I remember reading something somewhere recently that Supreme was one of the “ten best comics” according to whoever was writting it, so it got me thinking. I know very little about this guy, but from what I remember, he wasn’t a very interesting character.
His first appearance in Image comics, he seemed to be your basic Superman knock off (super human strength, speed, flight, invulnerability, heat vision, etc.). The only big differences I saw were that he was old, didn’t mind doing fun things like using his heat vision to fry villains to a cinder, or spin around like a top and cut thugs heads in half, and that his “invunerability” didn’t really extend much to blades (as demonstrated in issue 2, I believe, when some villain decided to play “Peek a boo” with his intestines).
Then I read that one shot “Supreme vs. Gladiator” in which they drew him up to be some super powered Christian Fundi. So much so, that upon landing on a planet where they apparently had a belief that a figure like him would show up, he got very offended and started destroying the people because they didn’t worship Jesus.
Next vision was of this picture painted by Alex Ross, I think, where it’s him kneeling next to a “Supreme Dog,” next to Supreme Girl, and with a pluthera of other Supreme’s flying around in the background.
What the hell happened? Who is he? Who was he? And is the book any good?
IIRC, he had a power sorta like Doomsday from the Superman books, in that once he was defeated/smacked around by a certain power he became immune to it.
As for it being good, I only bought the first dozen or so issues and thought it sucked. I hope everybody else liked it, though - it’d be nice to have comics that are worth more than cover price.
Here’s the upshot: he was a boring Superman knockoff who had a bunch of boring adventures that no-one cared about. Sales were, at best, so-so. There was also an ongoing thing about Loki, parallel worlds, alternate Supremes, etc. It was (apparently) crap. And worse, boring crap. It was like the Spider-Saga, but less coherent. (from what I’ve heard: I haven’t read the pre-Moore issues)
Meanwhile, IIRC, either John Byrne had just given an interview or Alan Moore read an old interview by John Byrne where Byrne defended his destruction of Superman by saying that modern audiences wouldn’t be interested in the 60 years of “baggage” like super-monkeys and bottle cities. No-one could make that palatable to a modern audience, said Byrne. That’s why he had to throw it all out.
Allegedly Moore took that as a challenge. Moore had been offered carte blanche to do whatever he needed to do to revitalize Supreme.
In Supreme 42 (or 41) Moore takes over. Supreme heads back to earth after whatever storyline was going on (involving Loki, parallel worlds, etc) only to find that he’s aware that things are changing around him. People are flickering back and forth between '40s versions, future-versions, present-versions, all-black versions, etc. Supreme is concerned that Loki is still active, but he’s met by several other versions of Supreme (Sistah Supreme (“Jiminy Christmas!, you bad mamma jammah!”), Golden-Age Supreme and Squeek, the Supremouse. They take him back to the Supremacy: a city built out of the ruins of demolished continuity. It seems that continuity is revised every few decades and when it is, all the old stuff ends up here: all the versions of Supreme used the bits and pieces of their continuity which ended up in limbo with them. (There’s all sorts of hysterical cracks about the earlier stories (“He looks like a '90s model: his powers are probably so poorly defined that they’re effectively limitless”). Anyway, Supreme’s continuity is going through a revision but things have settled down and he’s offered the choice of going back with a clean continuity or not. He chooses to (if he doesn’t, this new continuity may not have a Supreme) and Moore’s series takes over from there: the whole Loki/mind-games/parallel worlds/mutant clones/etc crap is gone. Supreme’s old origin? Gone. Loki? Gone. Now Supreme’s Arch-Enemy is Darius Dax, his origin is that he (and his dog and adopted sister) were exposed to Supremium and got super-powers and from there, Moore does a brilliant modern version of what Superman coulda been if a writer with skill and imagination had been given the pre-Crisis Superman without Byrne’s butchery.
There’s one collection of Moore’s Supreme stories, with a second and final one which wraps things up coming out.
