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!
There aren't quite as many nods to Alan Moore's proposals and ideas in this one, except for the obvious big one - Crow John himself. But let's see what I can find, and if you see any others, let me know in the comments.
Moore wrote about the Crow John adventure in his list of year one story ideas (it obviously wasn't issue #5):
While not a Moore idea, the wordplay with the collective names for the birds: a clattering of jackdaws, a conspiracy of ravens and a murder of crows does feel very much like a Moore idea.
The play with the name John and how the story deals with both the trial of Crow John and the trial of Johnny Panic also seems like an idea Moore could have come up with.
Did you note the poster for the air circus that referenced all the old Awesome aerial heroes. It has Jo(h)n Prophet's gyro glider we saw in that flashback from Judgment Day; the Phantom Aviator's biplane, also from Judgment Day; and the Stormbirds, who we saw briefly in Supreme:
We also got more of the scarred past of Leonard, which Moore hinted at here:
I also like Leonard turning Waxey's limo into a robot as a callback to Johnny destroying the limo in issue #7.
I always envisioned Threshold as being a flying base, akin to SHIELD's helicarrier, so was surprised the fan-creators turned it into a mountainside thing with huge windows. Not sure that part really worked for me.
And I've already mentioned the idea about stories being more important than truth to the Corvus as being a very Moore idea.
Moore planned to bring Crow John back in year two:
Moore had a habit of playing with song titles to name his stories, especially over in Supreme. Here's another case of a song title being used as Ray Bonneville wrote a song called Crow John, which had the lyric: "Crow John, What You Done?"
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