Supreme: Blue Rose
What the hell did I just read?
The only thing I’ve enjoyed about Rob Liefeld’s comics career is his willingness to let other creators like Alan Moore and Brandon Graham play around with the characters he’s created over the years. Now Warren Ellis, with artist Tula Lotay, joins their ranks with this esoteric take on “Supreme,” Liefeld’s take on “Superman” with the serial numbers filed off. Reporter Diana Dane is broke and desperate for a job, so she’s more than willing to accept the offer from mogul Darius Dax to investigate the plane crash in the town of Littlehaven from a few months back. Only it wasn’t a plane crash. It was something from outside reality crashing into this one and wreaking havoc with its latest revision. All Diana knows, from the weird dreams she’s been having where a young man in a wheelchair explains life, the universe, and everything to her, is that in order to solve this mystery she needs to find the man at the heart of it all: Ethan Crane.
Because I’ve read Alan Moore’s “Supreme” comics — and they’re quite good, allowing him to cleverly riff on “Superman” without having to deal with any interference from DC — I can tell you that the reason Ethan Crane is so important is because he’s actually Supreme. In fact, without some kind of familiarity with the key characters of that title I imagine most readers will feel utterly lost in Ellis’ twisty narrative. Me? I just felt like I was being led around by the nose for most of the seven issues of this story. Even though Diana’s investigation is meant to provide a convenient entry point for the story, the writer has his characters expositing on so many weird tangents and gives Lotay a lot of surrealist imagery to put on the page that most of this just feels confusing. It looks quite nice, courtesy of Lotay’s stencil-esque style, even though I didn’t care much for the random scrawlings over each page. Was it meant to suggest the unreality of the comic’s reality? Who knows.
It does come together in the end, as a kind of meta-joke about the nature of reboots in comics and what happens when one of them goes wrong. The problem is that it feels half-baked. As if Ellis had this idea and a lot of things he wanted to do with the characters, but didn’t think things through enough. Frankly, I would’ve liked to have seen things get even weirder. One plot thread involves a character moving certain cast members to the year 2800 when the timeline stabilized. What was life like for them there? We never find out. I can’t fault Ellis for trying to do something different with these characters and the “Supreme” concept, but I certainly hope this isn’t an indication of what we can expect from his next collaboration with Lotay, “Heartless,” which is due out next year.