What's amazing about the really hot writers in comics these days is that they grew up with superheroes, but they also just plain grew up. Moore's 'Supreme,' just like JMS' 'Hyperion' or Ellis collection of analogues in Planetary or Gaiman's side-long Superman references in Sandmand: Endless Nights show that they not only love these characters, but they see the iconic and mythic depth of them, and are excited to work with that depth, to play with it, to have fun and respect it all at once.
Moore's said that Watchmen and M*****man are both his 'last word' on superheroes, that after them, maybe people would get on with their lives, but he and many others have spent twenty years since them futzing around with the same characters and doing amazing things with them. Supreme and Supreme: The Return took Lefield's hackneyed rip-offs of the DC and Marvel universe, and revelled in their stolen nature because, just like Dr. Manhattan and Night Owl, their power lies in the fact that they are rip offs.
Morrison's Animal Man ends with the hero meeting the artist, his de facto deity, and discovering that that deity, Morrison himself, is very mundane. Not totally in control of the work, not always writing well, but still more power than Animal Man could possibly be.
Moore's version of the same gag is more playful, less angst-driven. He allows his characters, copies of DC's biggest heroes, to finally have nominal awareness of their own history and their own constructions as literary characters, while still retaining their own lives. In the process, he pokes fun at American history in the 20th century, at least as seen through comics, and even manages to turn himself into a super-villain, by proxy.
I honestly don't know what it all means yet, if anything, but I'm starting to find that other artists' commentaries on Superman, Batman, et al, commentaries that consist of parody, pastiche, and satire, are some of the most accurate of anything I've ever seen.
Posted by orion at September 11, 2005 6:59 PM | TrackBack