Welcome
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Having gathered quite a bit of information about Moore's Supreme and Awesome runs, I decided to create a home for the forgotten Awesome. Over the course of a year, I put it all together here.
Each week I did a main "Weekly Reading" post that was a read-through of that issue. I followed that up with a couple of other posts about topics from that Weekly Reading or whatever else I came up with to talk about. You'll find the lost Youngbloods in the Youngblood section and the fan-edit of the last Supreme in After Awesome.
Below is the archive of posts broken up by book. Thanks for checking the site out!
Book 1: Supreme: The Story of the Year
Book 1: Judgment Day
Book 3: Supreme: The Return
Book 4: Youngblood
Book 5: Glory
Book 6: After Awesome
Book 7: 1963
Book 8: Night Raven
Book 9: A Small Killing
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Monday, January 29, 2018
Weekly Reading: Youngblood #4
Never published by Awesome Entertainment
The covers:
Title: Young Guns
(Later issues of Youngblood were never in print. The only way to read them can be found through scripts or fan-drawn issues found online. Obvious pseudo-lawyer language: If anyone who owns the rights to these issues/scripts has a problem with me linking to them or posting pages from them, let me know and I'll remove them.)
In his proposal, Moore said that he wanted to mainly keep the stories self contained, with few stories running over into a second issue, unless the story really dictated it. As a result, we had an investigation that probably stretched on a little too long last issue and an adventure that will get wrapped up a little early in this issue. But this is still the better of the two and I like the way Moore handles the parallel stories, with three pages for each story going back and forth.
Let's dig in shall we?
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Johnny uses his holograms to disguise them in Old West garb, which is kind of awesome, mostly because they look cool, but also because it's filtered through Johnny's sense of humor. So Big Brother becomes a medicine show wagon and Suprema becomes an old woman from an old painting (at first I thought it was Whistler's Mother but from the script, it's the woman from American Gothic.
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And cut to 1998, where we see five of Moore's Awesome cowboys wandering around modern Omegapolis. We know Kid Thunder, Nighteagle, the Brimstone Kid and young Bill Hickok. The girl is Lady Lash, who was mentioned in Judgment Day.
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Nighteagle thinks it was the sorcery of Jericho Faust and Stooping Shadow, two villains from their time, who were working dark magic, and which this band of heroes were going to confront. They come across the Jackettes breaking into the Omega Bank, who think they'll have free reign without Youngblood around.
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And then we're back to the Old West. Youngblood is heading into town as everyone else is fleeing from Faust and Stooping Shadow. They're planning on summoning some sort of devil creature. There on the outskirts they see the two villains outside a time door, where they're planning on summoning an H.P. Lovecraft-style elder one up from a long stairs.
Youngblood decides to stop them as the elder thing emerges, looking like a blobby slug thing with too many faces. I like Twilight talking about how she hates supernatural stuff.
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Back in the '90s, the cowboys are in an all-out brawl with the Jackettes, which is really awesome. I loved the cowboy characters in Judgment Day, and the addition of Lady Lash--I guess she's like a Texan Zorro-like character?--makes for a fun group.
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Meanwhile, the fight continues back in the Old West. Johnny drops his disguises, which helps, as Big Brother explains: "I was just trying to imagine a medicine wagon getting in a fight, and it didn't really work, y'know?"
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Back in the future, the cowboys make sure the authorities keep a closer watch on Jack and then try to decide how to get back to their own time. Bill Hickok calls Ethan Crane... Supreme. Supreme flies them all to his Citadel and let's them use his access to the Time Tower to go back to their own time. He also offers to fly their horses down later, since horses can't walk down stairs!
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And we cut to Combat, from the old Youngblood, out in space, where he finds out that something is eating the stars. Something called the Goat! But we'll have to wait until next issue to find out what that is.
Man, what a fun issue! Anytime there's a League of Infinity twist, you know it's going to be a good one. And Moore has one more of those in store for us in "September 1998."
As always, please check out the Annotations Page for more details and references and be sure to let me know any that I missed.
Friday, January 26, 2018
The Youngblood cover that wasn't
It's an Ed McGuinness cover for Youngblood #2. Supposedly, it was going to be a variant cover. McGuinness was doing work for Awesome at the time (and if you have any interest, check out his work on Fighting American), so that makes sense. And Rob Liefeld's variant cover for issue #2 was originally supposed to be one of the 9,000 variants for issue #1. So, it makes sense to think that Liefeld's cover probably got pushed back to issue #2 and McGuinness's never got used. I mean, it makes sense in an Awesome kind of way.
Here it is cleaner and bigger...
...and colored:
Maybe if they ever reprint all of the Alan Moore Youngbloods, it can be the cover that will be again.