Alan Moore's Forgotten Awesome: Norm Rapmund, Awesome inker!

Welcome

So a long time ago (the mid-1990s), the greatest writer in comics agreed to take over the writing duties for Image Comics' Supreme. He would radically reshape the character, the book, and due to forces beyond his control, a whole comic book universe. And it led to an award-winning run of comics, three additional titles (among several proposed) and ultimately led to the genesis of Moore's much better known America's Best Comics. And then it all went out of print and was forgotten by way too many.

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

Thursday, November 24, 2022

Norm Rapmund, Awesome inker!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I need to say thanks to the incredibly nice Doyle Dodd, who sent me a scan of a Chris Sprouse Supreme commission he picked up on eBay. I’ve wanted to get it turned into an inked commission for years now. I tried both Al Gordon (Sprouse’s inker on Supreme) and Karl Story (Sprouse’s preferred inker) and didn’t get very far with either one.

So I decided to approach Norm Rapmund. Rapmund inked a lot of other artists on Supreme and does a lot of work for DC and elsewhere. He’s also very approachable on Twitter. He graciously agreed to ink it for me.

I also asked (bugged) him a bunch of questions about his time with Awesome:

“I remember working on Supreme being a blur. Lol”

He said he didn’t read the Moore scripts for Supreme: “Heck... I don't even read the scripts now. Lol.

The in-house inkers of Extreme was like a well oiled machine. Me, Danny, Jon, and Marlo would pump out as much work as possible.”

He got into inking really young: “I was 22/23 going on 18. Even though Rob is only 5 months older than me, he was so much more mature than I was in leaps and bounds. I still hung around with high school kids. Lol”

He was an Orange County kid, so that’s how he latched on at Awesome.

He didn’t really appreciate the Moore run at the time he was working on it: “I knew working on Alan Moores Supreme was important, but it wasn't till years later for me to appreciate what it really meant to be working on his stories.”

He didn’t want to leave Awesome, but had no choice: “I didn't. I was the last to go when Awesome Entertainment was shutdown but I still had one foot in DC working on Aquaman.”

He said that he was surprised by the layoff: “It was horrible. No one saw it coming and at the time Awesome was doing so well. Rob being the great guy he is, paid me everything I was owed from Awesome. He didn't have to do that, but he did. Then Rob paved the way for me to get into Marvel on Wolverine. That was fun!”

I’m so thankful to have gotten the chance to talk to him about his time at Awesome and it made the commission mean that much more to me.