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 According to Wikipedia: They formed in 2000 to to bring back into print "dormant, unpublished, and under-published serial comics and cartooning."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?