Images of Supreme - The Supreme Posters - #13, June 1994, Todd Nauck and Marlo Alquiza

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1121: Supreme #16, July 1994

Nope. I was right. Random superhero fight.

Yesterday's issue was an aberration, I think, a fluke in which all of a sudden there was growth and character development - Supreme was becoming a rounded individual. Maybe it's every two issues....?

The appearance of Stormwatch in today's issue reminds me of the idea of a recuperation of the old Image titles through the series they would one day become. Stormwatch is pretty basic for the first while, until Warren Ellis gets his dark hands all over it and it becomes some of the best superhero stuff out there. Seeing Hellstrike and Fuji and everyone here was a nice reminder to me of what they would eventually become. And of their grisly fate.

Though perhaps that's been retconned now?

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1028: Extreme Super Christmas Special #1, December 1994

What do I even say about something this ridiculous? Troll has to collect each of the groups mentioned in the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" before Circe, of mythic fame, turns every man on the planet into a pig. It's typically silly early Image, and early Extreme/Maximum/Awesome Studios stuff - but actually sort of works a little better than most of that stuff because it's refusing to take itself seriously at all. Interestingly, what happens is that you now have a tenor that fits the vehicle, so to speak. The art has always been slightly ridiculous, but the stories have tried to be super serious and gritty. This one isn't. It's the early Image equivalent of yesterday's Archie Christmas special.

And it works really nicely.

The only thing that bothers me these days when I read this old Image stuff, and specifically the Extreme Studios stuff, is thinking about it in terms of the future presented for most of these characters in the recent Prophet series. Knowing how things turn out for Troll in the future makes today's comic a little strange. But not in a bad way.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 253: Young Justice #1000000, November 1998

To celebrate my son's 17th birthday, I'm reading a comic today cover dated for the month of his birth.

I'd decided a few months ago to read through the DC One Million crossover, a huge cross-company story that DC did in the waning years of the 20th century. I think it is perhaps the best superhero crossover story I've read. It's got gravitas, it's got humour, it's got amazing superheroics, and scads of cool new characters who are both familiar and unfamiliar. Today I was up to Young Justice, the issue that rounds off the first week of the month-long series.

I haven't read a lot of Peter David's stuff, though I have substantial runs on Incredible Hulk and Aquaman that he wrote as a result of having owned my store. He's also done acclaimed runs on Supergirl and Young Justice, but for some reason his titles have never been ones that I've collided with. I'll have the opportunity, eventually, and this issue of YJ was a nice portent of things to come.

The three members of Young Justice Legion S, pictured above, tell legendary stories of their 20th century predecessors, muddling crisis with crisis, Zero Hour with Millenium Giants. I've been teaching a course on the ways that myths travel down the ages to us, so this was an amusing reminder that even the stories that I revere now, and that I think will last...thousands of years from now, they'll be mixed up tales of flying people and monumental, but silly-sounding, events. It makes me wonder, as I often do, what the stories that we tell from thousands of years ago actually started out like.

The comic is also cool because each of the flashback sequences is drawn by a different artist, so we even have art styles that hearken back, to a certain extent, to the crossovers the characters are butchering. All in all, a pretty satisfying comic.

I remember the day my son was born, I went over to a convenience store and bought a couple of comics to read while he and my wife were asleep at the birthing center. I can't remember what comics they were. At the time I was getting my comics at a small store in a  town called Listowel, about 45 minutes from where we lived, and the owner was kind enough to put one of each copy of the One Million crossover aside for me. It took me about 3 months to buy them all. Whenever I read it, I'm reminded of that time in my life, and of the remarkable change my wife and I underwent. I must have read these comics as he dozed, small and fragile, on my shoulder. A great story to be exposed to at such an early age.

Something else random tomorrow. I'm enjoying the things I've been pulling out. I will get back to my weekly posts on the Con, and The Flash soon. Work's been a bit killer lately. See you tomorrow.