"final thoughts"

Final Thoughts on Alan Moore's Supreme

Since I couldn’t incorporate all my thoughts in my previous article about Alan Moore’s Supreme, I’m using this article to develop some smaller ideas I had while re-reading his wonderful run. Just beware: this article contains massive spoilers, so if you never read the series, enter at your own peril.

Alan Moore’s Supreme is one of the best superhero comics I’ve ever read in my life. And it’s a series bursting with ideas. Although I touched on a handful of them in my last post, there are still some points I’d like to further develop:

The Ethical Turn

Supreme doesn’t kill. In this he remains faithful to Superman’s strict code of never taking someone’s life. Now it’s an ethical code readers may not sympathize with or even condone. After all so many of our beloved heroes kill and we don’t think less of them for that: how many evil wizards do Harry Potter and his friends kill in the books? How many Orcs are massacred by the Fellowship of the Ring? How many Stormtroopers does Han Solo fry with his ray gun? How many aliens does Obi-Wan Kenobi disintegrate with his light sabre? . Sherlock Holmes plunged towards death with his arch-enemy Moriarty (Sir Arthur later resurrected them due to monetary difficulties) and we don’t judge him for that. Heroes have always killed: they killed in antiquity, they killed in Medieval times, they killed in the pulp age, they kill in movies, they kill in novels.

But Superman doesn’t kill and neither does Supreme. That’s something Alan Moore is very intransigent about. Most heroes these days don’t have problems about toying with the concept of killing, breaking the law, or enforcing their will upon others. Writers love to put them in these complicated situations where they have moral dilemmas. You read comics, you know what I’m talking about; surely you’ve read one of the countless comics where The Avengers or The X-Men decide whether or not to just bump off Scarlet Witch. Writers especially love to bring up the old argument that it’d just make a lot more sense to kill dangerous homicidal psychopaths like The Joker and Carnage than allow them to break loose again and mass murder another bus full of toddlers. No doubt they think this makes them mature and complex.

Supreme #56

But Moore never puts Supreme in such a situation. He never broods over such a dilemma. One could argue it’s just a lazy way to avoid a thorny matter. But Moore is not a lazy writer. I think we can all agree he knows maturity and complexity. So what gives?

Moore avoids the issue in a way that not only shows that Supreme is smarter than any given contemporary superhero, but also more efficient and successful at his job of defending Earth from villains. There are two reasons why Supreme never has to contemplate killing his villains. The first one is really simple: in Supreme’s world, when villains are caught, they remain imprisoned.

In The Citadel Supreme there is a room called The Hell of Mirrors (built using the mirrors Alice used to travel to Wonderland - you have to love Alan Moore) that is a dimension where the Ivory Icon keeps his enemies detained. And you know what? They actually stay trapped in the damned thing! Sure, there’s a jailbreak in Supreme #56: Shadow Supreme, The Televillain, Korgo The Space Tyrant, The Slaver Ant and Optilux escape. But can you believe that they remained there for thirty years? When was the last time Arkham Asylum detained a Batman foe for thirty years? Thirty days is probably too much.

You see, Supreme isn’t a totally worthless, pointless, dumb, stupid, moronic, inefficient superhero who lives in a world whose institutions are equally worthless and inefficient. In his world, prisons work. When was the last time The Raft actually held a Marvel villain? A jailbreak every thirty years is quite good, considering that Arkham Asylum, Ryker’s Island, Blackgate Penitentiary and all fictional prisons have walls as solid as papier-mâché.

Of course the reason why there are jailbreaks galore at DC and Marvel segues into my second point. Moore, rather than reusing villains all the time, actually creates different threats every issue. Once upon a very distant time, writers actually created villains. This was before they discovered they could sit on these villains for their never-to-be-published creator-owned series (I don’t’ see many DC and Marvel writers rushing to launch their own comics). Since most writers don’t want to give new villains to these companies because you never know when it might become another Deadpool or whatever, the solution is to use a small pool of villains over and over again. That means that The Joker has to show up two or three times every month. That means Arkham Asylum must be shown as the most incompetent mental hospital in the world. That means The Joker’s body count is ridiculously high. That means people will understandably question the efficiency of superheroes. That means they’ll suggest, you know, maybe Batman should just snap the clown’s neck or something.

And I don’t think readers should be thinking these things. Superheroes shouldn’t look inefficient. They shouldn’t be fighting the same villain all the time. Each issue should introduce a new threat, a new challenge. In the first 24 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko introduced: The Chameleon; The Vulture; The Tinkerer; Doctor Octopus; The Sandman; Doctor Lizard; The Living Brain; Electro; The Enforcers; Mysterio; The Green Goblin; Kraven The Hunter; and The Scorpion. Not bad for two years’ worth of stories. Which writer nowadays would create so many new villains in such a short period?

Alan Moore does address the idea of killing a person, once. In Supreme #55, one of the members of the League of Infinity changes the past. In order to mend the timestream, the members vote to go back in time and kill him before he changes it. Supreme votes against it, obviously; but since the majority is in favor he grudgingly tags along. Moore deftly gets around this dilemma when Supreme realizes they’re just predestined to kill their friend, thus absolving them of any responsibility. This of course opens up the question of determinism and free will, but Moore pretty much ignores that.

Supreme #55

What’s important to Moore is to show that Supreme is an ethical, responsible, noble human being. Unlike modern superheroes, he’s not feared, despised or hated. Supreme lives amongst men, as a mild-mannered comic book penciller, even though he has a technical wonder floating above Omegapolis, hidden by clouds. At one point Darius Dax exposes The Citadel Supreme, hoping to terrify the citizens below. After Supreme defeats Dax, the first thing he does is make a public announcement to Omegapolis’ citizens, reminding them of his pledge to protect them. This is a hero who puts people first. I can’t think of many superheroes who’d worry with public announcements to reassure the populace after a major battle in New York. They’d just fly back to their snazzy HQs and hang around with other superheroes and drink cocktails and quip.

Supreme #52b

Clever, Didactic Comics

Reading Supreme has made me nostalgic of Mr. Mxyzptlk. Surely you remember him: the 5th dimension imp with reality-changing powers who likes to pester Superman and can only be defeated by being tricked into spelling his name backwards. Superman could never physically beat him. He could only fool him.

We don’t see Mr. Mxyzptlk a lot these days. And I think it’s because he just requires too much hard work to write. Coming up with new ways of fooling him into spelling his name backwards is difficult. It requires writing a her whot's good at imagination, cunningness, artifice, manipulation. Punching villains into submission is admittedly easier. But in the past, Superman solved more cases with his brains than with his fists.

Once upon a time comics were for children. If we lived in a normal world, they’d still be for children. Comics were the earliest type of literature I remember reading. Before I read superheroes, I read Disney comics: I was a big fan of Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, etc. I learned a lot from those comics: history, geography, literature (they had some hilarious adaptations of classics), and science. I can recite the names of the Seven Wonders of the World thanks to a bunch of Uncle Scrooge stories. Learning from comics was tremendous fun. I can’t remember the last time I learned something from reading a comic book. Must have been when I read Promethea, a couple of years ago.

Supreme #46

What does this have to do with Supreme anyway? One of the things I love about the series is how so many adventures are based on actual science. For instance, in #46, Supreme travels to outer space, to rescue his sister, Suprema, from Gorrl, The Living Galaxy. Throughout the issue, Supreme discusses quasars, black holes, the event horizon (the point after which no light can escape a black hole), and ‘gravity radiation,’ also known as Hawking radiation, named after Stephen Hawking who in 1974 discovered a type of radiation that actually escapes black holes. I find this amusing because just prior to my re-reading I read Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible which discusses Hawking radiation. A few years ago when I first read the series I passed over this detail without even thinking about it. But Kaku’s book has helped open my eyes to something about the Silver Age: as improbable as those comics used to be, they were often filled with actual science. Long-time readers of The Flash may even remember the Flash Facts, little snippets of scientific trivia that John Broome used to put in his stories. Men like John Broome, Gardner Fox, Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger, for all their deranged stories about superheroes turning into trees, puppets and whatnot, were well-read writers from the field of science fiction. I’m not saying the science in their stories was exact or realistic, but they managed to make it plausible by mixing it with these little facts. And it was a funny method of teaching kids something. Kaku, after all, claims that he became interested in science after reading comics and TV shows like Star Trek.

Supreme #43: well, have you?

Vocabulary, in my view, also used to be wider and more unpredictable in the past. I seldom read a comic book nowadays which makes me run for a dictionary, which is a pity; but Silver Age comics used to be rich in language, which is ironic considering they used to be for children. They often had lots of word puns, word games, used acrostics like in the image above, alliteration – Ivory Icon, Man of Majesty, Lad of Laurels – and grandiose interjections – Sacred Paracelsus! Merciful Mussolini! – that gave the characters unique speech patterns. Alan Moore recovers this linguistic tradition in Supreme.

This didactic aspects of comics is something it the medium inherited from boys’ adventure novels. If we go all the way back to Jules Verne, we can see he was basically just packaging school lessons in exciting, globe-trotting adventures. Nor was this unique to American comics. The best European comics also put an emphasis of educating its readers: Tin Tin, Alix, Lucky Luke, Asterix were all rich in history, for instance. Younger readers could learn a lot about ancient Greece and Rome and the Old West from them. In fact most great European comics are basically historical fiction painstakingly researched that offer its readers large quantities of facts about different cultures and nations. Reading the complete volumes of Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese is the equivalent of reading a history book about the first half of the 20th century. These were comics that were teaching at the same time they were entertaining.

Some will argue that we have smarter comics nowadays. I don’t know. I see a lot of characters nowadays who are smart not because of their actions but because writers (or characters speaking for the writers) say so. Supreme is intelligent not because others say so, but because his speech and personality reveal intelligence and scientific prowess. Supreme, like the heroes of the past, doesn’t win through force. He combines intelligence with cunningness and resourcefulness. His best power is to come up with original ways to stop his villains. A few examples: using the gravity of Earth’s core to trap Shadow Supreme; using his scent supreme to track down Slaver Ant by sensing her ‘formic acid,’ a substance found in ants (how many writers would remember such a lovely scientific fact?); or of course using a logical syllogism to prove Szazs out of existence. Of course sometimes reasoning with villains is also enough. This is what Supreme and Suprema do with Gorrl, The Living Galaxy: basically they just convince him to leave them alone.

Supreme #53

Violence doesn’t always have to solve everything. Intelligence can be a great super-power in itself.

Compression

A lot happens in just 23 issues. There’s a simple reason for that. Although Alan Moore had a densely plotted storyline, each issue was self-contained. This allowed Alan Moore to introduce at lest one new idea, villain or concept per issue. And this rhythm makes a huge difference. In a typical six-part story, the heroes are involved in the same idea for six issues: the same characters, the same villains, the same situation, sometimes the same location, drawn out for six slow-paced issues. Alan Moore in the first six issues of Supreme introduced The Supremacy, The Citadel Supreme, the Suprematons, Littlehaven, Dazzle Comics, Diana Dane, Judy Jordan, Billy Friday, Supreme, countless villains, etc. I was reading DC’s March solicitations recently and apparently in Batwing #7, Batwing is fighting Massacre, a guy with a sword, which is what he was already doing in #1. I don’t know if that just means Batwing is the most inept superhero ever written – really, tear gas from a distance should do the trick, man! He’s not Doomsday! He’s not even Lex Luthor! He’s just a guy with a sword and armour – but it’s certainly illustrative of a major problem in comics: decompression. After seven months of issues, it seems like nothing has really happened in Batwing’s life. And he’s pretty much on equal footing as Supreme when Moore started his run: both Winnick and Moore had to build up their characters from scratch.

There is a school of thought that argues that decompression makes comics smarter: it gives writers more freedom to explore the psychological nuances of the characters; there are all those eloquent silent panels (or three-page sequences) of characters staring solemnly at the space in front of their nose as they’re thinking about something very important. Their lives slow down; they’re not always just having adventures and getting into fights. We can see them in their personal lives, in intimate moments, going out with their friends to talk about whatever…

I guess that’s true. It’s also true decompression can just turn a simple one-issue fight between a bat-masked guy and a sword-wielding lunatic into a seven-part (and counting) epic of boring emptiness.

I never felt, reading Supreme, that I was reading about a character who didn’t have a personal life, who was one-dimensional or simplistic, and all those things superheroes used to be before decompression showed the way to make comics better. Supreme, or Ethan Crane, is an intelligent, humorous, noble individual. Moore needed only two issues to show this. He’s resourceful, he’s compassionate, he prefers to reason instead of fighting. He likes humans, he mingles with them; he respects them. Moore transmits a lot of information in each self-contained issue. Each issue shows something new while giving a complete story. And this for me is the secret of how the series can pack so much: like I argued above, self-contained stories change the rhythm of a series. If you have a six-part arc, that story will be probably devoted to one problem, one villain, one main location, one situation. That’s half a year of stories devoted to one single thing. If you have six self-contained stories, you have six different things happening in half a year already. That’s certainly more interesting. And as Supreme proves, self-contained stories do not preclude long-term storytelling or deep characterisation. It is possible to have intimate moments occur in interesting complete stories too.

Supreme #50

Supreme Is Not A Silver Age Story

So after defending self-contained stories and the way Moore captures the speech patterns and the storytelling of the Silver Age, it’s my turn to argue that Supreme is not a Silver Age story.

Supreme #43

Much has been written about how Alan Moore is celebrating the Silver Age in Supreme. But we forget that the series looks nothing like a Silver Age comic book. Supreme started with The Story of the Year, a 12-part arc of self-contained issues that was densely plotted and showed clues about the story’s climax from the start. Supreme was a rounder character. He had an actual personality. It’s funny that a lot of the jokes are that the expense of nineties comics and how its heroes are ill-defined and their powers are so vague they could almost do anything. I say it’s funny because that’s an accurate description of Superman in the fifties too. In every issue back then he had a new power, whatever was needed to make the story work. And as for personality, I’ve seen points in space with more dimensions than him. Up until the ‘60s superheroes didn’t have personalities: at best they had broad strokes: Superman was honest, never lied, respected all life, etc. That’s not personality, it’s just a list of traits. His existence was so vague one day he could be married to a mermaid, the other day he could be volunteering to the army; one story he had a brother in Krypton; the other story he was a single child; one story he spent his childhood in Krypton; the other he was sent as a baby to Earth. As crappy as the nineties were, at least there was internal coherence from issue to issue. If one thing happened in one issue, in the next its consequences would be explored.

Moore pays tribute to the Silver Age and all its madness and freedom, but he’s also a modern writer and he can’t avoid writing like a modern writer. So he writes things that would have been anathema to his beloved Mort Weisinger. Supreme has continuity; his relationship with Diana Dane is stable and evolves over time, unlike the dull Superman/Lois Lane relationship that went nowhere. Whereas each issue in the past had two or three short stories and the reset button was always being used, Moore’s Supreme has a continuity that spans at least the 23 issues he wrote. In the fifties, a two-issue story was unthinkable: at best they could get away with an issue devoted to a full story – that was their version of epic. Moore’s 12-part epic would have been unthinkable back then. These old stories weren’t densely plotted, no one cared too much what Superman would be doing twelve months from now. Most likely he’d be fighting alien flora that arrived on Earth from a comet or something like that. The care that Moore puts in his stories, the foreshadowing, the time paradoxes that only pay off many issues later, all that requires a lot of thinking.

So let’s not worship the Silver Age too much. As much as it was a gold mine for stories, ideas and characters, it also had its flaws. I find the Dark Age of comics terrible, but I don’t think a Neo-Silver Age is any better. Often it seems like we have to chose between these two alternatives: depressing crap and mindless fun. I really don’t think we need to go back to a time when comics were poorly written, when characters didn’t have depth or a stable back-story, when long-term plotting was unheard of. Supreme is a great series because it’s only a Silver Age story superficially. Remove all the gloss, and what you have is the same level of craft that went into creating a masterpiece like Watchmen. We don’t have to choose between grim-and-gritty nonsense and big, dumb, poorly-articulated ideas. Silver Age can be intimate, intelligent and complex. Supreme shows how to salvage the best from the Silver Age without sacrificing innovations introduced in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Posted by Miguel at 06:33

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Labels: Alan Moore, Silver Age, Supreme

6 comments:

• Prankster31 December 2011 09:35 It's Judy JORDAN, by the way, not Judy Barton. Unless they changed it in your edition? But you gotta have the Golden/Silver Age alliteration... I disagree that Superman didn't have a personality in the 60s; I think he had a very well-defined personality, which you've outlined both explicitly and implicitly. I agree with your points about his being written in an unsophisticated way, but that doesn't mean he didn't have a personality. Being noble and brave and the personification of Truth, Justice, and the American Way describes a personality, it's just that we tend to shy away from the idea of someone that good as being an impossible ideal, and therefore "boring". But as G. K. Chesterton put it, "White is also a colour." Unfortunate connotations of colour aside, I think it's a valid point, and that being a fundamentally and strongly decent person actually makes Superman a very interesting character; it's just that the situations he was put in in the Silver Age weren't particularly rife with conflict and drama, because the world he inhabited was just as placid and decent as Superman himself. Superman didn't change as the years went on, the world around him did. Reply

• Miguel2 January 2012 06:24 Prankster, hello. Oops, you're right; I've amended the posts. I agree with you to a point. I confess I tend to like my heroes, uh, I don't want to say darker, but not made just of sunshine and sugar. But Alan Moore also took pains to make Supreme a very moral and compassionate character and I think he's full of personality. For me the great difference is that he shows growth, whereas Superman was stuck in a never-changing world where he'd always fool Lois into thinking he's not Clark Kent and vice versa. For me one of the highlights of Supreme is when Ethan confesses to Diana he's Supreme. What continuity gave characters was memories, the ability to remember past things. I think the most effective moments in Supreme are when he's thinking about the past - his parents, Judy, Littlehaven, etc. In the static world of Superman, there was none of that human drama. It's like I say: Supreme is the perfect synthesis of what was so good about the Silver Age and what's so good about modern comics. Reply

• Prankster2 January 2012 09:48 Yep, and in that regard he should have been more of a blueprint for comics writers. I think too many of the people who try to use Moore as a model (which is an admirable goal) tend to pick up on one or two aspects of his work and take them to extremes, while missing the sense of balance he brings to his work. Marvelman and Watchmen are dark and gritty and "realistic", sure, but they still leave room for a sense of imagination and wonder. Just as Supreme is a frequently campy and sunny pastiche of the Silver Age, but it's still sophisticated, and possessed of a certain dark side. There's a happy medium you can strike, which so many writers don't seem to get (though admittedly it's far more likely these days to see them erring on the side of "too dark" than "too light"). The aspect of Moore's work that others have seized on that bothers me the most is his penchant for retconning and killing minor characters. Whenever Moore did this, he always did it in a way that *enabled interesting stories further down the line* (even if he wasn't going to be the one writing the stories). For instance, in the big Swamp Thing Crisis on Infinite Earths tie-in storyline, he killed off Zatara and Sargon the Sorceror--but it's easy to follow his storytelling logic: they were somewhat redundant and slightly dated characters, with dozens of more interesting magic-wielders running around the DC Universe, so he must have seen them as safe to bump off. Furthermore, killing Zatara set up an interesting turn in the relationship between Zatanna and John Constantine, so what was lost in killing the character was gained, at least potentially, in new story ideas. Even crippling Barbara Gordon gave us Oracle. These plot turns made the DC Universe more interesting, not less. But they were picked up on by lesser writers and paved the way for the non-stop slaughter of minor characters with no thought given to whether they might still have had some life in them, and retcons that stripped the comic world of its wonder (I remember reading that Howard Chaykin had done a revamp of the Challengers of the Unknown in the 80s that basically ripped off Marvelman, having them revealed as having been prisoners of virtual reality or some nonsense...) Moore got the blame for this, but only because people missed the point of what he was trying to do: infuse emotion and sophistication while keeping the fun and imaginativeness of superheroes. ...I may have drifted from my original point there, sorry. Reply

• Prankster2 January 2012 09:49 This comment has been removed by the author. Reply

• Prankster2 January 2012 18:59 And now, looking at some of your older posts, I see that you've said a lot of the same things I just did in, for instance, your "Reconstructionism and Revisionism" post. Clearly, great minds think alike. Reply

• Miguel6 January 2012 16:10 "...I may have drifted from my original point there, sorry." Don't worry; I've enjoyed reading your thoughts. Reply