#rick veitch
Shared on Twitter, sharing here too: a compilation I put together of nearly 100 sketches from the abandoned Alan Moore/Rick Veitch project Superversethat the latter posted to Facebook.
Background for those who didn’t hear anything about it: Alan Moore has a collection of short stories titled Illuminationsreleasing later this year, with one chapter apparently constituting a novella in itself called What We Can Know About Thunderman, which “charts the surreal and Kafkaesque history of the comics industry over the last seventy-five years through several sometimes-naive and sometimes-maniacal people rising and falling on its career ladders…Moore reveals the dark, beating heart of the superhero business”.
This called attention to a sketch Rick Veitch had posted last year without much notice of a character named Thunderman, perhaps a notion carried over into Illuminations, from the scrapped project titled Superverse. It turns out he spoke quite a bit about it: it was a project he described as covering the whole of superheroic history, “like ’League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ but with long underwear guys,” with Thunderman and his counterpart Thundergirl meant to be siblings sent from their presumably-doomed world to parallel Earths and unaware of one another’s existence.
It was of all things meant to tie into Moore’s film The Show, with in-universe comics appearing in it (probably somehow via the film’s ‘superhero’ supporting character The Flash Avenger) which Veitch and Moore would have actually made, each essentially promoting the other. This was conceived of roughly 8-9 years before Veitch originally decided to start rounding up his assorted character designs and posting them to Facebook, and he alluded to part of why it fell through being due to some outside funding being cut off. There were no formal scripts or plot outlines, these sketches were purely spawned from conversations between Moore and Veitch and apparently there were ideas for a couple hundred more characters before the plug was pulled.
A loss for the medium for sure, as evidenced by the remarkable flair and cleverness on display in the linked album above, but keep in mind two things to ease your soul:
* Moore would have been forced to give even more interviews about superheroes than he already does, and the man’s miserable enough having to talk about them once or twice a year.
* Given Moore’s notorious apparent fondness for Superfolks, the imagery of the two evoking the Silver Age Superman/Supergirl with all the memetic weirdness their relationship occasionally brought about, and that it’s specifically noted they didn’t know they were siblings, Thundergirl and Thunderman absolutely would have fucked, so we dodged that bullet.
