As I mentioned before, I was reading J. Michael Straczynski’s Supreme Power and I was damn impressed. Last week, I finished the actual Supreme Power series (issues #1-18) and I moved on to the side stories after the very dramatic and skin devouring ending to the series. I purchased the trade paperbacks back when I went to Wizard World Chicago at some discount booth and I really am glad I bought them. Let me just say that the series ended up being way better than I thought I could have been and I loved Straczynski’s take on the possible craziness of the DC universe.

But enough of that, let’s talk about the greatness of what I read.

**spoilers after the break**

I started with Supreme Power: Hyperion. Given the atomic ending to Supreme Power and the very openendedness of said ending, I’m glad Straczynski decided to continue on a bit more with the Hyperion story to elaborate on the idea of more heroes being alive and still being a tad confusing in a way such that you were guessing what was going on up until. Of course, reading the story you can understand how things became what they were due to quantum jumping and crazy things like that… it’s ideas like that that can really make or break a story and I think in this case Straczynski did a good job at not killing the story at all. I really dug the idea of so many quantum possibilities surrounding Hyperion because when it comes down to it, page after page throughout Supreme Power you could have seen any number of things that Hyperion could have done based on the massive amounts of shit he had to take and the amount of shit he had to swim in and around every day. It was very well done.

On top of the main story, the cause of the plot was the small group of quite-possibly-DC-influenced characters who were hinted at in Supreme Power but were given some light in this series. Starting with Emil Burbank, he is a super genius who is cleverly written as a mock-evil Lex Luthor who isn’t necessarily bent on destroying Hyperion but still seems to have a subtle unexplainable grudge against him. He is the team leader who is introduced to Shape, the massive, severely idiotic and indestructable Blob look-alike team-mate, who is around as a monster (pun intended) power house–who is the size of a house (had to say it for fun). These two meet the unbelievably beautiful Arcanna who can manipulate quantum fields and is really looking for an answer as to why she has these strange powers of hers and is really hoping that somehow Hyperion can give her the answer she needs. Finally, there is Nuke. He is hellbent on making Hyperion pay for making him who he is: a nuclear-radiation-emitting death trap for anyone who comes near him. Oh, and he can control that nuclear-ness and make himself a walking bomb. He’s kind of awesome.

This rag-tag team is sent out to find Hyperion and everything goes amiss as Arcanna swaps realities and craziness ensues. It’s not comedic in any way and is really an amazing story to read, so I’ll let you go from there.

The next book I read was Supreme Power: Nighthawk. This story actually wasn’t written by J. Michael Straczynski but by Daniel Way but you don’t lose anything in this story at all. This story really has nothing to do with anything but Nighthawk and who he is. The story begins with some of the Batman-esque vigilante antics over–you guessed it–a racial issue. I don’t know about anyone else, but the racial stuff was a pretty good twist on a character based off of Batman, but for this story it would have made no sense to make it a big idea for the plot. But as the story goes, a catatonic serial killer named Steven Binst wakes up and decides to–you guess it again!–start killing again. Boy you’re good at this. What makes this story so good is the blatant rip-off from Batman as the character Steven Binst dresses up as a party clown and starts killing people like a mad man. Does that sound familiar at all? The ending of the story is simply perfect as the typical Joker-to-Batman monologue goes on about how the two need each other and all sorts of fun things in that area.

This story was probably my favorite of what I’ve read of the miniseries-off-shoots from Supreme Power, but I have yet to read Doctor Spectrum yet or Nighthawk vs. Hyperion so once I get a hold of those (Doctor Spectrum is on the way!) and get them read I’ll let you know what one I liked the best. Either way, these two TPBs are definitely worth the read if you’re into the Supreme Power stuff.