Warren Ellis is challenging the reader with Supreme: Blue Rose - how long will you stay with it? Have you abandoned it already? Can you handle this level of weirdness and what’s your limit? If you’ve been following this series, you’ll know it’s bonkers - it’s probably the most bonkers superhero comic of the year - and #4 only takes things further!
Here are some words and phrases that appear in the script: “the substrate of local spacetime, the p-brane… it’s rewritable”, “instantiation”, “eventual destabilisation of spacetime”, “spaciotemporal impact point”. Recognise any of those words? Understand any? Granted, I plucked them out of context but even in context I’ve re-read those pages and I still don’t get what it’s supposed to mean. At this point though, I’m with Diana Dane, our heroine, who says “I am just not even questioning these things any more”.
From what I gather, Diana and someone called Doc Rocket go to Omegapolis. The red Supreme symbol appears several times. In a club called Always, Doc Rocket and the red-haired lady talk and she says all those big words I mentioned. We see some blue roses, we learn a bit about Supreme, and the issue closes out with 8 pages of seemingly unconnected imagery that might have something to do with the Doctor Who-esque TV show, Professor Night, or it might be Diane Dane hallucinating after looking through the window of a diner.
I can understand small pieces of this comic - time is in flux, or something, which explains why everything in this issue, or the entire series for that matter, is so chaotic. And there’s a reference to Supreme as a manifestation of that chaos, or something. I still don’t hate this comic though, for all its difficulty - actually, I kind of like it because it’s so strange!
Tula Lotay’s art continues to be gorgeous. Doc Rocket’s fiery transportation from the woods to Omegapolis was really cool, and the 8 page montage at the end was brilliant. Pretty much every review I’ve written of this series is the same: confusing script, great art. But there we go - that’s how it is!
Four issues in and I’m still not sure where up and down are. Maybe Ellis will tie everything together (somehow) by the end but it might also be an elaborate joke on the reader - “You tried to intellectualise my bollocks? BWAHAHAHAHA - I was blackout drunk the whole time I wrote this crap, you wanker!” is what I’m sorta hoping will be the postscript to the final issue. Either way, I’m hanging on until the end and, if you’ve made it this far as well, you’re probably doing the same, baffling words and all!
Come on, Warren, I almost understood part of this issue - bring the nonsense full on, let’s really go crazy!
Supreme: Blue Rose #4
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