he meets different versions of himself. They take him to the Supremacy, a limbo dimension where all Supremes exist and go after they’re written out of existence. Supreme learns that he’s just the new Avatar and apparently he’s a constant in the universe: there must always be a Supreme. Hopefully why will be explained in the forthcoming issue. As he accepts the new role, he returns to Earth in the civilian identity of Ethan Crane, penciller of the Superman-like Omniman for Dazzle Comics. Slowly he starts putting all the pieces of his new life together. On his trip to Littlehaven, he narrates in his diary that his memories are filling up the blank spaces as he thinks of them. It’s like he didn’t have a back-story until he started thinking about his past. His memories feel real, but at the same time he’s aware they’re fictional too.

Supreme isn’t the only charecter dealing with issues of memory and identity in the series. In #43, on his first trip to The Citadel Supreme, a hidden fortress floating above Omegapolis, covered by artificial clouds, he discovers that S-1, one of his suprematons, replicas he used in the past as decoys, has created a personal haven for himself. Creating suprematons of his dead parents and Judy Jordan, Supreme’s lover back in Littlehaven, S-1 has been living a false existence, hiding from the replicas their own artificiality. S-1 is the only suprematon capable of independent thought and so he’s practically a human capable of feelings, emotions and loving. This erosion of categories between human and artificial is further explored in #54. But first we must discuss Darius Dax.

Supreme #43

Darius Dax (the Lex Luthor of the series) also explores the theme of identity. When Supreme visits Littlehaven, he meets Judy Jordan, now aged in her seventies, taking care of the Supreme Museum. But unbeknownst to Supreme, Judy’s personality has been replaced with Dax’s. One day Dax discovered exposure to Supremium (AKA Kryptonite) had given him cancer. In order to beat death, he digitized and recorded his personality in nano-bots and transferred it to Judy Jordan. “That’s all we are, you see: patterns,” he claims in #52a. Thus in #54 Judy’s mind is rebuilt like an ‘electric Jigsaw puzzle’ from traces left in her old body and transferred to an artificial body. Although Supreme can’t love her in this state, S-1, who retains his master’s personality, declares his love for her and they both marry, blurring the line between man and machine, something he later explored in Top Ten.

But Dax doesn’t just steal Judy’s body in the series. Dax’s identity is in constant flux throughout the series. For instance, he’s also The Supremium Man. In the new continuity that Moore creates for Supreme, he is originally a boy who in 1925 is exposed to the Supremium meteor and gains powers from it. In 1950, his sister, Suprema, is also exposed to Supremium when an entity called The Supremium Man falls from the sky. We later learn, in #52b, that this creature is none other than Dax falling through time-space as he becomes a black hole. In a neat time paradox, Dax is not just Supreme’s arch-enemy but also his origin. And before becoming The Supremium Man, he temporarily becomes Magno, transferring his personality from Judy’s body to this android’s for a while.

Supreme #52b

Although Darius Dax is the most extreme example, the themes of identity, memory and artificiality continue to play small roles throughout the series, in the present as well as in the flashbacks. For instance, all three stories involving the League of Infinity – #42, #52b and Supreme: The Return #4 – show either the Leaguers playing pranks on Supreme or Suprema by disguising their identities; or a villain disguising himself as a hero to join the League’s roster to destroy it. Satana, Suprema’s arch enemy, steals her identity to destroy her reputation. In one of my favourite flashbacks, Supreme’s friends pose as wax statues to play a prank on him. In #47, Darius Dax and Jack-a-Dandy swap Supreme and Professor Night’s powers and they get back to normal by swapping their identities to trick the villains. In the same issue, Supreme enters Professor Night’s consciousness and explores his memory. Then there’s Billy Friday, the British writer of Omniman, who’s also changed by the Supremium, much in the way Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen was often changed into monstrous creatures in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Like in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, where each issue explored a different take on dreams or storytelling, Moore’s Supreme constantly explores different iterations of these themes, making them the web that holds the entire series together.

Supreme #43

With so many changes of identities and body swaps, it’s no wonder that artificiality and fiction are major themes of the series too. After all, the flashbacks that purport to be adventures from real comics, are just another level of fiction. We know they’re modern stories, but Moore and Veitch painstakingly reproduce the style of comics from the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and the ‘70s, both through the art and through the dialogue, capturing the smallest of details that characterise these eras. Rick Veitch mimicks several styles, from Curt Swan to Jack Kirby to Jim Starlin. Meanwhile Moore has lots of fun with the alliteration, speech patterns, the grandiose interjects – Sacred Paracelsus! – and the word puns that characterise these ages. And they’re so perfect that even though we know they’re fake we can convince ourselves they’re real-life classic comics.

Supreme #49: lovely tribute to Jim Starlin

It’s also in those fake relics that we often see another theme fully explored: that of reality vs. fiction. In a flashback in #51, Judy Jordan and Supreme attend an exhibition that has Judy as the main attraction: there’s a whole room devoted to showing her in all her different versions. In the past characters were malleable, reality was fluid. Characters, unfettered by continuity, could afford to change their nature from issue to issue. As The Patriot complains in #41, everything was ‘too changeable’ in the past. He didn’t like that. But The Patriot is a post child of the '90s. The opinion of this muscle-bound, grim-and-gritty simpleton, who’s more machine than man, is of no importance. The fact that things were easily changeable is what made the Silver Age such a wondrous age of comics.

This changeability, of course, used to be the fabric of comics reality and Moore acknowledges that through the concept of Supremacy, the limbo where all versions of Supreme exist: the Afro-American female version; the anthropomorphic animal version; the grim-and-gritty version; the future version. As Supreme is informed in #41, he’s but a nineties model. Darius Dax has his own version, called Daxia. Once upon a time, it wasn’t unusual to explore different possibilities, back when the past was ‘changeable,’ before continuity carved everything into stone. Before comics got realistic, they used to be about ideas and weren’t afraid to look silly if that led to a funny idea for the month’s issue. As Jack Kirby explains in Supreme The Return #6, comic book creators used to farm ideas; comics used to be factories that mass-produced characters and concepts. For that reason, reality wasn’t something that was on the minds of the writers of the Silver Age.

Supreme: The Return #6

It’s no wonder then that in Supreme, the characters are constantly changing their physical nature. For instance, in #48, Supreme and his colleagues explore Idea-Space, a non-physical dimension accessed through the power of the mind. In Supreme The Return #3, Supreme and Diana Dane (the Lois Lane of this series) are turned into light to visit the Kandor-like city of Amalynth. Sometimes these changes aren’t physical but thematic: in one issue, Supreme becomes the Supremacist, and Omniman becomes the Klansman, after a member of the League of Infinity, changes the outcome of the Civil War. The fictional Omniman (fictional from Supreme’s perspective) becomes “real” too in issue #53. In this issue Supreme also finds himself reading issue #53 of Supreme, ad infinitum, cleverly reminding us that the series is one gigantic labyrinth where reality and fiction are meaningless concepts (in the new art available, the Angel Luriel claims that she’s just imagining us all into existence, a neat reversion of the idea that we’re the ones imagining mythical creatures like Luriel and the other denizens of Supreme’s Mythical Zoo).

But it turns out Omniman is in fact Szazs, the Sprite Supreme (a loving tribute to Mr. Mxyzptlk), who has reality-changing powers. Our hero uses a ‘Syllogism Supreme’ to disprove Szazs’ existence after he reads how issue #53 ends.

Supreme #53

However, the greatest source of reality-warping powers is the Supremium. It is what causes the Supremes from the ‘50s to grow ant heads or turn into puppets or abstract art. It is what grows Billy Friday’s infinite limbs. It’s what changes Dax into The Supremium Man. It’s what grants Supreme his powers. It defies all physical laws, it makes solid things liquid, the impossible possible. We may as well just call Supremium by its true name: imagination.

Dax’s theory about identity being just patterns is later echoed by Jack Kirby in Supreme The Return #6, in which The King of superhero comics explains that people are just ideas; that’s all a personality is, according to him. As we re-read Alan Moore’s Supreme, it’s hard not to agree with him. Before comics became character- or continuity-driven, they were idea-driven, and that, for better or for worse, offered countless possibilities that were closed off when characters became too coherent and solid. It’s true that characters in the ‘60s become more rounded, thanks to Stan Lee; but what we gained in characterisation we lost in unbridled imagination. And realism eventually led to the impoverishment of the superhero genre from the ‘80s onwards. There’s a reason why comic book writers continue to mine the ‘50s and ‘60s for ideas: they were such a rich era that it’s nearly an inexhaustible mine. Some can say superhero comics are more realistic, more literary, more erudite today; but for me they’re not as original, unpredictable, funny or stimulating as they were in the past. Comics have become more about continuity than telling stories. Writers prefer to polish old characters instead of creating new ones (understandable in the creator-owned age where a comic book can become a lucrative TV show or movie), and I’m sure many readers share my belief that they’re just rehashing the same stories over and over again.

More than a love letter to the Superman mythology or a meta-commentary about the state of superheroes in the ‘90s, I see Supreme as a panegyric to imagination and creativity. Comics used to excel at one thing: generating new ideas. It is perhaps fitting that the last issue published ended with Supreme and Jack Kirby talking about the nature of ideas. Ideas used to be the true currency of comics. Using Supreme as a vehicle, Alan Moore explores the importance of ideas and the ever-changing nature of reality that was the foundations of the Silver Age, before continuity chained characters to continuity. More than just clever pastiches of Superman’s mythology, I hope this is what readers get from Alan Moore’s Supreme when they read the series.

Posted by Miguel at 06:32

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Labels: Alan Moore, Image, Keith Giffen, Rich Veitch, Rob Liefeld, Supreme

4 comments:

Prankster31 December 2011 09:12 Hi, great blog! I don't totally agree that the series wasn't influential; I think that, along with perhaps Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City, Supreme was partly responsible for the abandonment of the 90s "grim 'n' gritty" style and the attempts to "return to the Silver Age" that we've been witnessing in the past decade or so. That would include the strip-mining of Silver Age concepts that you mention; remember, at the time Moore took over Supreme, most of the companies were rather desperately fleeing from their Silver Age legacies, purging the "campy" elements from their continuity as fast as they could. Supreme was partly a response to this, and I think it opened the door to a newfound respect for the weirdness and silliness of comics' past. I'll agree, though, that as tends to happen with Moore, various superhero writers latched onto the superficialities of his work and tried to emulate it without an understanding of his fundamental point. Just as too many people took away from Watchmen the idea that comics ought to be "dark" and "realistic", I think too many comics writers took away from Supreme the idea that comics should be endlessly backwards-looking, while ignoring the blueprint Moore lays out here for the future. Reply
Miguel2 January 2012 06:36 Prankster, thank you for the nice words. "I don't totally agree that the series wasn't influential; I think that, along with perhaps Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City, Supreme was partly responsible for the abandonment of the 90s "grim 'n' gritty" style and the attempts to "return to the Silver Age" that we've been witnessing in the past decade or so." Well, I never read Astro City - shame on me, I know - but I guess we can include Mark Waid's Kingdom Come and Grant Morrison's JLA/DC One Million to this attempt at a Silver Age revival. Were they successful? I don't know; I think those who liked the Silver Age continued to write in that vein, ie Waid, Morrison, etc. But I look at DC's comics from the mid noughties and at the New 52, and I wonder... Identity Crisis, the dismemberment of superheroes, rape and mutilation of women, graphic murder of little girls, superpets turned into murdering monsters... I'm not convinced. What I think is there's a lot of writers paying lip service to the Silver Age. But I think this is more of a PR thing to satisfy a shrinking audience that more and more looks backwards, than genuine love for it. Usually Silver Age conceps and characters are brought back only to be mocked, killed, grittified, etc. I hoped the New 52 would be difficult, but apart from the usual suspects, it's been more of the same. It perplexes me how DC is losing its identity to become more and more like Marvel. The DCU used to be a far more whimsical, wondrous universe, an alternative to the gritty drama of angsty heroes; it had wonderfully silly concepts like Captain Marvel, Metamorpho, The Metal Men, Doom Patrol - and now it's just angtsy, badass, rude superheroes too. Reply
Prankster2 January 2012 10:07 Right, but the mere fact that "going back to the silver age" has become good PR in the first place is something that I think you can partially credit to Supreme. Before Supreme, AC and Kingdom Come, comics seemed downright ashamed of the silver age, and referring to those stories and characters was something superhero comics seemed to avoid at all costs. Now at least the knowledge of older comics is respected, if not handled well. I'm certainly not going to argue that modern comics suffer from a surfeit of whimsy and imagination! Just that the priorities have, at least superficially, shifted a bit from the era when Supreme first appeared. (And as with Watchmen, I think there was a brief flowering of very good comics work in its wake--the late 90s were actually a pretty strong time for comics in general, before they sank back into a repetitive morass and desperate attempt to increase sales.) Astro City is a little uneven in patches, but it's frequently brilliant, and if you like Supreme I suspect it'd be right up your alley. It's got the same attempt to bring some legitimate sophistication to superheroes while keeping the goofy imagination of the Silver Age intact. I get the distinct impression that the current dire straits that DC find themselves in (and Marvel to an extent, though surprisingly they seem to be a little more amenable to reaching out to a broader audience and producing more kid-friendly work right now) are the results of a few fanboys-turned-pros dug in on the editorial staff. Dan Didio in particular seems to be a guy who learned all the wrong lessons from the early 90s, and the New 52 seems like a desperate attempt to go back to that era when relaunching a comic at #1 and slapping a pair of breasts on the cover guaranteed a half-million in sales. I actually suspect the New 52 was a last ditch effort on Didio's part to save his job, one that sadly seems to have worked...for now. But they can't keep the bubble inflating forever, and eventually I think WB is going to prune the dead wood and replace the upper management at DC with actual professionals. And as much as that might sound like an invitation to blander, less interesting comics, I suspect it's actually exactly what the industry needs right now. I'm not going to hold up Marvel, as it currently exists, as a shining beacon unto what superhero comics should be, but they've become a much more diverse (in every sense of the word) company that's shed some of its more egregious fanboyishness and is making at least a vague attempt to reach out to kids, women, indie readers, and so on. I suspect that can be attributed to its being bought by Disney. Reply