Supreme Power: Hyperion Vs. Redstone.

[proteus_lives]

Greetings True Believers! I was reminded of my love of the Marvel MAX series "Supreme Power" today and I wanted to post the highlights of the first Hyperion/Redstone fight. SP was one of my all-time favorite series and cemented me as a JMS fan. This post could also be titled, "The result of superhumans fighting a populated area." Enjoy!







For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Squadron Supreme was a riff/homage of the Justice League created by Marvel in 1971. There have been a lot of great stories about them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squadron_Supreme

Supreme Power was a 2003 MAX re-boot of the concept. It was very smart, very dark and cool.

In this post we see Hyperion (Superman analog) apporached by Nighthawk and Blur (Batman and Flash analogs) about a super-powered serial killer. (Redstone, the first super-villain) The cool thing about SP was that there were very few superhumans and they were all connected by Hyperion. Redstone was a convict who escaped from a government faculty after being inject with a retro-virus made from Hyperion's DNA.

Nighthawk tracks Redstone to his killing ground. He is in radio contact with Hyperion and the Blur.



This provides an example of human unprepared for superhuman combat.






I like that page. I think Redstone's example of superhuman strength is awesome.

Hyperion is on his way.



Hyperion's former government handlers are discussing the situation. They find out that He's after Redstone and they're afraid of Hyperion learning the secret behind Redstone's origin. One of them has their other superhuman operative (Joe Ledger/Green Lantern analog) waiting for a signal. Because H and R are so powerful, they are monitoring earthquake monitors.



Nighthawk has the right idea.



The battle continues underground.



To the moon Alice! Plus, Nighthawk continues to have great reactions.



To note, all the battlers are n00bs at superhuman combat. Ledger is the only other superhuman that Hyperion has fought at this point.

Hyperion zips back down the hole but Redstone has tunneled out to the freeway.

Now we see how normal folk fare in the superhuman crossfire.





Obviously inspired by Miracleman but still effective.



Nighthawk and Blur are trying to catch up with Nighthawk's secret weapon. Redstone smashes into a mall and Hyperion follows.



He's throwing people. That is truly disturbing.



They punch each other a bit more and the Blur zips in with a goo that Nighthawk to suffocate Redstone. He manages to cover his nose and mouth with it. Unlike Hyperion he still needs to breath. They are debating on what to do with him when Ledger arrives to take Redstone back into government custody.

Supreme Power is worth picking up.

Comments

[jlroberson]

Yeah, I just caught up on it, and it might just be that I like Gary Frank, but it does a lot of things with this angle correctly that others(Millar) often get wrong, while STILL giving us plenty of crowd-pleasing ultra-violence.

[cmdr_zoom]

That's because, I believe, JMS comes at it from the angle of "this is terrible" rather than "isn't this kewl hur hur hur."

[jlbarnett]

to me it isn't "crowd pleasing" if you've got consequences like this.

[jlroberson]

Like what, the villain getting his ass kicked?

Or is it just that innocent people die? That isn't a problem for me in a fictional story unless it makes no story sense. This does.

As far as the violence itself...for someone who read MIRACLEMAN: OLYMPUS at 18, the bar is set pretty high and this didn't even come within breathing distance. I don't feel this violence is gratuitous either.

What I was saying was that you can still have an INTELLIGENT story with all the grimdark you like. The point of this story was not the grimdark, but it does go with the territory. But I do not feel that wallowing in it is going on, I do not feel the creators think this is "badass," and one cannot forget that innocent people are being killed. I saw less regard for individual deaths in BLACKEST NIGHT: SUPERMAN--or indeed, anything James Robinson writes now.

[lamashtar]

Wierdly, I loathed the mass slaughter scenes in Miracleman, but I didn't mind this as much. This reminds me of Frank Miller's story of Nuke using military ordinance indiscriminately in a packed, firetrap neighborhood.

[jlroberson]

Which is a beautifully drawn, very dramatic and well-paced sequence by David Mazzuchelli, that makes you realize the real destruction in such scenes. I'm not sure of your point. If your story focuses on real-world consequences of having superpowered beings, then it would be very likely things like this would happen. And look at any number of Lee-Kirby(or thereafter) stories. We take it for granted Marvel New York has a 9/11 happen every day. Most of it drawn there by just a few superheroes' presence. Mass destruction in crowded, populated places is a tradition of many decades in comics.

But did you ever get a sense that it was a crowded place where just one building falling could kill lots of people? No. Not really. Certainly not in the old days. (I hate to think about the air quality of MU NY, come to think of it)

If you're going to have these kind of fights, then it is inevitable innocents get hurt. In my case, it's an argument against superheroes and I'm not too uncool with that. (Leaving aside of course we're talking about a concept, not something that exists; ultimately WATCHMEN and everything else proves they can't take the weight of real-world, that it only makes them look small and absurd) Compare this to a similar sort of small-town mass destruction in BLACKEST NIGHT: SUPERMAN. Where most of Smallville is killed, it seems, in the first issue, but do you get any sense of that? No. It's just a sensational weightless shock and then we're off to Ma in the cornfield.

[lamashtar]

I said 'wierdly'. I don't know what it is about the Kid Miracleman slaughter that makes me want to kick Moore.

[jlroberson]

Only thing I can think of is that it caused a large number of horrid imitators since.

And really, this isn't nearly on that scale.

[bruinsfan]

I recall getting that feeling once, in an old Byrne-drawn Avengers story where Count Nefaria dropped an entire skyscraper on the team and it was actually shown to collapse all over the place. I think bystanders had already been evacuated by that point in the engagement, but the aftermath had Iron Man doing a search-and-rescue and hoping that one or two of his teammates had managed to survive being crushed.

[endless_aegis]

Supreme Power was great.

I think what I like is that the badass normal's only contribution is coming up with the goo to stop him. Batman always manages to mix it up with these guys, which--I mean, great, Batman's a badass and all, but it also means that having superpowers is pointless since it tends to give the impression that the guy without them is /always/ better. That just irks me sometimes.

[proteus_lives]

I liked that too.

I realized years ago while character like Batman are awesome and they can defeat superhumans with "prep-time!"

But what can they do against a walking nuclear bomb on the fly? Not much.

[aulayan]

It's a pity it went to Marvel Knights, and JMS went, IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ARC "Oh. I can't write this anymore."

[wizardru]

As I understand it, when it went to Marvel Knights, they changed what was allowed in the book from the MAX line and it sounds like JMS didn't want to continue writing the book under the new restrictions.

Which is disappointing, but there it is.

[jlroberson]

You can trace the moment Marvel decided to suck it dry and kill it by when they went to the Ultimate universe. Over the course of those issues they went from being more of less the characters we knew to...I don't really know WHAT the fuck it disintegrates into about halfway through, where at some point the dialogue is nothing but characters echoing what other characters say and...UGH. It's like watching their brains get sucked out.

But being in the Ultimate universe will do that. Suddenly you're not allowed to be any smarter than Michael Bay. MUCH more dangerous than the Zombie universe.

[lonewolf23k]

Of course, that "predators don't hunt predators" bit is pure bullcrap. To a predator, meat is meat. They don't give a damn about "natural order". The reason leopards don't go after adult cheetahs is because a) there are more gazelles, and b) the gazelles don't have claws and sharp teeth. But that doesn't mean a leopard won't prey on a cheetah cub if it finds one.

Or heck, just look at the frequent wars between hyenas and lions.

[jlroberson]

Predators are, in general, cowardly when they can be and you'll live longer and reproduce if your main diet is something more numerous and less able to fight than you, so predators who pursue that strategy tend to prosper as long as the game lasts.

When predators attack predators, it's not really thought of as predation: it's thought of as war.

[lultam]

I love how Redstone breaks Nighthawks ribs. JMS did a fantastic job with all of Vol 1, easily one of my favourite comic runs. Shame Vol 2 sucked...

[proteus_lives]

That was great. Simple, chilling and effective.

Yeah, it sucked as soon as it moved to Knights. Sigh...it was glorious in it's MAX days though.

[lamashtar]

Anybody know which DC villain Redstone is an analog of?

[jlroberson]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redstone_%28comics%29
"The first Redstone is a superhero who is a native to the alternate universe of the original Squadron Supreme. Unlike most of the characters created for the original Squadron Supreme series, Redstone, a later creation, has no DC Comics counterpart."

[bruinsfan]

Perhaps no intentional counterpart on the part of the writer, but I wouldn't say that a giant Native American strongman is a concept that had never seen the light of day in a DC property.

[geoffsebesta]

wait, how can you possibly hear a sonic boom before Hyperion gets there? Isn't that the whole point of sonic booms?

[bariman]

Maybe it's the sonic boom of him slowing down?