Image United: Supreme #66 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Super – nah; it’s just spoilers.

Alan Moore’s run on Supreme, back when it was part of Rob Liefeld’s Awesome Comics imprint in the mid-90s, was a classic of the superhero genre in an era that brought us The Spider-Man Clone Saga, the death of Superman, and nearly every other comic book that wasn’t Starman, Hitman, Preacher or Channel Zero (my pull list was a lot shorter and cheaper between, say, 1995 and 2000). It was a simple concept: examine the character of Superman using a pastiche character, using versions of Superman’s Silver and Bronze age history as canon, while placing that character in the modern world of the 1990s, all about fifteen or so years before All-Star Superman was a glimmer in Grant Morrison’s baggie of peyote.

What with Liefeld resurrecting the comics under his Awesome imprint under the Image proper label, bringing back Supreme was a gimme, especially considering Alan Moore’s script for issue 63 had been written, but never produced, what with Awesome folding back in 2000. Moore’s final issue dropped a couple of months back, with Image partner Erik Larsen taking over writing and art in the subsequent issue. And Larsen is no Alan Moore. No one is… but in Supreme #66, he gets the broad tones and feelings right while updating Supreme for the 2010s. The question is: is that enough?

The answer is: kinda.