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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

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

In Pictopia

Judgment Day was not the first time Alan Moore had mixed up genres of comics or even to do so to critique the comics industry. In 1986 Alan Moore contributed a little 8-page story to a benefit book called Anything Goes. I'm not going to get into the specifics of the book, but Moore's story soon expanded to 13 pages by illustrator Don Simpson and has long been hailed as a minor masterpiece.

The piece was originally called In Fictopia, but Simpson changed it to the more appropriate In Pictopia. In it, Moore tells the story of an older cartoon magician, Nocturno the Necromancer, who lives in a city of cartoon and comic characters. The older ones like him have fallen on hard times, living in the black and white slums. A new breed of superhero characters are moving in, taking over the city, leaving no room for the older-style characters.

It was an angry cry about what was happening in the comics industry, forgetting its past. Its message is not that dissimilar to the outcome of the Judgment Day trial, but in Judgment Day, there's a positivity that things can change. Perhaps Moore realized that to bring back stories of knights and cowboys and cartoon-like characters, it would take someone of immense stature in the industry to do it. Someone like Alan Moore.

Anyway, here is In Pictopia. It's been in and out of print a number of times, but is definitely worth owning. Check it out:














6 comments:

  1. In Pictopia should be at the top of the list of less-easy-to-find Moore works for any interested reader. It's really a great piece of work.

    This was re-colored (by Jose Villarubia who worked with Moore on some of the ABC books) and re-printed in the original version of The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. If I remember correctly, Simpson didn't like the recoloring. The revised version of the Moore bio had something else. I like both versions, personally.

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    1. It was included in the mostly excellent Brighter Than You Think collection of Moore short stories, though some of the scans aren't the best. Unfortunately, some of Moore's best shorter works have gone almost completely unread because they were printed in such small publications. If you ever get a chance, I love his story from The Puma Blues. (I haven't found a reason to work it into ForgottenAwesome yet.)

      Yeah, In Pictopia is a wonderful little piece. I've always enjoyed it as a comics-version, more serious Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But it definitely feels like Moore in his angry old man mode (though he wasn't old then). That's why I like comparing it to Judgment Day because the stories have the same basic idea and message but Judgment Day offers an optimistic message that things can get better if creators try to make comics that are better.

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    2. It looks *terrible* in "Brighter Than You Think". The story "Tapestries" looks slightly worse than the original, but "In Pictopia" just looks awful. It would look better if they had just used a scanner on an old comic book than whatever they did.

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    3. Ha, I just assumed they had scanned it out of the comic.

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    4. Correct, when Khoury made EXTRAORDINARY WORKS it had IN PICTOPIA [new coloring]; perhaps 2008.

      The Indispensable EXTRAORDINARY WORKS was expanded and PICTOPIA dropped and had: MR MONSTER Riddle of the recalcitrant refuse...

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    5. To be fair, that Mr. Monster story is amazing, too, but in a much sillier way.

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