Supreme: Blue Rose #2

[Rob Banner]

[Sorry guys, I promise I won't do it again!]

...with the twist (in Alan Moore's issues) that Supreme's world has been overwritten again and again, each time with a new version of Supreme, but the characters experience their lives without breaks, as if it's been this way all along.

See, what you're saying answers my questions of weather or not whoever took it from Larsen was going to fix what he did or run with it. And the answer is run with it looks like.


There's one reality. A reality that repeatedly undergoes a revision.
Each time a "Revision of Reality" occurs, it's not just that the Supreme is replaced with a new, revised one. It's all reality instantly ceasing to be and getting replaced with a new version.

If you are a person living in a given reality you are going about your day, the Revision happens [reality briefly "flickers", freeze frame, between the current and incoming versions, stopping on the new one] and you wink out of existence none the wiser for ever having existed in the first place.

If you are a person living in the new reality that just popped into existence and replaced that last one, life's going on as usual. You've always existed. Your world and surrounding universe having billions of years of past history, as well as the usual infinite number of potential past / future timelines contained in any other universe, despite only having existing for a brief two-three week period between revisions.

Take that and insert;
If you're Supreme [+ attendant supporting cast / central locales] when the Revision happens, you end up in the Supremacy instead of blinking out of existence.
Up till then you just existed as another of the billions of inhabitants of earth who believed that their world had an entire past history, that you had lived through a childhood and a lifetime - despite only existing for a brief two-three week period between revisions.

Repeat process and you get Supreme after Supreme, along with their relevant pals and places, showing up in The Supremacy.
All very different from each other because each is from an entirely different version of reality. Versions of reality that no longer exist.

Of course outside there always exists a current version of reality, containing a Supreme, forever unaware that they have only existed for a short time so far, and that at any moment they'll all cease to exist [sans Supreme].

Warren Ellis appears to be borrowing the idea that Supreme's world rewrites itself (or that someone is rewriting it), but instead of placing the emphasis on meta-fiction and metaphor he's interested in how that would actually work and what it would look like to the people living through the change.

That's the rub. Nobody "lives through the change".
The only people left after reality winks out of existence are Supreme and the Lois Lane / Jimmy Olsen, ect. analogues who go to The Supremacy with him.
It's not really a change at all. The Diana Dane who lives in "Reality A" has no inkling of the Diana living in "Reality B". Or of Reality B and the revisions until she arrives at The Supremacy. It's not as if the Ethans, Dianas, and Darius's [not to mention the rest of reality] actually transform from one version into the next; they are completely separate individuals, each new iteration just instantly, physically replacing the last.
The realities are unaware of each other. There's no possible way for someone to know that there's anything other; to them reality is reality and that's the way it is and always has been.
When they instantly cease to exist there's no time to think about it. It's instant. The new people, world, and reality blissfully unaware that they're brand new. As Supreme was when he first arrived at the Supremacy; He had memories stretching back decades but had only existed for a few weeks.

Supreme's world rewrites itself.
It's actually not meta-fiction and metaphor, there's an in-story device and reason, an origin for it.
An original reality existed, in which a set of events occurred, the effect of which set all reality to periodically undergo these revisions.
It had to do with the discovery of the "element" Supremium, a mysterious uber-powerful Kryptonite analogue that is responsible for the creation of the Supreme of this original reality and is the thing in common among the various versions of reality that have come and gone since. Reality revising waves, proceeded by reality altering ripples, radiate from it / the initial event of contact. It's intimate connection with Supreme facilitates his escape from non-existence and deposits him in The Supremacy each Revision.


The reality we call the Extreme Universe, from which the Supreme who was turned into what's referred to as the "Moore Supreme" came from, for some reason had no Supremium. Thus here, instead of a revision happening with none [characters OR reader] the wiser as usually occurs, we [characters and readers] were made aware of the existence of the revisions and The Supremacy solely due to the fact that the Supremium-less Supreme failed to automatically show up in The Supremacy when his reality underwent revision.
The first time such a thing had ever happened.

It's another example of the double-edged genius at work here; we hadn't seen or had mention of Supremium thus far in the Supreme book not only for the real-world reason's of Moore hadn't come along and introduced the concept, but also because it didn't exist in-universe.
It SHOULD have, it "usually" does.
And it's absence caused a malfunction in the revision of the Extreme Universe into the Awesome Universe that replaced it.

Ideally, per above, Revision occurs and reality, in this case the Extreme Universe, ceases to exist [we actually see this happening in-story]. Supreme + related whisked off to The Supremacy with the new reality, in this case the Awesome Universe, complete with it's own Supreme + related, history, and memories, instantly replacing it.
This is how it's always happened since the first reality. All the Supreme's of the Supremacy's realities have disappeared out from under them as they suddenly found themselves in The Supremacy confronted with alternate versions of themselves.

It's not how it happened the time we saw. In fact the very reason we got to see and know any of this is that that's not the way things went this time.
The journey from the Extreme Universe, through The Supremacy, and on into the next, Awesome Universe that we undertook with Supreme was a singular, unique happening. It's the reason we see the Extreme Supreme's memories and history / powers slowly supplanted by the Awesome Supremes'; instead of finding himself suddenly in the Supremacy, his reality erased and replaced by the Awesome Universe and it's Supreme, the Extreme Supreme physically travelled to the Supreme-less Awesome Universe and became, was revised into, it's Supreme.

[Cryptid]

That's the rub. Nobody "lives through the change".
The only people left after reality winks out of existence are Supreme and the Lois Lane / Jimmy Olsen, ect. analogues who go to The Supremacy with him.
It's not really a change at all. The Diana Dane who lives in "Reality A" has no inkling of the Diana living in "Reality B". Or of Reality B and the revisions until she arrives at The Supremacy. It's not as if the Ethans, Dianas, and Darius's [not to mention the rest of reality] actually transform from one version into the next; they are completely separate individuals, each new iteration just instantly, physically replacing the last.
The realities are unaware of each other. There's no possible way for someone to know that there's anything other; to them reality is reality and that's the way it is and always has been.

What you're describing is true for Alan Moore's Supreme, and much more thorough than what I wrote earlier in the thread, but there are signs that Warren Ellis is changing the rules a little bit. The second issue suggests that the revision process involves forms of time-travel and causality-violation that leave no memory of the former timeline but show traces of the tampering in the form of unexplained phenomena. It's close to what Ellis did in newuniversal, Aetheric Mechanics or the ending of Planetary, where reality-manipulation (whether from a higher dimension or the future) leaves behind paradoxical evidence.

I never read Erik Larsen's run, so I can't tell you whether Ellis is acknowledging anything that's going on there. My general sense is that this is a re-imagining instead of a direct continuation, but the iterative premise of Supreme makes it all too easy for future writers and user-end continuity purists to resolve the inconsistencies between runs.

Supreme's world rewrites itself. It's actually not meta-fiction and metaphor, there's an in-story device and reason, an origin for it.
An original reality existed, in which a set of events occurred, the effect of which set all reality to periodically undergo these revisions.
It had to do with the discovery of the "element" Supremium, a mysterious uber-powerful Kryptonite analogue that is responsible for the creation of the Supreme of this original reality and is the thing in common among the various versions of reality that have come and gone since. Reality revising waves, proceeded by reality altering ripples, radiate from it / the initial event of contact. It's intimate connection with Supreme facilitates his escape from non-existence and deposits him in The Supremacy each Revision.

The presence of an in-story explanation does not keep Moore's Supreme from making sense as a meta-fiction, in that the plot device of Supremium gives an in-story explanation for a fictional world that behaves like comic-book publishing. Supremium makes the consequences of things like editorial whims and rotating creative teams into a property of the fictional universe in a way that draws attention to comic conventions by hard-wiring them into the plot. It's not a meta-fiction in the same way as parts of Sandman or The Invisibles, where the characters actively experience themselves as figments in a story, but there's still a great deal of irony and self-reference going on. And Warren Ellis seems less interested in commenting on the genre in that way and more interested in tinkering with the pseudoscientific logistics of a reality that overwrites itself. No one is wrong here exactly, but I am using "metafiction" to describe a story that comments on its own conventions, perhaps obliquely, while you are using it to describe a story that founds its world-building on codes of storytelling without offering another explanation, which is a more concrete definition but leaves out all sorts of material that engages in fairly overt genre parody and self-reference.

[Rob Banner]

I never read Erik Larsen's run, so I can't tell you whether Ellis is acknowledging anything that's going on there. My general sense is that this is a re-imagining instead of a direct continuation, but the iterative premise of Supreme makes it all too easy for future writers and user-end continuity purists to resolve the inconsistencies between runs.

What Larsen's run did was mistake the unique method the Extreme Supreme underwent revision into the Awesome Supreme - one version's personality and memories slowly being supplanted by the next ones' - for the way the revisions commonly occur in general.

The presence of an in-story explanation does not keep Moore's Supreme from making sense as a meta-fiction, in that the plot device of Supremium gives an in-story explanation for a fictional world that behaves like comic-book publishing. Supremium makes the consequences of things like editorial whims and rotating creative teams into a property of the fictional universe in a way that draws attention to comic conventions by hard-wiring them into the plot. It's not a meta-fiction in the same way as parts of Sandman or The Invisibles, where the characters actively experience themselves as figments in a story, but there's still a great deal of irony and self-reference going on. And Warren Ellis seems less interested in commenting on the genre in that way and more interested in tinkering with the pseudoscientific logistics of a reality that overwrites itself. No one is wrong here exactly, but I am using "metafiction" to describe a story that comments on its own conventions, perhaps obliquely, while you are using it to describe a story that founds its world-building on codes of storytelling without offering another explanation, which is a more concrete definition but leaves out all sorts of material that engages in fairly overt genre parody and self-reference.

I'm with 'ya on all this. I see all that and agree that it's an integral part of what gives that stuff it's charm and raises it above the average.
Was merely trying to illustrate that, while all that stuff is present, the book doesn't require "slapstick" to convey it; there's no relationship or direct communication between characters and reader, no real "reader involvement" with the actual contents of the story. The character's aren't ever aware that they are characters in a book subject to the whims of a writer [well, except for that ONE time...] because they aren't.
I just feel that when discussing the nuts and bolts story mechanics of something like this the meta-physics get in the way, lead straight to the misinterpretations that resulted in Larsen's run. That it's all merely a Superman "take". A take and commentary on how when a creative team revises up the Superman mythos how do the characters feel about it? When it's much more than that, neat and clever as that sounds by itself.
That stuff only really works ON you, AS you read the story anyway.

[Cryptid]

I'm with 'ya on all this. I see all that and agree that it's an integral part of what gives that stuff it's charm and raises it above the average. Was merely trying to illustrate that, while all that stuff is present, the book doesn't require "slapstick" to convey it; there's no relationship or direct communication between characters and reader, no real "reader involvement" with the actual contents of the story. The character's aren't ever aware that they are characters in a book subject to the whims of a writer [well, except for that ONE time...] because they aren't.
I just feel that when discussing the nuts and bolts story mechanics of something like this the meta-physics get in the way, lead straight to the misinterpretations that resulted in Larsen's run. That it's all merely a Superman "take". A take and commentary on how when a creative team revises up the Superman mythos how do the characters feel about it? When it's much more than that, neat and clever as that sounds by itself.

I see what you mean. And you're right that Alan Moore's work on titles like Supreme and Wildcats (and even that one issue on Spawn) only looks like a send-up at a first glance. He parodies the super-hero genre, of course, but his method is to revamp the tired old tropes that have distanced readers from the core appeal of characters like Superman. It's a way of intercepting the ironic superiority of readers instead of indulging it.

[Geralt of Rivia]

Anyone know how long Ellis plans to stay on this book? His usual 6 issues maybe?

[Rob Banner]

Six seem to be solicited.

[gregesis]

Seems to be 7 issues. Tula Lotay answered the question on her Twitter account here: https://twitter.com/tulalotay/status/512319422489698305

[Deniz Camp]

That's unsurprising, and disappointing.

[Flash Gordon]

Damn I was really hoping for a long run. Blah.

[wwise03]

I won't even understand this book until issue 7 comes out...only then will it get from the category of "reading just because of the art" to "reading because I like the story."

I just called to cancel this book off my list. I'm just not interested in minis. Sorry Tula your art is amazing...work with a more dedicated comic book writer for your next series and I will be all over it

[ysemaj]

Warren Ellis does seem to have some serious commitment issues with his comics. Not that disappointed about Supreme being 7 issues because I don't really understand the story anyway and really just purchase it for the amazing art. Would like to see Trees have a long run though instead of 7/8 because there is so much potential....

Also, WHERE IS ISSUE 10 of 'FELL' ELLIS?!?!?

[Maxpower00044]

Warren Ellis does seem to have some serious commitment issues with his comics. Not that disappointed about Supreme being 7 issues because I don't really understand the story anyway and really just purchase it for the amazing art. Would like to see Trees have a long run though instead of 7/8 because there is so much potential....

Also, WHERE IS ISSUE 10 of 'FELL' ELLIS?!?!?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who hasn't gotten a clue what's going on. Art is gorgeous though. In sure it will make more sense when I read all 7 issues, but for now, I'm always left sayin "what?" when it's over.

[ysemaj]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who hasn't gotten a clue what's going on. Art is gorgeous though. In sure it will make more sense when I read all 7 issues, but for now, I'm always left sayin "what?" when it's over.

I think he's just over complicating the script quite a lot. Haven't read any of the other Supreme series so maybe if I did I would have a much stronger grasp on the story...

[Rob Banner]

I think he's just over complicating the script quite a lot. Haven't read any of the other Supreme series so maybe if I did I would have a much stronger grasp on the story...

Nope.
Not at all.

[Deniz Camp]

I for one am still LOVING this. It's in contention for my favorite thing being published right now, and had it come out any other week it probably would have been the best issue of that week full stop (Multiversity was particularly good this week, but Supreme Blue Rose 2 did the impossible and beat it last month).

The revelations are coming subtle but fast here, from the nature of the bar and the appearances of Enigma and Storybook, to the metafictional elements asserting themselves more strongly, to the overall plan...and the prose, like the art, is just gorgeous, lush, evocative.