Al Gordon, inker Supreme

A friend tipped me off to Al Gordon as someone who might have some interesting stories to tell about the Awesome era, and boy, was he right. Gordon has had a long and fruitful career, inking over some of the greats, and is full of fun and humorous stories. He’s also a gracious, generous guy, who was very nice to let me bug him about my tiny corner of the comics world.

For those who don’t know, Gordon is an inker and writer who began freelance inking for Marvel in 1978 working with pencilers Bob Budiansky and Steve Leialoha. He was the regular inker on Spider-Woman, with penciler Carmine Infantino, and worked on The Avengers, Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider, Iron Man, The Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man and more. In the ‘80s he went to work for DC on Captain Carrot, DNAgents and Wonder Woman. He also inked Kevin Maguire while working with plotter/thumbnail artist Keith Giffen on Justice League International. Two years later, Gordon, this time inking Giffen, also began cowriting with Giffen and Tom and Mary Bierbaum for DC's revamped Legion of Super Heroes. Gordon took over the complete writing and scripting chores for issues #21 through 24, while continuing to ink Giffen. In 1992 he created WildStar with Jerry Ordway for Image Comics, writing and inking the series. He continued working freelance, including a stint working on Supreme and Judgment Day, mainly inking Chris Sprouse’s amazing run. After Awesome he continued inking freelance, including more work with Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse on Tom Strong.

When asked how he started working for Rob Liefeld at Image, he explained that he and Rob just hit it off. “I remember meeting Rob when he looked like a young punk skateboard kid,” Gordon said. “And he was hysterical. Rob does the best impressions of anyone I’ve met in my entire life. He does an impression of Todd MacFarlane that will have you peeing in your pants. I always got along with Rob. He’s never done me wrong.”

Gordon says that he enjoyed a good reputation as an inker and didn’t worry too much about finding gigs at the time. “Working in comics is really weird because being responsible is an odd thing in comics,” he explained. “I’ve always been a really responsible guy. I’ve had a lot of gigs where you have to have that self-impetus to do it. I didn’t realize there was another way of doing things. And I think that showed when I worked on comics. I always was on time. I think Rob picked up on that. He knew that if he gave me something that I would finish it.”

Gordon’s work on the Awesome books started even before there was an Awesome when he inked Keith Giffen’s short flashback sequence in Alan Moore’s first Supreme story in Supreme #41. This was just after Curt Swan, who was supposed to draw the flashbacks, had died and before Rick Veitch had started his run on Supreme.

He returned again when Chris Sprouse did his first Supreme issue with #50. Gordon explained that he most likely got the job as a combination of being friendly with Liefeld and having worked with Chris Sprouse before. Gordon had inked Sprouse’s first professional work for DC on a Secret Origins story and had inked more of his work, including a Youngblood annual for Liefeld.

On that annual, Gordon said, “I inked the first half of it and then hadn’t seen the pages for months and months and months. And Rob asked if I still wanted to do it. Rob said, ‘I’m going to make Chris an offer he can’t refuse,’ and I guess he offered Chris more money to [get the pages out faster.]”

The rush had an interesting effect. “If you looked at the first half of the book, the pages look like Chris,” Gordon said. “His faces are way symmetric. His bodies are way symmetric. Until you get to the last third of the book. And it gets weird. The figures get elongated. They’re slightly different. I don’t know that most people would notice the difference. But if you look at them, the figure drawings and the faces are different, but I think it was because he was working quickly. The last third of the book looks incredible. I thought it was some of Chris’s best work. It’s so lively and has so much energy and it’s just I think it’s really, really cool.”

So, by the time the regular gig to ink Supreme came around, Gordon was happy for the job. “My preference is working over somebody that I love the work of,” he said. “And I loved Chris’s stuff. I was a big fan of it.”

He was also a fan of what Moore was doing with Supreme as a love letter to Silver Age Superman. “I’m a huge Superman fan,” he explained, recalling one of the first comics he had read was “the Death of Superman, the imaginary story by Curt Swan and George Kline and I don’t remember who wrote it. But I remember reading it in the car. My mom was going shopping someplace and asked, ‘Do you want to come shopping with me?’ ‘No, I want to sit in the car and read this book three or four times!’ And that was the book! I just loved Curt Swan’s period of Superman. I loved Curt’s work and I got to ink him once. And it was a little like Carmine Infantino, in that it was beautiful, but soft. Instead of having a million lines, there was just one thick, soft HB line. It was much harder to ink than any of the guys today.”

So when he was offered Supreme, he said, “Yeah, I want to work on this. It’s Superman. The real Superman!”

After issue #50, Gordon also inked a few issues of J. Morrigan’s pencils (“just as a favor to Rob”) until Sprouse came on as the regular penciler with issue #53.

Even when working on Supreme and other series, Gordon wasn’t always sent issues after he had worked on them and wasn’t always aware of what was going on in the stories.

“At that period, books were so late, and we were reluctantly entering into the digital age, there were a lot of those books, the lettering was done in overlays,” he explained of how Todd Klein lettered Supreme. “They would send full-sized Xeroxes of the pencils to the letterer. The letterer would letter it on velum acetate. So a lot of those books, I don’t know what’s going on.”

He also rarely got a copy of scripts. “Occasionally, a conscientious editor would say, ‘We need this job in two weeks, can you do it?’ ‘Yeah, I can do it.’ ‘I’m going to send you the script and the pencils and while you’re doing that we’re going to have the book lettered and colored from the pencils, so don’t draw any crazy shit that’s not in the pencils or it won’t be colored.’”

But on Supreme, Sprouse sent him copies of a couple of the scripts. “We were talking on the phone one time and I remember Chris said something like, ‘Working with Alan Moore is not deciding what to draw, it’s deciding what not to draw,’ because his panels were so stream of consciousness. There was so much going on. This guy is describing the ashtray and how many cigarettes are in there and what kind they are and the color of the filter and just crazy stuff. And Chris was like, ‘I can’t do all that stuff; I’m not George Perez.’”

Gordon said that he only spoke with Moore a few times several years earlier when Moore was planning the 1963 series. “Alan and I talked at length a few times when Image was doing the 1963 book that he and Rick Veitch were putting together,” Gordon said. “We were all supposed to tie it in. So we were going to tie in WildStar with it. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I remember these conversations with Alan and it takes a while to acclimate into a conversation with Alan because he’s got a very thick British accent. And it takes a while to acclimate to him because unlike Americans, he was actually speaking English.

“He’s an amazingly generous creator,” he said. “We spent a few hours on the phone a few times and he made me feel very competitive, the way Keith [Giffen] made me feel very competitive. Keith would come up with something that was brilliant and I’d go, ‘Damnit, I need to come up with something that brilliant!’ It would end up like Magneto and Professor X battling after a few hours, but I remember we came up with the coolest stuff after that. It was the same, but a little different with Alan, because you’d come up with something and he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s quite brilliant.’ And you’d go, ‘Thanks.’ It was limited, but it was my favorite time brainstorming ever.”

The Sprouse-Gordon team only lasted a handful of issues until Awesome went out of business. Gordon, the professional, went on to ink other work. He teamed up with Sprouse again, this time to ink Tom Strong.

Asked about working with Sprouse, Gordon said that he loved Sprouse’s work but didn’t envy his process. “Chris is very slow,” Gordon said. “He draws the same page three times. I don’t know if he still does it that way, but my understanding is he used to draw them on 8.5 x 11. He would draw four or five pages all on 8.5 x 11 take them to the local drug store and would blow them up on the Xerox machine to 11 x 17. Then he would turn the page over and trace it in reverse on two-ply Bristol on a lightbox. So what I used to get were so painstakingly precise.”

At the time he was inking Sprouse, Gordon shared a work space with Erik Larsen, who would much later have his own run writing and drawing Supreme. “Larsen was looking at Chris’s pencils and said, ‘What a smudgy mess.’ It’s a smudgy mess because when the pages were shipped to you, the pages were stacked and so the pencil sketches on the backs would come off onto the front of the next page. Erik asked, ‘What’s the point of drawing it in reverse?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s an old masters trick, like Howard Pyle, with their pencil sketch and they would turn it around and look at it backward to make sure the symmetry is right, that the eyes you've drawn are in the right place.’ He took whatever he was working on at the time, probably Spider-Man, and he held it up to the light and turned the page over and he went, ‘Augh! God, look at this!’ ‘Yeah, that’s what it’s supposed to correct.’

Asked what his favorite work was from that time, Gordon couldn’t name one, but explained, “I loved Supreme.” But more than just the series, as an inker, it helps to be paired with a great penciler, and Gordon and Sprouse were buddies at the time. “I liked inking Chris’s stuff,” he said. “Chris is a really nice guy. Very mild mannered, Clark Kent kind of guy. He’s a very sweet man.”