Alan Moore's Forgotten Awesome: Chris Sprouse: Commissions and Evolution of a Comic Page

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

Friday, November 24, 2017

Chris Sprouse: Commissions and Evolution of a Comic Page

Unfortunately, Supreme: The Return #1 is the last we'll see of Chris Sprouse except for a cover he did for Youngblood, so let's send him out in style.

I had the opportunity to meet him at the CXC Comic Convention in Columbus, OH on Oct. 1, 2017 (pictured at right), and he was gracious enough to do this Supreme commission for me (which you can see him working on in that photo). It was very cool to meet a hero of mine:

I framed the piece with a Supreme poster signed by Sprouse and with an Alan Moore-signed script for issue #46:

Sprouse has been asked to do a number of Supreme commissions over the years, which I've collected from various sources and posted here:

There's also this Wizard pin up:

As you can see from my commission, Sprouse uses blue sketches to help guide him to make the best finished drawing he can. He does this all the time and you can often find some of his sketch guides online. Anyway, Checker, when they published the Supreme trades much later, included a cool feature that shows some of Sprouse's sketches and how they became final images. Here is the Evolution of a Comic Page: