The Checker collections

In 2002 and 2003 Checker Book Publishing Group came out with two white "leather" hardcovers of Supreme. The first, titled "Story of the Year," collected #41-#52B. The second, titled "The Return," collected #53-The Return #6.

Never heard of Checker? Yeah, join the club. According to Wikipedia: They formed in 2000 to to bring back into print "dormant, unpublished, and under-published serial comics and cartooning."

According to a rumor, Checker offered Rob Liefeld a large sum of money for the reprint rights. Erik Larsen (in a conversation with Rick Veitch) later explained Liefeld's thinking:

"It could very well be that Rob was in the hole on Supreme and that the Checker money helped pay off some of that debt. That doesn’t excuse him from not telling people what’s going on–but it’s a possible scenario."

When he heard about the deal, Rick Veitch went to try to negotiate a deal with Checker for creator royalties:

"We creators had been promised a royalty deal on the collections. Whatever Liefeld’s deal was with Checker, we were cut out. I was in touch with Checker after they picked up the rights and offered to talk with Alan about finishing the second book. They instead chose to rush into print with an unfinished story and horrible reproduction. Instead of paying industry standard royalties to creators, Checker chose to use the substantial profits of the two Supreme collections to build their imprint."

Complaints about the reproduction have dogged the hardcover and trade paperback collections ever since. It's obvious that the images were scanned from the printed pages and not the original files or art, as Chris Sprouse points out, as the scans show the art from the opposite side of the paper. There are many moire patterns and scanning fragments.

As Veitch told fans:

"The best way to get the SUPREME stuff is seek out the original issues in the quarter bins. Repro is great and you could probably put together a complete set for less than a Checker trade. Don’t worry about Alan and I–we’ll be fine. We did the material because we loved it and want people to enjoy it even if Liefeld’s a dick."

If you want to read a whole long thing about Veitch arguing with Liefeld about royalties, feel free to read this.

It's also a shame that Checker used the Alex Ross sketches for World War Infinity rather than some of his other pieces or even Sprouse art. Foreign collections have had much better art for their covers, such as these ones done by Daniel Acuna for the Spanish language editions (which he says on his blog that he used as his cover letter for the American market):

 

 

 

 

     

Checker also came out with a trade paperback collection of the Judgment Day series (without the prologue from the Sourcebook, but with the Youngblood story from the Awesome Holiday Special).

At some point after this, Rob Liefeld offered to Marvel to redo Supreme with a single art team, but Marvel turned him down, supposedly because they were publishing another series called Supreme Power at the time and didn't want the confusion.

Later, Checker formed Devil's Due, a digital comics publisher and made the same bad scans of the Supreme issues available for reading online. I believe these are the only versions still "in print."

Personally, I've followed Rick Veitch's advice and made my own collections from the printed comics:

What do you think?

The Rick Veitch exit interview

Supreme: The Return #6 was Rick Veitch's swan song on Supreme, but what a way to go! In the Ivory Icon online fanzine, he gave this interview from 1999:

Ivory Icon: What are your fondest thoughts of your work on Supreme?
Rick Veitch: Probably working with Alan. He and I have done a lot of stuff together over the years, but somehow the Silver Age SUPREME was the most fun of all. Doing comics is a lot of hard work, but there was something delightful going on when we did SUPREME.

Part of it was dredging up our personal memories of the real Silver Age of comics. We're both in our mid forties and grew up on Mort Weisinger SUPERMAN, so there was something in the creative process of SUPREME that transcended nostalgia and plugged us into the sense of wonder and worlds of imagination that we possessed as young children.

Another part of it was turning the dark gritty 90's version of the superhero on its head. Everyone was dead sick of the over-muscled violent vigilantes who were worse than the bad guys, and the pure morality, nobility and sense of justice that we caught with SUPREME stood out in marked contrast, I think.

Yet another thing that made it fun, was that we knew we were doing what SHOULD have been done with the current SUPERMAN. From my point of view, DC had lost the essence of the SUPERMAN character in all their various attempts to make the NEW SUPERMAN, which probably came to a head when they staged his 'death' and the public believed them!

II: What was your favorite scene in Supreme?
RV: I think the SUPREMELVIN sequence was my favorite. I've always loved doing Will Elder MAD style stuff and thought Alan's adding it to the SUPREME book was a stroke of genius. I'd love to give SUPREMELVIN his own title!

II: Will you be back to work on the pages of Supreme?
RV: I'm not sure at this point. I have been paid for all outstanding invoices and they have a bunch of my SUPREME stuff in the can, so I think it is safe to say they will be reprinting that. There are a couple of 8 page sequences, one a flashback and one a flash forward and I almost completed all of issue #61, where SUPREME meets up with the disembodied singularity of Jack Kirby's pure
creative spirit. I think as a whole, that issue is one of the best things Alan and I ever did together.

I doubt it will be possible to put the original creative team back together, since Alan is writing 5 books a month for WILDSTORM, and Chris Sprouse is doing one of them. I know Alan had worked out a wonderful new direction for a possible third year of SUPREME, but whether or not he can do it, I don't know. If Alan does come back as writer, then I'd love to continue if I can fit it into my schedule.

II: Have you seen Alex Ross redesigns, and what is your opinion of them?
RV: No, I haven't seen them, but can't imagine a better artist to rework SUPREME than Alex. Here's a dream team SUPREME book for you: Alan and Alex doing a SUPREME graphic novel!!!

Alan Moore on New Jack

Alan Moore gave an interview about Jack Kirby to the Jack Kirby Collector, which can be found here. I'm reprinting part of it below (obviously, if anyone has a problem with me reprinting this here, let me know and I'll remove it).


THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR: How powerful an influence was Jack Kirby for you?
ALAN MOORE: Well, I'll have to go all the way back to my very early childhood for that. I first discovered comics when I was about seven; this would have been around 1959 or 1960. When I said "comics" I meant American comics; I had read the homegrown British fare before that, but when I first came across the Superman and Batman comics of the time, the first couple of appearances of the Flash, things like that, these were a revelation. I became completely addicted to American comics, or specifically to the DC Comics that were available at the time. I can remember that I'd seen this peculiar-looking comic that I knew wasn't DC hanging around on the newsstand and it looked too alien. I didn't want to risk spending money upon it when it wasn't stuff that I was already familiar with. And then I can recall on one day, I think I was ill in bed—I'd been seven or eight at the time—and my mother said that'd she get me a comic to cheer me up while I was confined to the bed. I knew that the only comic that I could think of that I hadn't actually bought was a Blackhawk comic that I'd seen around. So I was trying to convince her to sort of pick up this Blackhawk comic, kind of explaining to her what it was and that it was a bunch of people in blue uniforms. Much to my initial disappointment she brought back Fantastic Four #3, which I read. It did something to me. It was the artwork mainly. It was a kind of texture and style that I've just never seen before. The DC artists at the time, I didn't really know their names, but their style was the one I was accustomed to: Very clean, very wholesome looking, and here was something with craggy shadows with almost a kind of rundown look to a lot of it. It was immediate; literally, from that moment I became a devoted fan of the Fantastic Four and the other Marvel books when they came out—particularly those by Kirby. I mean, it was Kirby's work that I followed more than anybody else as I was growing up. Just the work in Thor and "Tales of Asgard," the Fantastic Four during that long classic stretch in the middle, and then when Kirby went over to DC and the Fourth World books. This was around the time that I was approaching my psychedelic teenage years and the subject matter of these books seems to be changing along with me. I absorbed actively every line he drew in those years, or at least the ones that I was able to lay my hands on. There's something about the dynamism of Kirby's storytelling. You never even think of it as an influence. It's something that you grew up with, kind of understanding that this is just the way that comics were done. So I'd say yeah, that I would account for the influence of Jack Kirby upon my own work. It's almost like a default setting for my own storytelling. It's sort of like if you can tell a story the way Kirby would have, then at least that's proper comics; you're doing your job okay.

TJKC: What exactly made those classic Marvel stories so revolutionary? Was it that the storytelling was more mature than DC?
ALAN: An extra dimension had been added to both the storytelling and the art. In a sense the DC characters at the time were archetypes to a certain degree. Archetype means they are one-dimensional. Stan Lee and his collaborators in terms of the story overlaid a second dimension of character. He gave them a few human problems. These weren't three-dimensional characters but they were of a dimension more than what we'd been used to, and something about the art kind of corresponded with that. With Kirby there was a level of attention to detail and texture and intensity about the art that seemed to give another dimension to the super-hero—to the comic book—than what was used at the time. It just seemed to be much more visceral, much more real. The Human Torch finding the Sub-Mariner in a bowery slum; that kind of had a visceral reality to it that was much more engaging.

TJKC: It seems that everyone at the beginning finds Kirby's artwork a bit awkward. Did it take you a while to get used to it?
ALAN: Well for a while, probably seven or eight pages, but yes there was that kind of shock of something unfamiliar. But then again, in my life that's generally been a sign; something I'm almost repulsed by to start with will be something I'll be enduringly fascinated by later. Some of the underground artists, the first time I saw their work, genuinely repulsed me, but later I became addicted to them and the same is true to a different degree with Kirby. Yeah, looking at his art for the first time there is that shock of something that is unfamiliar, and at first the shock might feel unpleasant, but pretty soon it's a strong acquired taste and you have to have more of that.

TJKC: Do you think your style of comics writing is a natural progression to what Lee and Kirby did in the Sixties?
ALAN: I guess it must be to a degree. That's some of the early stuff that I saw, so like I said, that's almost a kind of default setting.

TJKC: But namely with your super-hero work....
ALAN: Yeah, but there again that was the only kind of comic I'd seen at the time: Super-hero comics, really. Even war and western comics were super-hero comics in drag, so basically that is almost a default storytelling style. Lee and Kirby: It's just basic. It's something that's omnipresent—you don't even think about it. You don't even notice it. It's there like air is there.

TJKC: How would you describe Kirby's use of mythology and other genres in his work?
ALAN: It was great. He obviously got a real feel for these archetype figures. I remember "Tales of Asgard" being some of his best work, and the way he blended together myth and science-fiction in Thor was terrific. I thought he got exactly the right degree of relevance for the original material and exactly the right degree of irrelevance, where he was prepared to sort of change it and do new things with it; that kind of made the myths live in a sense.

TJKC: One of the most amazing things about Kirby is the more you see his work, you start to notice the great versatility he had jumping from genre to genre.
ALAN: Sure, it's stunning. You look at his westerns, Boys' Ranch, the romance stuff; that's the sort of thing which I've always tried to emulate. I've always liked to think that I could have as much breadth and versatility in my work as Kirby did—obviously in a different way because I'm a writer and he was an artist/writer. Yeah, I've always admired that in him. I think more people should. If you're going to take something from Kirby, don't take just his style; take his sense of adventure, take his willingness to explore other forms and take a few chances.

TJKC: Could you tell me a little about the "New Jack City" story in Supreme?
ALAN: The basic story was that some sort of mysterious citadel seems to have appeared overnight somewhere in some high, inaccessible Tibetan mountain valley or whatever. So Supreme goes to investigate and what he finds is this bewildering landscape which is in fact a great number of different landscapes sort of fused together. There's bits of it that look like a 1930s Depression era bowery slum, where he meets a kid gang and a costumed hero that the kid gang are obviously accomplices of. They have some battle with a suitably super-villain type. I believe we have a huge Atlas monster rising from the depths. Supreme wanders down a tunnel to find himself coming out into a trench of a battlefield where there are lots of grizzled multi-ethnic soldiers: An obvious Irish one, an obvious Jewish one, an obvious Black guy, all very much like the Sgt. Fury line-up and a whole slew of patriotic heroes. This carries on until Supreme actually meets the supreme creator of this world, who kind of turns out to be Jack Kirby. This is very difficult to explain because it took a whole story to tell the story, but it's basically that this gigantic floating head changes from this kind of Kirby photo montage—the head is changing, it always looks like Jack Kirby drawn or both. This gigantic entity explains to him that he used to be a flesh and blood artist but now he is entirely in the realm of ideas, which is much better because flesh and blood has its limitations because he can only do four or five pages a day tops, where now he exists purely in the world of ideas. The ideas can just flow out uninterrupted. He talks about the very concept of a space where ideas are real, which is the kind of place to some degree all comic creators work in all their lives, but Jack Kirby maybe more than most. So it's kind of an idea that being free of a physical body, this artist is then able to explore endless worlds of imagination and ideas.

Supreme #62 script

Here is Alan Moore's full script for what he thought would be issue #62 (which later became The Return #6). Be sure to check out the very end where Moore thought he might be giving us an Emerpus story in issue #63!

 

 

Weekly Reading: Supreme: The Return #6

Supreme: The Return #6

Published by Awesome Entertainment in June 2000

The cover:

Title: New Jack City!

(As always: Supreme is currently out of print. There are a number of ways to read it, which can be found on the How do I read Moore's Awesome works page.)

For almost two decades this was thought to be the end of Supreme. To be honest, it wasn't so bad, as least it ended on a really strong note. And, as an added bonus, I have the script for this issue, so we can see what Moore had in mind (to be honest, it's pretty close).

As we've seen, Alan Moore and Rick Veitch are both students of comics' crazy history. And no history is complete with recognizing Jack "King" Kirby. So it's only right that Moore and Veitch would dedicate an entire issue to the man and his work.

Originally, the plan had been for Veitch to draw all of the Kirby elements and Chris Sprouse to draw all of the Supreme figures flying through the Kirby world. So Veitch drew the pages with Supreme figures in pencil to be finished by someone else, like this:

 

With Sprouse having left a long time ago to go work on Tom Strong, Rob Liefeld filled in. It worked for most of the pages. And Todd Klein returned and do the lettering on the Kirby-based pages, which made a big difference. And this issue is a beautiful gift from Moore and Veitch and Klein to us. Perfectly timed for Christmas!

We start this issue with Supreme flying to the Himalayas to investigate the sudden appearance of a town. When he descends through the clouds, what he sees is an entire city filled with multiple backdrops. Here's how Moore described it...

 

...and how Veitch turned it into a two-page spread:

 

There are modern skyscrapers next to structures from mythology. Supreme lands on a Brooklyn street from the 1930s where he's confronted by some streetrats known as the Little Tough Guys. They say that they're just doing the "monarch's will." Then a city maintenance hero, called The Custodian, shows up.

Supreme agrees to help them fight Doctor Dread somewhere down in the Wonder Well! They soon find Dread (a Dr. Doom knock off) and an Atlas-era Kirby monster called "Baragoom, the creature that walked like a thing!" Ha.

As they fight, Dread creates a magical fog to conceal his escape. Supreme chases after him and the other heroes, but comes out in a World War II warzone where he finds Sgt. Strong's Dambustin' Dogfaces and the Battlin' Yank. They join the fight with other '40s era heroes fighting the Steel Swastika.

Supreme flies on into a giant woodland where he finds a twisty homeland like that of Kirby's New Gods. One of the New Breed recognizes that Supreme is an outsider by, "the eyebrows... the lack of shadow on the chin. You do not have the regent's mark upon you!" Supreme picks up a guide, Davey Krikkit, who will lead him to the realm of the gods to meet this regent.

They head up an amazing staircase, which leads Supreme to ask, "How can all this landscape fit into one remote mountain valley?"

Krikkit: "Mister, that's nothin'! Why, I've heard it said that this whole >chirrik< cosmos could fit inside one man's >chirrik< head!"

As they go on, Supreme notes that there's something childish, but also something divine about the landscape. Krikkit says those two are the same thing. Eventually they come to another gate that leads them even higher.

Krikkit: "The thing about >chirrik< imagination is, there ain't no ceiling! It just keeps >chirrik< going up!"

Then they're introduced to the essences of the gods. Supreme notes that they don't look like the standard gods, but Krikkit explains that the look different depending on how they're filtered through the human mind.

The gods send him through the narrow gallery of truth to the omegadrome, the central aleph-point of all existence.

And inside he finds the king... the disembodied head of Jack "King" Kirby! All kinds of characters are growing out of his head. Supreme wants to know what he is, and the king explains that he was an imagineer who used to farm ideas in Idea Space. 

As Supreme talks to the King, we see his head as a collage of panels illustrated with Kirby-esque ideas and patterns. It's very beautiful. Here's how Moore set Veitch's imagination going:

 

And here's what Veitch came up with:

 

  

The king talks about how he used to only spend part of the time in Idea Space, but now he lives here permanently after his physical body died. But that doesn't matter, because, "All we are is ideas."

King: "The ideas we have, the ideas other people have about us, the ideas we have about ourselves... what else is a personality?"

The king appreciates not having hands slow him down from the act of creation anymore.

Supreme wants to know what he's doing in Supreme's world, to which the King replies that this seemed like a nice place he could set up a retreat for his concepts.

King notes that Supreme is a Wylie-type character from the book "Gladiator" and that dark detectives are Gibsons and warrior princesses are Moultons. The king then has an idea for a war between a planet of good and a planet of evil, but Supreme thinks that's unlikely.

And then the king and his worlds are gone. See what I mean about this being a good ending for Supreme?

As in his Hermes-centered Judgment Days, Moore addresses his basic concepts about imagination, Idea Space and the power it has over us and our worlds. It's also interesting to note that he basically told Supreme that his world is in Idea Space. And this world is linked to all the other worlds with Supreme and Darius Dax in combat, all powered by supremium, making anything from imagination possible. Unfortunately, Moore never got to put his period on the Supreme story, though it seems clear where he was headed.

The brilliant thing about this issue is that it's taking Moore's ideas, filtering them through the body of work (pun intended) of Kirby and doing it in a way that honors Kirby. As we've talked about before. The best comics aren't just stories... they're works that can only exist as comics. And this issue could only work as a comic.

Anyway, Supreme returns to Diana in time to have a dinner date, where he and Diana make light of her seeing another guy (the guy being Ethan).Diana then shows him the makeready of the Omniman issue (with the Todd Klein reference in the script removed... drat).

Diana wonders if the Supremes in the Supremacy will mind her using the idea for her comic, but Supreme replies, "How could a comic book affect the Supremacy?"

We'll see. But it would take 12 years for me to see it happen, with Revelations not coming out until 2012. It'll take us a while too, as I'm switching to Youngblood starting next week.

In the letter's page, it was announced that Awesome was planning to do a collection of Supreme #41-#46 under the title "Secret Origins."

 

As we'll see, collections would come out, but they should have stayed secret. But I'll talk about that in a post later this week. As a nice Christmas week bonus, I'll be doing posts each day this week--including interviews with Alan Moore and Rick Veitch--so keep an eye out for those.

I heard a rumor that after Supreme's supposed demise, Liefeld tried to sell Supreme to Marvel. He offered to redo the whole thing with one artist (probably himself), but at the time Marvel was doing a series called Supreme Power and they didn't want their fans to get confused. And so it languished for a long, long time. But it's not the end. As we'll see.

As always, please check out the Supreme Annotations Page, for more details and references and please help me by letting me know anything I missed that can be added. Thanks!