Yes, it’s more of my Indie Comics Month! This new guide for all Patrons of CK is for one of Image Comics’ most-acclaimed titles of the 90, and here’s the shocker: it came from the mind of Rob Liefeld! Of course, the acclaim came much later, when Alan Moore arrived to transform Liefeld’s character. Read all about it in my Guide to Supreme!
No one was more surprised than me to learn that Rob Liefeld’s steroidal Superman riff turned into an Eisner Award winning comic only a year after I gave up my 90s comics addiction!
That fact piqued my curiosity, so as I put together my complete collection of WildStorm comics back in 2016 I also turned my attention to grabbing a complete run of Supreme. It was pricier than I expected for the exact reason it won the Eisner: Alan Moore.
By that point, Alan Moore was well-known for nearly two decades of his signature storytelling inventions and superhero deconstructions. However, what he did on Supreme was more of a superhero reconstruction. Moore took all of the classic Superman DNA crossed with extremely-90s violence that had been baked into five years of Supreme and evolved it into something that felt like a more optimistic revisitation of his MiracleMan.
As with many Image Comics, the success story had an unexpected detour into disaster. After changing publishers from Extreme Studios to Awesome Entertainment, Liefeld’s company dissolved just as Moore was working on the final two issues of his run. That left his story incomplete for over a decade. Then, in 2012, Image publisher Eric Stephenson pulled Moore’s script for the first of those final issues from the archives and handed it to Erik Larsen, who illustrated it and then completed the story in a brief run of his own.
Larsen gave the character of Supreme some long-awaited closure, which lead to a further reinvention by Warren Ellis in his grounded Supreme Blue Rose in 2015.
Want instant access to this Guide to Supreme as well to my guides to all of the other Image Comics launch titles from 1992 in my Crushing Comics Guide to Indie & Licensed Comics? Become a Patron of CK for as little as $1 a month or $10.20 a year to gain access to this exclusive guide and over 70 other guides months before the general public gains access!
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