Broken Frontier

As Hyperion, The Blur and Nighthawk team up to hunt a serial killer, the problems and questions—such as who’s the predator and who’s the prey—get bigger and murkier than any of them can imagine.

After a few months hiatus, Supreme Power #13 returns with several members of (what may or may not be called) The Squadron coming together to solve a mystery. Nighthawk and Hyperion form an uneasy alliance pursuing a serial killer who is murdering hookers, most of them women of color. Two government agents search Mark Milton’s (Hyperion) apartment, one of them much more aware than the other of the scale and meaning of his sudden change of heart. Leads on the identity and location of the murderer come together as Hyperion gets information from a police lieutenant, the Blur interviews a group of hookers, Nighthawk shakes down a pimp, and Doctor Spectrum learns of the murderer’s connections to the same government program from which he and Hyperion originated. However, as their various investigations begin to converge, they may be too late to save another victim from death at the hands of the super-powered psychopath.

Technically, this issue continues the narrative strategy J. Michael Straczynski has employed throughout the series—character development driving plot development, and plots itself developing incrementally. To this extent, it is Straczynski’s intimate knowledge of what makes his main players tick that makes Supreme Power #13 a gem of theme and characterization. The exchange between Nighthawk and Hyperion perfectly crystallizes the conflict between the two, as well as the place of superhumans in a world in which they may be as much a threat as a salvation. Similarly, the exchange between the G-men tossing Milton’s apartment not only hints that Hyperion is more unstable and manipulated than even he understands, but also suggests that Power Princess’s speech a few issues ago might not have been as deranged as it seemed.

These details point to the depth, dimension and richness of Supreme Power’s characters, and that Straczynski is up to something completely different from what’s found in just about any other superhuman comic other than Sleeper. He’s navigating the space between the superhero adventure story that’s been a staple of the genre and the soap opera story that’s been its main alternative and is headed to someplace that looks like real drama, the sort one finds on network or cable television. It’s a particularly bold move, given how closely Hyperion, Nighthawk, The Blur, Doctor Spectrum, Power Princess and The Amphibian resemble principal members of the JLA. Readers might come to the title with JLA-type expectations, only to have them totally subverted. Instead, they’ll find Straczynski re-imagining what a superhero comic is and depicting heroes as they might be in a very real world that may or may not need them.

In fact, it’s not yet even clear that the cast of Supreme Power are even heroes at all. They may be anything but, and it’s this that makes the lack of the standard superhero plot a breath of fresh air. As in Straczynski’s Rising Stars, the lack of overt villains, the narrative focusing instead on the antagonists within the protagonists, makes the stage much larger, more believable, and more meaningful.

Artistically, while the issue-ending cliffhanger is totally telegraphed by the cover, overall the script could not have found better expression than in the first class work of the artistic team, their images striking all the right notes of realism and depth. Gary Frank’s pencils are sure, confident and clean, every line meaning serious business. John Sibal’s work is a masterful example of how inks can take pencils to the next level, his shading and sense of pitch injecting the images with life and dimension. Finally, Chris Sotomayor’s colors play a muted and sober role as subtle, non-verbal clues to the nature of the moral structure of the world of Supreme Power.

If you’re not reading Supreme Power, then you’re not reading the best comics series The House of Ideas currently has to offer.

-Dexter K. Flowers