It should be no surprise that Warren “Transmetropolitan” Ellis is still pushing the boundaries of comics in ways that no other writer is. With the incredibly talented Tula Lotay providing that artwork, “Supreme: Blue Rose” seems to be getting more obtuse and complicated with each issue as it comments not only on the nature of superheroes and the stories they live, but life and the stories we live in.
Written by Warren Ellis
Illustrated by Tula LotayPeople are disappearing from the world. People who may not have belonged in the world at all. Secret protocols are being activated. Diana Dane is on a lost highway. Nothing is what it seems.
“I am just not even questioning these things any more.”
And I swear, in that moment, we were all Diana Dane.
Late last year, I took on what I thought was my most difficult challenge in reviewing comics: trying to review Georf Darrow’s “Shaolin Cowboy” #2, a comic book with no dialogue and every single page was a two-panel, double-page splash. Looking back, compared to this issue, that seemed like a piece of cake.
I’m not going to pretend like I know what’s going on in “Supreme: Blue Rose”. This is, after all, a review and not an annotations column, and I am nowhere near qualified to try and examine this book. What I do know, however, is that “Supreme: Blue Rose” is a beautiful work of Art.
In comics, it can become a little corny to throw around the word Art with a capital A thanks to the underlying stigma against comic books as “kids things” where beefcakes in spandex punch each other for twenty pages. This book eschews that notion completely in order to present a story in what seems to be the comic book equivalent of an arthouse movie to explore the notion of living life as a comic book character.
The overarching theme of this issue is at least pretty clear: what must it be like to live in a comic book universe during a timeline reboot? What happens if something goes wrong? This issue ditches Diana Dane on, as the solicit puts it, a “lost highway” (get it?) in order to follow Doc Rocket as he converses with Zayla Zarn. This isn’t so much a dialogue-heavy issue, even as the crux of the issue is built around a conversation between Rocket and Zarn that is dense, but something that really explores the fringes of Ellis’ examination of universal reboots. Ellis is no stranger to that field having written “newuniversal” after all, but with “Supreme: Blue Rose” he goes all in on the jargon.
I honestly can’t tell what is taken from Ellis’ interest in fringe and counter-culture science and technology and what is purely comic book science-fiction, and perhaps that is why all of it sounds so convincing. It takes the notion of a universal reboot and talks about it in such a way that it seems like a scientific fact outside of the comic. It is easily the densest part of the issue and may even take the most astute reader a couple of reads to even begin to decipher it – even Doc Rocket admits to having no idea what it all means – but it is nicely surrounded on both sides by sequences without much dialogue that shows off just how perfect an artist Tula Lotay is for this book.
It would be easy to mention that it is clear on the page that David Lynch’s style of filmmaking was a huge influence on Tula Lotay’s artwork here and leave it at that. However, that Lynchian feel creates a comic that is both unbelievably beautiful and completely unlike anything you have ever seen before. In keeping with Ellis’ themes of universe reboots and time resets going wrong, Lotay presents a world inside a comic book in which the boundaries of reality seem malleable and time itself seems shapeable.
In a sequence in which Doc Rocket seems to phase out of reality as a mean of super-speed (I think? It’s not made clear exactly what happens as the result not the action is what is important to the reader), Lotay plays with boundaries of the panels on the page. She creates a vortex on the page as reality itself seems to shift and bleed into the, well, bleed of the comic book page. It’s a small detail, something that has defined the aesthetic of the book since issue one, but in the context of a universe that is literally trying to put itself back together again it is a touch that shows that Lotay’s art is much more than just something pretty to look at.
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Even during the conversation between Rocket and Zarn that makes up the bulk of the issue, Lotay does not simply rest on her laurels to make a visually unexciting scene pretty. In the same way a film would cut to different shots over the dialogue to keep a scene interesting instead of just cutting back and forth between the two characters, so too does Lotay cut away to context-giving panels that bring the dream-like cinematic quality of her art to the fore. If there was ever a way to experience a David Lynch film as a comic, Lotay has cracked it and then some. In two pages, Lotay turns a scene of two people talking in a bar into a exploration throughout time, space and the universe by cutting away to flashbacks and layering the malleable reality in a way that seems to mimic a cinematic fade. It is a gorgeous example of how storytelling in comics can be more than just creating detail in the art; it can show the reader information that cannot be expressed through the dialogue.
It must be rather repetitive by now to say that “Supreme: Blue Rose” is unlike almost any other comic, but a special mention must go to the design of the book. The use of colours on the page brings a vibrant, comic book-y quality as what seem like crayon scribbles dance across the page and in and out of panels. The feeling of the malleability of reality returns as even the colours seem to fade and blend into each other. There is no stark detail in the colour, more that the colour brings life to the sharp detail in Lotay’s pen. It is dream-like and unreal and haunting in a way that I have never seen a comic be before.
“Supreme: Blue Rose” is an utterly fascinating comic, there is no two ways about it. In its four issues so far, it has become clear that not only is it nothing like previous incarnations of “Supreme”, but it is nothing like any other comic book ever published. What Warren Ellis and Tula Lotay have done here is take the idea of creator-owned fanfiction – using expys of well-known liscensed character (his name rhymes with MuperSan) to tell stories that comment on the state of said character, but could never be done using said character – and completely turning it on its head to tell a story that comments on the nature of comic books as a whole. All that wrapped around obtuse, exposition-less dialogue, dream-like artwork and an arthouse-evoking narrative, and you have a book that pushes every single boundary that exists in comics.
Finale Verdict: 9.0 – This book is beautiful, obtuse and there is honestly nothing else like it out there on the stands right now. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is a fascinating story wonderfully told.
