A universe of characters - part 1

As Moore's ideas for the expanded Awesome Universe started to take shape, he knew he was going to need a lot more characters. As many of them were to be frozen in suspended animation for 30 years, they needed to have a retro look. Fortunately, Moore had the best retro artist on speed dial (did they have speed dial in 1996?) in Rick Veitch.

On his wonderful blog, Veitch talked about creating these characters for Supreme 48-49 and the Judgment Day miniseries. (Note: I'm only going to post the ones who appeared in the pages of Supreme here and save the Judgment Day ones for a later post.)

"The way Alan Moore and I worked, when we created these characters for his Awesome Universe reboot, was via the phone. He’d have a bunch of ideas; some well thought out and others still in a raw state, which he’d describe to me. I’d start sketching as we spoke, throwing in ideas as they came to me. Since almost all the characters were knock-offs of existing golden and silver age icons, the trick was to catch the flavor of the original while adding some new and interesting angle; be it a different costume or power or hairstyle or whatever."

 

 

"For this guy, Alan didn’t have anything solid in mind except that he wanted a PLASTIC MAN type. I suggested that, since these characters were supposed to have originated in the early 1960’s, we could base his stretching powers on the polymer industry, which during that era was mixing up new molecular structures to create exotic plastics and 'space-age' materials. POLYMAN was the natural name and his costume design was based on a molecular grid."

 

"Don’t remember much about this time-traveling hero Alan Moore and I came up with for the Awesome Universe except that it brought a phone call from Jean-Marc Lofficier at Starwatcher, pointing out that he looked a bit too much like Moebius’ MAJOR GRUBERT. I think we agreed to remove the spike on his helmet and white out the infinity symbol on his chest, but not sure if we ever did anything more with him."

Note: Mark Time (now called Mark Tyme) showed up in Supreme #49, helping to send Optilux back to the real world.

 

"Would you believe this is the last of the Alan Moore character designs I drew for Awesome? ... This guy is the archetypal psychic detective with a buttoned down sixties look. I have no idea if he ever saw print in any actual stories."

Note: Blake Barron was used in the Judgment Day miniseries and later appeared in Moore's Youngblood #1.

It's interesting to note that Moore must have liked the idea of waking up a bunch of superheroes from 30 years of suspended animation because he did it again in the pages of Tom Strong with the heroes on Terra Obscura.