I like Brian Clevenger who writes 8-Bit Theatre becasue he knows how to do a good review. I just thought I'd share this one with you guys.
Superman is dead. Doomsday didn't kill him, decades of DC editors and fanboys did.The good news is that though the character may be without life, Superman the icon--the archetype--lives more vibrantly than the character ever did.
I really like Alan Moore. He is a mad genius of the comics page. Maybe it's just me, but I always detect a hint of anger and exasperation in his texts. Like each script is desperately screaming, "No, you ridiculous apes, this is how you write a comic," in the hopes that someone else will pick up his torch so he can eventually quit.
He gets a lot of attention for helping to change the entire industry/artform with Watchmen. I don't mean to overlook its impact, but we hear enough about it so let's look elsewhere. I find his other works to be every bit as powerful and "good" as Watchmen, but their impacts on the industry have been muted. Watchmen hit everyone across the temple with a two by four. Moore's still swingin' that thing like a madman, but now he can't blindside us with it anymore 'cause we know he's armed and mentally unbalanced.
My favorite Moore trick is when he takes some awful go-nowhere piece of crap title and turns it into a masterpiece. Swamp Thing is a good example of this. More recently, and more interestingly to me anyway, he did the same thing with Rob Liefeld's painfully bad mid-'90s title Supreme.
I actually managed to pick up some Liefeld issues of Supreme really cheap (no surprise) a couple years ago. It's easy to curse and despise Liefeld and I'm not here to jump on the bashing bandwagon, but oh dear lord were those some awful comics. It was nothing but one pointless fight after another with little if any justification or resolution. There was dialogue, technically, but it had all the power of a phonebook reading. It essentially epitomized all that was wrong with superhero comics of that time period: mistaking violence for depth in the decade-long wake of Watchmen. It also managed to show what was wrong with Image at the time: forgetting that artists didn't get to be really good by writing all their lives.
But the other day I noticed Supreme: The Story of the Year at a bookstore. I didn't need to read the cover to know that this had to be the collection of Moore's work on the title. Non-Moore Supreme was so trash that no one would bother collecting it in a trade paperback.
I'll just snag Amazon's review which, itself, was snagged from Publisher's Weekly, to give the LD: "Supreme began life as an exceptionally violent Superman rip-off. Moore took over in 1996, jettisoning everything except Supreme's blond, muscular good looks and turning a copycat into an ingenious homage to the Superman archetype."
Brian's Short Review: Finished it, saw an ad for Supreme: The Return, also by Moore, and ordered it immediately. If you know anything about the history of comics, Moore's Supreme will be a delight. It's a satire and a loving homage all in one.
I found Supreme to be especially interesting because the entire title is heavily steeped in what Klock would call the Anxiety of Influence.
The anxiety of influence is a present author's worry and treatment of past authors' works. Superhero comics have an especially hard time with this because present authors have to worry about several decades of past authors' works which the reader is supposed to somehow reconcile as a given character's/universe's literal history. This is complicated even further by the fact recent obsessions with continuity that render the possibility of good storytelling severely hampered if at all possible.
I'm reminded of Ovid's Metamorphoses which strikes me as one of the earliest attempts to deal with continuity. The work has to contain a variety of Greek myths that exist within the same narrative space but it does so by encapsulating many of the stories. Most of the book is told in varying layers of a story (what is being read) within a story (a character is introduced and tells a tale) within a story (in that tale another character talks about a dream) etc. In this way, events that can't possibly co-exist with other events in the book are part of the same over all story.
Modern superhero comics and ancient myths then share more than the trite similarity of "powerful people doing amazing things." The ways in which these narratives are constructed is identical: hundreds of authors telling hundreds of distinct tales which change and become self-contradictory over years and years of re-telling and examination.
Leave it to DC and Marvel to create a thousand years worth of anxiety in a matter of decades.
Klock cites examples of how some modern comics authors have dealt with the anxiety of their influence. Busiek's Marvels and Astro City attempts to disarm the violence of post-Watchmen comics with nostalgia and hope of a firmly Silver Age mentality written with modern sensabilities. Ellis's Authority and Planetary appropriate DC's Golden and Silver Ages as well as the pulps that influenced them into the actual history of the world. As Klock points out, Moore does something similar with League of Extraordinary Gentleman--a series wherein 19th century British "pulp" characters are a Justice League--where one panel makes reference to 18th century pulp characters who were that century's JL.
All these works are so interested in or concerned with the past that they're doing little more than rehashing it. I'm not complaining, mind you. Hell, my comic is doing the same thing: take an established history and and make it new again. And Supreme, The Authority, and Planetary are three of my favorite books out there. But it's kind of annoying that their histories are so similar because they're all based on the same "original" history. Why should wholly new completely "modern" comics be so intimately tied to their influences?
Enter the nine issue run of Mr. Majestic by Joe Casey. Mr. Majestic is a lot like Supreme: he started as a boring Superman knock-off created by an Image-founding member (Jim Lee). Casey does more with Majestic in these nine issues than DC has done with Superman in sixty years. The only crime of the TPB linked above is that it does not include the last three issues which take some getting used to artistically but when you're done it's beautiful. On the bright side, it does contain an otherwise very hard to find story by Moore that puts Majestic at the end of time. The decision to not include the last three issues of the series is doubly perplexing since it sets the stage rather nicely for Moore's story which is included, but whatever.
Where Moore used a Superman stand-in to examine and satirize all of comics history, Casey uses a Superman stand-in to create something entirely new while giving us the sense of awe and wonder that has been lacking in superheroes almost since their inception.
I find Casey's solution to the anxiety of influence more compelling than other solutions. He acknowledges Majestic's roots, but he does not dwell or labor on them like Moore, Busiek, and Ellis. He realizes the debt Majestic owes to the past and repays it by creating a new sense of wonder for authors to ape fifty years from now.
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Reviews: Supreme & Majestic
hehe, cool review...but supes fans delight cuz next spring Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets) and Jim Lee are gonna do Superman, Greg Rucka on Adventures, and Chuck Austen on Action!!!!!!!!!!