“Suprema The Has-Been Supreme”
Supreme #52A (September 1997)
Writer: Alan Moore
Art: Jim Mooney
Colors: Reuben Rude
review by Emsley "Ultra Fan" Wyatt
Suprema is the younger sister of Supreme, who obtained her powers, like Supreme, by exposure to a Supremium meteorite (shades of Colossal Boy, eh).
Our story opens with your typical Silver Age style splash panel, which shows Suprema arm-wrestling with a pointy eared baby while four other folks look on, snickering at her apparent weakness.
So how did this bizarre scene come about? Well, it starts with Suprema flying through space.
That ramshackle structure, perhaps made from old spacecraft parts, is the home to a family of, as they're referred to later in the story, “space hillbillies.” Suprema asks if she can bunk there overnight and offers to do some chores in exchange. The first chore they suggest from her is to fetch some water from the creek.
Suprema walks down to the creek, accompanied by buck-toothed Vulcan Jimmy Olsen. They see a spindly jagged shape sticking up from the snow. He tells her that it's just a frozen lightning bolt and then........
...she gets stuck inside her own frozen breath. He carries her back to his home and she says she's obviously not accustomed to their winters. Orc Ma Kettle just snorts and says: “Winter? HUH, Girl, this is mid-summer!” Well, the next morning she sets Suprema to building a rock wall. But there's a problem. The rocks erode so fast.............
….she's only able to lay two rows of rock. They return to the home where she can't even lift baby Lucifer's snow globe.
So by now she's getting pretty PO'd, telling them that where she comes from she's a mighty heroine. So they end up having her arm-wrestle the baby and the best she can manage is a draw.
So she starts to leave and they call her back revealing themselves to be.........
telling her that she's just passed her initiation into the League of Infinity. The members shown here are (from left to right) Future Girl, Witch Wench, Kid Supreme (Supreme when he was a boy), and Aladdin. They tell her that she's just passed her initiation into the League of Infinity.
All of the tasks that she tried to perform were impossible and the amazing thing was that she did as well as she did. The incredible cold she experienced trying to fetch the water came from the frozen ends of time. The rocks of the wall she tried to build were subjected to accelerated time by Zayla's chrono-fields. As for the snow globe.....
So, yes, she picked up the entire freaking universe. Alladin, with his genie, seems to be an analog to JSA member Johnny Thunder, with his magic thunderbolt. And regarding her arm-wrestling duel with Baby Lucifer, well,
She fought the totality of human evil to a standstill! And the story comes to a close, with the League inviting her to visit them in their Time Tower.
Love that line: “See you later...or maybe sooner.” The league doesn't shy away from temporal paradoxes.
And this is the second League of Infinity story. (By the way there is, of course, no “Actual Comics”. That's just a sly reference to Supergirl's run in Action Comics.) You knew, of course, that the League would be showing up because this is, after all, The Legion of Super-Bloggers, so we wouldn't be talking about this story without it being tied to the Legion via the homage route.
I liked this story. Like the previous League of Infinity entry it seemed like a relic of another time, with the art style and the story-line seeming to be taken straight from the Silver Age.
There are a couple more League of Infinity stories that I will be covering. One is book-length and serious, but the other is a short, lighter tale like this one. I'll be tackling them out of order so I can finish up with the serious story. There is one that I won't be reviewing because basically it's the culmination of a multi-issue arc and the League only figures in the final chapter. But there are a couple of panels from that story that I wanted to share.
Yes, it's the “flip side” of that scene where the League was first introduced. I thought that was a neat touch.
Holy Silver Age, Batman! Cute story, thanks!
ReplyDelete