Quarter Bin #26 "Alan Moore's Supreme"

No Image Comics character underwent a greater creative revision than Rob Liefeld’s Supreme, and that was all thanks to Alan Moore, who came onto the series with #41 and refashioned it as a Superman pastiche, which ran until #56, was rebooted for six more issues, and then unambiguously refashioned as Tom Strong when Moore launched his own America’s Best Comics line.

Without getting into the whole thing, and maybe leaving out the kind of interpretation found in the above paragraph, I’ll just jump into the issues I selected from the Escape Velocity back issues bins…

SUPREME #50 (Awesome)
From July 1997:
Moore’s run with the character now stretched at this point to ten issues, and this was actually the writer’s first pairing with Chris Sprouse (the duo would most famously collaborate on Tom Strong). The issue heavily leans on Moore’s interpretation of Supreme as a surrogate for Superman, and spends its time revisiting the storytelling style of the 1950s. For many readers at the time, these Supreme stories were an entirely unexpected gift from a creator who’d famously vowed to stop working for mainstream publishers the previous decade, and as such seemingly sworn off superhero comics.

SUPREME #55 (Awesome)
From December 1997:
In case you were wondering if the tone of Moore’s Supreme stories ever deviated, this issue might possibly elucidate the matter. It features what the cover promises is “the most controversial story you’ll read all year,” mostly because it posits an alternate timeline in which the South won the Civil War, and so everything in the modern day, until corrected, reflects a KKK dream come true. And actually, it’s not really heavy on nostalgia this time as a more innocent style of storytelling. This is not a comic Marvel or DC would have published.

SUPREME: THE RETURN #1 (Awesome)
From May 1999:
The most amusing element of this comic is the way Moore approaches the Clintons, still ensconced in the White House, when one of Supreme’s enemies tries to take over and finds out how domineering the First Lady could be. This was when everyone still assumed she had an easy path to her own presidency (and now we know). It’s not so much that Moore’s version was bad, because from these issues it certainly appears enjoyable, so much that Supreme as a unique character is utterly erased by Moore’s own motives to continue writing a character he denied himself a decade earlier. He is one individual who gives “ornery” new meaning. Just imagine if he didn’t find it so hard to play with others…