Supreme: Blue Rose #1

[arbre_rieur]

"I think that last Superman movie felt this, a bit, but couldn’t quite get to it — a Lois Lane story is always more interesting than a Superman story, because mystery, investigation and revelation are more powerful than binary conflict." -- Warren Ellis

The issue starts out with a weird dream sequence:







Then Diana wakes up:

Comments

[mishalak]

Intriguing. More than the usual Supreme story... Though the random blue lines bother me just a scosh.

[alicemacher]

I wonder whether those blue lines will turn out to be some sort of "playing with the fourth wall" motif. Much as Moore's run on the title did that sort of thing (not with blue lines, mind, but in other ways).

[grumman]

Agreed on both points. The story looks interesting, the art looks like Image has an unrestrained toddler on the staff.

[doctor_spanky]

This made me laugh pretty hard

I like the idea that every Image comic has to go through their artistic director, who's just some 4 year old that scribbles on everything

[grumman]

Either that or the artist has a whole box of #1s and first appearances, and knows that if he can convince people they're /supposed/ to be covered in crayon, he'll be rich.

[silverhammerman]

Those blue lines are pretty distracting, they make the otherwise gorgeous art kind of hard to parse visually. I haven't had a chance to read the physical copy of this yet, but my suspicion is that they'll be far less disorienting in print.

[silverhammerman]

I'm not sure I agree with Ellis' comment up top, and that might make me unsophisticated, but in a world where Superman exists I'm always much more interested to know what he's doing that what the people around him are doing, he is after all the centre of his narrative universe. I suppose a Lois Lane story might be more interesting or nuanced, but to me a Superman, on average, is more engaging. I have little interest in knowing about the people around someone extraordinary when I could simply know about the extraordinary person.

This does look interesting, don't get me wrong, and I appreciate Ellis' decision to go in a completely different direction that Alan Moore's Silver Age reconstruction/homage, and apparently focus on the cool/strange universal revision concept, but after a certain point it might be hard not to feel like the story is burying the lead.

[drtechnobabel]

I agree with Ellis about Lois Lane stories being more interesting, but not for the reasons he does. A lot of Lois stories in the past involve tons of Superdickery, and if there's one thing I love more than stories about Superman fighting aliens and being a role model for us all, it's stories where Superman is a condescending dick to his friends.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

If those were your friends, wouldn't you be at least tempted to be a condescending dick to them, too?

[drtechnobabel]

True. I like the alternative explanation, too: If you were a nigh-immortal superbeing with so many powers and skills that nothing even came close to being a challenge for you, you'd get bored pretty quick. So why not use your free time to come up with elaborate schemes solely to mess with people? It's better for everyone that you entertain yourself doing that than going insane with boredom and conquering the world just to prove you can, or straight up killing everyone after their incessant whining gets on your nerves one too many times.

[sailorlibra]

As a huge Lois Lane fan, I obviously wish there were more Lois Lane stories, but I don't think that the typical Lois Lane is necessarily better than the typical Superman story. (I also think that the idea that a Superman story consists just of binary conflict is an oversimplification.) Moreover, I really resent feeling like I have to choose between a LL story and a SM story. I like both types on their own, but I think they're particularly good when they're combined into one story. I do think that sometimes the investigative reporter aspects of the Superman mythos are neglected, however, and I would like to see them get more focus.

Anyway, this comic looks interesting, though I agree with the other commentators about the art.

[katefan]

Yeah, those blue lines feel like the artist trying to be all, I dunno, cutting edge and original, and it just comes across as making the art look like a mess. It works in the dream sequence where reality is supposed to look surreal, but in the real world it doesn't fit.

...

Unless this is some visual cue that the main character hasn't really woken up?

[icon_uk]

I'm viewing the blue lines as being the comic book equivalent of lens-flare or a primsatic lens, to stress that things aren't quite normal (the effect of super-reality)

[halloweenjack]

Both the art and the writing come off very much as Ellis writing his version of an 80s Vertigo story. You can decide whether that's a good thing or not.

[bruinsfan]

I quite like the look of the art. The squiggles are probably meant to go hand in hand with the blue rose motif, to indicate that something rare and unusual is going on. (Possibly having to do with Diana's own perceptions of reality, given that she mentions no longer taking her meds?)

I think I find this more intriguing than anything Ellis has written since before the end of Planetary.