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, June 22, 2017

Letterer Supreme Todd Klein

Most comic fans don't think about who is lettering the comics they read very much, but Supreme was so lovingly created and rendered in detail down to its lettering that I wanted to bring the man responsible to your attention. Todd Klein has lettered just about everything and is an acknowledged master. He also has a wonderful, readable blog about lettering that is top notch!

I'll reference him again as we go on, but here are some of his contributions to Supreme #41 and how he helped capture the exact retro feel that made the book such a loving homage.

As I mentioned in my weekly reading, the credits page helped set the tone for the issue that followed. Klein created it, as he explained on his blog:

"Hand-lettered rather large in the style of Ira Schnapp, this appeared on the inside front covers of SUPREME #41-52 and served as the ongoing story title for those Alan Moore-written issues. I no longer recall who suggested going this route, but it was probably Alan. I think I was the one who found appropriate old DC Comics house ads to imitate, pulling ideas from several of them. Scanned from the original lettering in my files. Lots of other Ira Schnapp and Gaspar Saladino lettering homages appeared in the issues."
It makes sense that Klein was modeling the design on Ira Schnapp (who created logos and lettering for DC Comics from about 1940 to the late 1960s) as Moore and company were creating a love letter to the comics they grew up with.

Some more pieces of lettering from this issue, from another blog post:



"When I was lettering the Alan Moore issues of SUPREME, whenever I did some hand-lettering I thought I might want to use again, or at least refer to, I made a photocopy. My copier wasn’t the best, and sometimes, as above, the copies were dodgy, but good enough for reference."


"This one I copied in case I had further use for this style for Squeak the Supremouse. The sound effect was a bonus. Leave it to Alan to sum up what I loved about super-animals like Mighty Mouse as a kid in one choice panel!"

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