Alan Moore working for Rob Liefeld? One of the unlikeliest combinations in comics, and yet, for a short but prolific time, they made it Awesome.
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
A friend pointed this out. Coollines, a comic art company, is selling one of the covers from Judgment Day Omega.
It's fun to see how these pages are put together, but with Coollines, they jack up the price way out of proportion. So beware. You can check out the listing here.
I found this funny, so thought I'd share it. I saw this pop up on eBay:
So, if Alan Moore is your homeboy, your shirt is waiting here.
Immediately after Awesome went bankrupt and Alan Moore moved on, Editor Scott Dunbier at Wildstorm gave Moore a call and offered him a gig: doing a story for a Gen¹³ Annual. Moore, no longer pumping out scripts for Awesome, said yes, and wrote a 13-page script.
For those who don't know, Gen¹³ was a superhero team and comic book series originally written by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi and illustrated by J. Scott Campbell. It was published by WildStorm under the Image Comics banner, which went on to become an imprint for DC Comics, who continued publishing the Gen¹³ title.
The comic features a loosely organized team of super-powered beings composed of five teens and their mentor. It was basically outrageous teens with superpowers.
The annual never happened and Scott Dunbier sat on the script for decades until recently when he showed it on his Facebook account and said that the faxed copy is likely the only copy anywhere. With Moore's permission, Dunbier is now selling it on eBay to raise money for Bob Wiacek. You can see it here (where it's already near $4,000): https://www.ebay.com/itm/Alan-Moore-RARE-UNPUBLISHED-script-ONE-OF-A-KIND/333818947766?hash=item4db928e8b6:g:FwEAAOSwCH9f0CcQ
While you can't read it all, check out the first page and the last:
My interest in this script is that it was one of the first things he wrote after Awesome's collapse and seemed to continue Moore's fun, experimental style he was using on Youngblood and likely lead to the creation of ABC under Dunbier's watch.
The story is about some cosmic collector (like a comic collector) who comes to collect Gen¹³. While we don't know the specifics of the plot, read that last page and see if you don't think that this little Gen¹³ script might have something to say about the state of superheroes and the industry in general in 1998 and the apocalypse happening to many comic book companies... just like the one he had just seen come to its own armageddon.
In a terrific interview about the tragedy of 1963 falling apart, Rick Veitch speculates that if 1963 had continued coming out after the special annual, Moore wouldn't have ended up working for Liefeld and likely would have brought a Superman-like character into the 1963 universe. Frankly, I didn't like 1963 that much and preferred the mix of old and new in Supreme more, but it's an interesting What If? to think about. The relevant portion is at about 49:00 below.
I found and bought the cover art for Bloodstrike #33 because I am a big fan of the underrated series, I decided to tweet it to Tim Seeley who was awesome about it:
I think Tim Seeley might be my spirit animal.
I never caught this until someone pointed it out, but the cover for Supreme: The Return #6 was a Kirby homage (as was the whole issue). I think it needed more krackle, though.
Here's an odd little thing, courtesy of my friend Rob:
So when DC reprinted Superman 123 in Superman 217, which was the first appearance of a proto Supergirl, they re-colored her orange and green. Did Alan know about this reprint to homage it for Supreme 54?
Cartoonist Kayfabe interviewed Rob Liefeld and the conversation turned to Alan Moore and how Alan tried to offer a different Moore to write the third season of Supreme. That part of the conversation starts around 1:16:00.
Basically, Liefeld says that Alan wanted to keep making $10,000 an issue, but to be co-writing with Steve Moore. Liefeld refused and that was the end of Supreme. Liefeld doesn't mention that Alan was hip deep in ABC by this point and Liefeld initiated this conversation.
Cartoonist Kayfabe did a fun interview with Jim Valentino recently, which you can watch here. Very little of it has to do with Awesome, but there is a great little bit at 1:27:00.
When Moore says that he's not sure, Valentino uses a trick that he says Dave Gibbons taught him. He tells Alan, "We want you to do everything on Supreme that DC wouldn't let you do with Superman."
My friend Rob and James forwarded this one to me. Apparently, Awesome had a Supreme contest. If you look at deadline date, it was almost exactly when the company died and it likely was never awarded. Sigh...
My friend Doyle made this cool (pseudo)recreation of a Supreme comic and I thought it'd be fun to share it:
For reference:
In 2015, Rob Liefeld came out with a new Bloodstrike. He wrote it and did the art for it, so it was probably the idea that he wanted to do and scrapped Tim Seeley's version of Bloodstrike for.
Moore never worked on Bloodstrike, so there aren't a ton of connections and I'm not going to go into a ton of detail on the series (all two issues of it), but some Awesome characters appeared in it, so I'll discuss them in detail.
Essentially the story is about a new Born Again operative who, while tangling with an old Liefeld villain, Tragedy Ann (yeah, really), has his penis cut off. He then spends the rest of the series trying to track it down. Ann has given it to a mysterious teenage villain, who is putting together body parts to construct an ultimate weapon.
The story is Liefeld at his most funny. It's all really lowbrow stuff, but when he starts calling out his own original early-Image characters as being "Wolverine ripoffs," you can tell he's having fun. Whether you think it's funny or just dumb is up to you.
Anyway, where this blog is concerned is where Professor Night shows up in issue #2. Apparently the villain wants his brain to put into Supreme's body. And she used a kidnapped Twilight to lure Professor Night out of retirement:
Twilight is one of my favorite characters and this is kind of tacky and gross, but of course, none of it really mattered because there was no issue #3 and none of this was ever mentioned again.
Chris Sprouse posted this on his Facebook recently:
"Unfinished inks/inked linework. When doing color pieces, I use pretty heavy, nearly opaque watercolors sometimes, and certain colors will just sit on top of the black ink. For that reason it's better to fill in all the solid black areas after all the colors are applied and dry."
"Colors, done using brush and watercolors. There are actually clouds and some light blue sky in the final drawing, but I did this piece in a hotel room after hours at a convention and was at the mercy of the crappy Kinko's scanner I had to use to capture it the next day. The blue just didn't reproduce at all."
Here's the deal. I really don't want to get into Andrew Rev's contracts, and for the most part, I doubt we'll ever actually see a new Supreme or Youngblood comic from Terrific. So I'm mostly going to ignore the noise. That said, this is interesting.
An artist working for Rev got angry for non-payment of work so he shared some pages. He said the writer's name is Leon MacKenzie. And it appears to be a Kid Supreme book, which includes the Supremacy, multiple Supremes and maybe Original Dax (um... maybe not). Check it out:
Rob Liefeld recently tweeted some of the thumbnails for Judgment Day Alpha. He asked Marat Mychaels to go through Moore's script and draw thumbnails for Liefeld to then finish off. It's interesting to see how much of it stayed close to what Mychaels drew... with a few exceptions.
Here are the pages side by side:
