How the Judgment Day: Final Judgment delay was explained

I regularly check eBay for Awesome items, just to see what might pop up and came across this interesting little tidbit. American Entertainment, which regularly supplied variant covers and special versions of Awesome books sent this out to people who preordered Judgment Day: Final Judgment and Agent America:

I discussed the Fighting American/Agent America stuff here, but in summary, Liefeld left Marvel and decided to publish some leftover Captain America pages he made as a series called Agent America. Marvel raised a fuss and Liefeld licensed the character of Fighting American from Kirby/Simon and the lawsuit got settled.

It makes sense that they'd give away the preview for Agent America at this point since they were no longer going to publish Agent America.

Another twist is it might explain why there are these variants for Judgment Day Alpha that are almost exactly the same, except one features Fighting America and one features Die Hard in the same location/pose.

 

After a several-month delay, Judgment Day: Final Justice did come out, as did three series of Fighting American.

The Judgment Day card set

Merry Christmas! I hope your holidays were Awesome! Mine brought a funny bit of Awesome... the Judgment Day card set. These came out in 1997 with the publication of Judgment Day.

Let's back up for a moment. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, comic book card sets became very popular. They started off publishing artwork lifted from comics. Sometimes there was writing on the back and sometimes there was part of an image that combined nine cards to make a larger image. They weren't really all that interesting, but it was fun to buy a pack in the comic shop and open them up.

Then came the first Marvel Universe set, which featured new art and specific information about the heroes, their powers, etc. (There's a great article about how it happened here) The set was incredibly popular. The second set featured popular artists such as Jim Lee, Art Adams, etc. and was even more popular. When Jim Lee then did an entire set of X-Men cards, the popularity of card sets had exploded. They moved to fully painted sets and ones with sketch cards. (Eventually, like the comic market itself, the trading card market for comic characters imploded.)

So, it's a bit of a surprise that this set is almost entirely made up of artwork from the miniseries:

The first 16 cards feature art from Judgment Day Alpha. On the backs, we find out who drew the art and a bit about what's happening in the story:

The first 46 cards focus on Rob Liefeld's (and his imitators') art from the "present" storyline. The flashbacks don't appear until later.

Next, we get 15 cards for Judgment Day Omega:

And another 15 for Judgment Day Final Judgment:

Then we get 13 images from the flashbacks, featuring the art of Gil Kane, Chris Sprouse, etc. It really feels like they skimped on the flashback art, which was my favorite part of the series:

Then comes a subset of 9 cards with brand new art by longtime Extreme artist Dan Fraga. They let Fraga draw just head shots and busts and one wonders whether this art was even made for this set as Prophet barely appeared in the series at all:

 

 

Then comes a three card subset that's basically an advertisement for the Sony Playstation Youngblood game. It never came out (you can read more about why it never came out here), but these three images wouldn't do anything to convince me to buy it.

 

 

The final normal card was the checklist card, which got us to 72.

But this was the 1990s, so there had to be some gimmick chase cards, right? They made six "chromium" cards from some of the many covers. The cards are basically see through with bright metallic ink on the back that made it kind of shimmer. They are, admittedly, kind of neat.

I know the focus was on Liefeld art, but they could have at least done the third Dave Gibbons cover to complete the three-panel image. Sigh.

They made two promo cards to give away to promote the set:

And Liefeld autographed about 500 of these cards:

 

I think I paid about $15 for this set on eBay as a gift to myself (not including the autograph card). Mostly I laugh at this stuff now, but 15 year old me would have loved it. So it was worth every penny!

Hope your holidays were as Awesome as mine!

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.