Squadron Supreme by Mark Gruenwald Omnibus

#HC-B

Alex Ross Book Market Cover

Release:	Nov 03, 2010
Cover:	Jan 2011

Creators

Writer	Mark Gruenwald
Cover Painter	Alex Ross
Penciller	Paul Neary, Bob Hall
Inker	Keith Williams, Dennis Janke
Colorist	Christie Scheele, Mark Philips
Letterer	Rick Parker, Diana Albers
Editor	Ralph Macchio, Mike Carlin
Editor in Chief	Joe Quesada

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We are the world’s best hope.

The other day a Bluesky user posted an old house ad from Marvel.

The next day was the birthday of the late Mark Gruenwald, beloved writer, artist, and editor – and inspiration for the Time Variance Authority in general and the character of Moebius M. Moebius in particular – who wrote the comic in that house ad.

Indeed, it’s generally considered – with good reason – his magnum opus.

So those events struck me as a sign that I should write an Unbagging about what is an often overlooked but significant piece of comic book history. Before Watchmen or The Authority, there was Squadron Supreme, a twelve-issue maxi-series that served as a bit of a deconstruction of the superhero and an examination of what it might be like if a team of super-powered beings decided to do everything in their power to make the world a better place.

The Squadron Supreme had been around for a while by the time their maxi-series rolled out in 1985, but I was only passingly familiar with the team, mostly thanks to their entries in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. The main things I knew about them were that they were based on an alternate Earth rather than the Earth 616 – if it was called that at the time, I didn’t yet know it – that was the “main” Marvel Universe, they were very obvious analogs to the Justice League of America, and there was an evil version of the team called the Squadron Sinister (that part will be important later).

Though he spent his career at Marvel, in many ways his heart belonged to their Distinguished Competition, and Squadron Supreme was the Justice League story he always wanted to write but never got the chance to, which leads to it being one of the most DC-like books I’ve ever seen from Marvel, though it still retains that particular Marvel flavor.

I’ve often talked about how inconsistent my access to comics was as a kid. I’ve also talked about how sometimes, for reasons that I can’t explain, there also times when I didn’t buy some comics even when I could have.

The latter proved to be the case with Squadron Supreme. I picked up several issues but deliberately passed on many of them. Why? No idea. I liked it! I was hooked with the first issue. I did pick a couple more after that and then snagged the last few issues of it. But others I just flipped through and put back on the shelf.

So it is that what I’m looking at today is a 25th anniversary omnibus edition that collects not only the original twelve issues – plus a crossover issue of Captain America – but also the follow-up graphic novel Squadron Supreme: The Death of a Universe. I will talk about that, too, but the main focus is going to be on the maxi-series.

The story begins at rather a low point as the Squadron’s satellite headquarters is falling out of orbit and it’s all that Hyperion – the Superman analog – can do to guide it to a safe splashdown in the ocean.

Things aren’t so great on Earth, either. It seems that a powerful being known as the Overmind had taken over the United States government and then taken control of the Squadron and used them to declare war on the rest of the world. Only Hyperion was able to escape the Overmind’s grasp, and he was able to bring aid from another world in the form of the non-team known as the Defenders.

That’s where I had a bit more familiarity, as the Overmind – or at least his body without his original personality – ended up becoming a member of the Defenders after his defeat, and that was a comic I did read semi-regularly.

Indeed, one of the members of the Squadron was an alternate version of a member of the Defenders, Kyle Richmond AKA Nighthawk. The Squadron’s Nighthawk, however, was very different from the one I knew, and was much more driven and competent, as befits his standing as a stand-in for Batman.

The Squadron’s Kyle had retired from heroics and gone into politics and was actually the President of the United States when the Overmind arrived.

In any case, though the Overmind was defeated, the Squadron’s reputation has been ruined, and the rest of the world is in terrible shape, with multiple conflicts in every nation, and very little in the way of functioning government.

As the team considers what’s next for the Squadron and for the world, Power Princess (their Wonder Woman) offers a suggestion. Power Princess, whose real name is Zarda, comes from a place called Utopia Isle, an isolated society whose culture is far in advance of the rest of the world, its inhabitants being the beneficiaries of genetic experimentation performed in the distant past by the alien race known as the Kree.

Decades ago, the people of Utopia Isle departed for the stars, leaving Zarda behind as their sole emissary. Throughout that time, she tried to convince the rest of the world that utopia was something that could be achieved, but to no avail. But now, with the world at its lowest point, the time might be right to make a more forceful case.

Hyperion, whose human parents had raised him to use his power for good, but not to go too far in using them, thinks that Zarda has a point and that he should reconsider the values he’s lived by. There is so much more that the Squadron could do for the world, going beyond merely rebuilding what was and instead building something new, using their gifts to their fullest potential to solve all of the world’s problems.

They can end war, end poverty, end pollution, end inequality, end sickness, and maybe even end death itself.

Everyone is jazzed by this idea, except Nighthawk, who is one of the few members of the team without any superhuman abilities. Others share his misgivings, so it’s put to a vote – which in itself Nighthawk finds troubling, given that it’s a small cabal of the powerful voting to determine the fate of the world – and ultimately the ayes have it.

Though, like Nighthawk, Amphibian (guess which Leaguer he is) voted against it, he agrees to go along with the majority’s wishes.

Nighthawk, however, opts to peace out.

We then get glimpses into the personal lives of all of the members of the Squadron, and we see Kyle bust out an old costume before getting a visit from Hyperion who tries, in vain, to close the gap that has formed between the two friends.

Kyle, however, has other plans, going down into a secret vault and carving a bullet out of a piece of kryptonite argonite, the one thing that can kill Hyperion.

The next day, Kyle stands before the American people and resigns as President before handing the microphone to Hyperion, who is there with the rest of the Squadron to announce their ambitious plan for the world.

As Hyperion speaks, Kyle tries to force himself to pull the trigger and end this before it can begin but finds himself unable to kill his best friend.

Hyperion states that if they fail to achieve their agenda within one year, the Squadron will voluntarily relinquish the authority they have been given.

He closes by stating that they will no longer hide their faces from the world, even as Kyle hides his intentions.

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And that’s how it begins: with the best of intentions.

I wonder where the road paved with those leads?

Over the course of the next twelve issues (counting the Cap crossover) we find out, as we see the Squadron doing things like building a new Earth-based headquarters that serves as the hub for research and development and for all of the services they’ll provide the world, rounding up all weapons, providing people with safety in the form of personal force fields, and making their most controversial move: developing a behavior modification machine.

The B-Mod, as they call the device, leads to the next big fracture in the team. The Golden Archer and Lady Lark have been an item for quite some time, and the Archer thinks it’s time to take the next step. Lady Lark, however, is finding herself falling out of love with him and becoming more interested in their teammate Blue Eagle.

When the Archer pops the question, she admits that she simply doesn’t feel that way about him, and he doesn’t take it well.

In fact, he takes it about as far from well as he possibly can. After getting the lowdown on how it works from its genius inventor, the diminutive Squadroner known as Tom Thumb, the Archer drugs Lady Lark while everyone is asleep and puts her in the B-Mod machine, reprogramming her mind to make her love him completely and desperately.

In time, the truth comes out, and the Archer is expelled. For her part, Lady Lark refuses to believe that her feelings aren’t real and chooses to resign in her anger over the Archer’s expulsion.

But before that happens, the B-Mod is used on the members of the supervillains in the Institute of Evil, and several of the now-reformed members are inducted into the Squadron.

The whole debacle just confirms Amphibian’s initial misgivings and leads him to quit as well, but not until after he destroys the only working B-Mod device (though he knows Tom can easily build another).

Nighthawk, meanwhile, has travelled to Earth 616 in search of allies to help him with his plan to take down the Squadron, and ends up finding some refugees from his own Earth who decide to join with him as he forms an uneasy alliance with Hyperion’s arch-enemy Master Menace, a sort of pastiche of Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom.

Speaking of Master Menace, and the aforementioned Squadron Sinister, the diabolical genius manages to dredge up Hyperion’s evil doppelganger while on an extradimensional fishing expedition, and then traps the real Hyperion in the same limbo he’d pulled his double from, then performs the old switcheroo, sending the evil Hyperion to infiltrate the Squadron.

That’s not all the evil Hyperion infiltrates, as he soon becomes sweet on Zarda, and secretly kills her husband – Zarda doesn’t age, but the regular human she’d married decades before did, and evil Hyperion causes him to have a fatal heart attack – and then makes his move.

While it is sudden, Zarda gives in to his advances and moves on quickly – after all, her husband had been frail for quite some time, and she’d known that their time together would be brief by her standards – and love blossoms.

This leads evil Hyperion to turn on Master Menace, who is forced to retreat to the same limbo he banished the real Hyperion to, and there the two are able to work together to get back to their own dimension.

Real Hyperion is, quite understandably, pissed, and he wastes no time laying into the imposter. The two have the ultimate staring contest, bringing their atomic vision to bear against each other.

Ultimately, the real Hyperion wins that contest and begins to beat the evil Hyperion with his bare hands until finally being pulled away by Dr. Spectrum.

However, it’s too late for the evil Hyperion, who was not actually a real person but was an artificial being created from unliving matter, a form he returns to as he melts away in Zarda’s arms, admitting to his crime, but still professing his love for her.

The real Hyperion doesn’t come out of it unscathed; the extreme use of his atomic vision renders him blind, forcing him to have to wear goggles that provide him with an approximation of vision.

But it’s not all bad news. Zarda realizes that the feelings she had for the evil Hyperion were actually the feelings she had for the real Hyperion, and so, once again, love blossoms.

Love was also blossoming – though one of them didn’t know it – between Tom Thumb and Ape X, a cybernetically-enhanced lady gorilla who had been part of the Institute of Evil before being reprogrammed in the B-Mod machine. Since that time, she’d worked very closely with Tom and began to fall for him.

Unfortunately, Tom has been keeping a secret: he has cancer. In the time he has remaining, even with the help of Ape X, he’s unable to devise a cure, and a note at the end of issue nine tells us he quietly passed away while working in his lab.

(I neglected to mention that the maxi-series plays out in real time, so a month passes in-story between issues.)

While all this has been happening, Nighthawk has managed to get a couple of his allies to join the Squadron as double agents, one of whom manages to steal the designs for the B-Mod machine. Ape X sees this happen, but her programming prevents her from taking any negative action against a member of the Squadron, and the resulting conflict between doing what she feels she must do and what her programming will not allow her to causes her to have a breakdown.

With the B-Mod designs, Master Menace is able to build a machine that can undo the programming, and Nighthawk and his team – which includes the former Golden Archer, who joined up with Nighthawk as the Black Archer to seek some kind of redemption – begin deprogramming the former members of the Institute of Evil.

However, Blue Eagle stumbles upon them, and while he is quickly defeated, there is the question of what to do with him. Nighthawk is forced to compromise his principles by allowing Master Menace to use the B-Mod on Blue Eagle.

However, he stipulates that it can only be used to make him forget what he saw, not to alter his loyalty.

That’s a discussion that Nighthawk and Master Menace have in the final issue as they wrap up deprogramming the last members of the Institute of Evil. Master Menace suggests just brainwashing the Squadron into giving up their Utopia Project, but Nighthawk won’t have it.

But that brings their alliance to an end, and Master Menace takes his B-Mod machine and returns to his lab, leaving the stage set for the final confrontation between Nighthawk and his Redeemers and the Squadron Supreme.

This happens as the Squadron returns to their HQ after addressing the world to report on their progress.

They’ve ended war. They’ve ended poverty. They’ve ended hunger. They haven’t ended disease, but they’ve made progress, so with all that said, they are not relinquishing their authority.

In the face-off, Nighthawk tries reason once again, but to no avail. Then he reveals the traitors in the Squadron’s midst and the final battle begins.

Several of the members of the Institute still feel conflicted even after being deprogrammed, as the surgical precision of the modification didn’t change everything about them, just their more antisocial tendencies, so in many ways they remained who they really were, meaning that the friendships – and more -that they formed with the Squadron were real and those feelings are still there.

Such is the case with the romance between the former villainess Foxfire and Dr. Spectrum. She decides to be true to her man the best way she knows how by using her power to cause decay to destroy Nighthawk’s heart.

That does bring the battle to an end, and the death of his friend causes Hyperion to finally see the rot at the core of the utopia he’d been trying to build.

While there are deaths on both sides, and the death of a dream, the story ends with a birth, as Squadroner Arcanna, who’d been secretly pregnant for most of the maxi-series, gives birth to a healthy baby boy.

Said baby boy ends up being the salvation of the universe in the follow-up Death of a Universe, the graphic novel included in the omnibus.

The story picks up shortly after the end of the maxi-series at a time when what’s left of the Squadron is dismantling what they’d built and handing power back to the people. A mysterious entity – who comes from the Earth 616 universe in a story I’ve never read – is set to destroy the universe.

Hyperion and company must team up with Master Menace to defeat it, but ultimately, it’s Arcanna’s baby – who is destined to be the most powerful magic user on Earth – who saves the day by swapping places with the entity, restoring the entity to the man he had been before the accident made him into a universe destroying void, and then departing the universe so as to avoid destroying it.

It’s…not as good as the maxi-series, but it was nice to check in on the Squadron’s world and see how things were going.

Also, I like this bit with the Whizzer playing tennis with himself, because getting bonked on the noggin by his own return seems like exactly the sort of thing that would happen to me if I were in a similar situation.

There’s obviously a lot I left out in my recap of the two stories, much of it focused on the personal lives of the members of the Squadron, as well as a lot of the details about how their Utopia Project unfolds and the public’s reaction to it, which, while mostly positive, isn’t without its detractors.

And of course that’s the meat of the story: the moral and philosophical questions raised by the Utopia Project and the means by which the Squadron attempts to achieve their noble end.

A benevolent dictatorship is, after all, still a dictatorship, and we see every day just how dangerous it is when powerful people engage in overreach – and that’s just with regular, mortals, not superhuman beings with godlike abilities.

At various points in the story, we find characters at a crossroads, not sure what their next move should be, or where lines can be drawn, and wondering what it means when they – inevitably – cross them.

We also see many of the characters undergoing a lot of personal growth, as the womanizing, devil-may-care Dr. Spectrum grapples with a guilty conscience after a battle with a grief-stricken Nuke, the youngest member of the Squadron, results in Nuke’s death. It’s a sobering event that follows on the heels of him playing a prank on Zarda that causes her to have a “wardrobe malfunction” on TV.

We see it with his best pal, Golden Archer, who almost immediately regrets using the B-Mod on Lady Lark, which ultimately leads to the two friends coming into conflict that results int he Archer’s death at the hands of Blue Eagle in the final battle after joining up with Nighthawk in the hopes of one day reversing what he’d done to her.

What’s also interesting to me is the way some of the obviously over the top means the Squadron takes to build their utopia pay off in smaller, subtler ways, such as the feelings that members of the Institute of Evil develop after being put through B-Mod that stick around even after deprogramming.

It drives home the idea that they had the right destination but were taking the wrong path and leads you to wonder if they could have achieved similar results without violating people’s minds.

Could Foxfire have fallen for Dr. Spectrum on her own? Would the childlike Shape have been won over through the simple power of friendship? If someone had simply believed in him, or challenged him to be better, would Quagmire – not the giggity one – have had it in him to make his heroic sacrifice? Could the love Ape X developed for Tom Thumb while working side-by-side just naturally develop?

The biggest questions the story raises surround perfection, if it’s possible for imperfect people to achieve it and what are we willing to sacrifice in order to achieve it.

These are very complex questions for a Code-approved superhero comic in 1985 to grapple with, and while some of the limits imposed on it as such prevent it from achieving the same heights as Watchmen, it’s still a remarkable work and one that is fondly remembered – by those of us who remember it – for a reason.

As with Watchmen, the story benefits from using characters that aren’t part of the main books in the company’s line, freeing Gruenwald to change them and kill them as he sees fit and as the story requires while still having a kind of resonance given how well they map to more familiar characters.

An aside – beyond the obvious similarities between the Squadron and the League, one of the other things that feels DC-like is that many of the cities on the Squadron’s world have different names than cities in the real world.

The art from Bob Hall in the main story is…fine. I have no complaints, especially for a mid-eighties book. He does excel in his depiction of the battle between Hyperions, but there’s nothing particularly remarkable about any of the art. It works in service of the story and has a good storytelling flow. It does what it needs to and never gets in the way and that is praise enough, I think.

The same is true of Paul Neary in Death of a Universe, though I think it suffers here from the reproduction process and in being somewhat reduced from its original size, though I can’t say for certain as I’ve never seen the original graphic novel. Whatever the case, here, it looks a bit muddy at times, though that’s more in the colors than in the linework.

While later works that had fewer constraints would explore the same things in greater detail and to greater fanfare, and even other comics of the time have overshadowed it and had a greater impact – this came out at roughly the mid-point of DC’s twelve-issue Crisis on Infinite Earths – the Squadron Supreme maxi-series has a depth and complexity that rewards revisiting and deserves its place of honor as a precursor of what was to come.

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