Book-A-Day 2010 # 258 (10/19) -- Supreme: The Story of the Year by Alan Moore and various artists

Superhero comics are never going to get over themselves: we should just accept that now. No matter what happens, they'll be exactly what they are: endlessly self-referential, stuck in an ever-tightening loop, obsessed with their own past and with the narcissistic re-representations of that past, and entirely concerned with the shallowest of power fantasies. And even comics' best writers -- even the ones who swear, again and again, that they're done with all of that -- keep coming back, like a junkie to the pure stuff.

Supreme: The Story of the Year was one of Alan Moore's periodic attempts to remake the entire Superman mythos the way he wanted it to be. This storyline came out in the mid-'90s, when he'd been screwed over by DC Comics two or three times fewer than the current total, but one still has to wonder at Moore's devotion to such a central symbol of the corporate comics world that he was in deep exile from at the time.

Supreme had a complicated publication history and a weird backstory that I won't get into in any depth -- he was created by Rob Liefeld, and the issues here (from 41 to 52a and b) spanned the end of Liefeld's studio at Image, his Maximum Press, and then Awesome Entertainment, all in a mere thirteen months -- but he was always a Superman manque (others might use less kind words). Moore's schtick always being continuity and deep connections, his Supreme begins with a version of the "infinite versions of the same character" idea that Moore had used in Captain Britain and then moved on to out-Silver Age the actual Silver Age.

Each issue has a complex mix of modern story -- in best Image mid-'90s clenched teeth and big hair style, by a rotating array of mostly forgettable artists, including Joe Bennett, Mark Pajarillo, and J. Morrigan -- and flashbacks, with the flashbacks (almost all by Rick Veitch and inked by Jim Mooney) clearly the center of gravity. Moore's version of Supreme emerges from the "Revision" -- a wink-wink metafictional explanation for the random massive changes that superhero universes are subject to -- to find that he's now Ethan Crane, penciller for Dazzle Comics's Omniman (which is just as much of a Superman rip-off as he is). That's yet another level of meta piled on top of a story that exists primarily to say "Remember the Silver Age? Wasn't it just so totally cool to be young and reading comics in the springtime of the world? And isn't it totally awesome that we're now '90s sophisticates, but can still enjoy that great old stuff?", and it raises the self-indulgence to painful levels.

So each issue of Supreme does three things: it inches forward Ethan/Supreme's knowledge of his newly reconstituted self, it presents a fake "classic" story in a tone wavering between undying devotion and mild joshing, and pats itself on the back in the "modern" pages about how far it's come, baby. (And that last is deeply ironic now, since the art is pure '90s excess.) The details of Supreme's past, of course, are the same in almost every single detail as the Mort Weisinger Superman, with names and costumes changed to protect the copyrights. If you've ever read old Superman comics, you'll be able to play along the game of spot-the-references, which is presumably most of the fun here.

Let's be honest: Supreme may have won Moore an Eisner as Best Writer, but that's entirely because the story is a sloppy tongue-kiss to superhero comics and their fans, a frankly embarrassing display of misplaced enthusiasm. The '90s part of the story might be silly and overwrought, but it's at least an authentic story of its own time, and not a pastiche version of earlier work. We already have tens of thousands of pages of real dumb old Superman stories; there's no reason to create new dumb old Superman stories.


Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index