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, February 16, 2018

Jaime Hernandez's Love and Rockets and wrestlers

In the script for Youngblood #6, Alan Moore references that the older Supremaiden should have a look like one of Jaime Hernandez's female wrestlers:



I've said on a number of occasions that one way to enjoy Moore's Awesome work is as a guide through the great works of comics' history. That's as good an excuse as any to talk about Love and Rockets.

Jaime Hernandez, with his brother Gilbert, created the indie comic Love and Rockets for Fantagraphics in the 1980s. The brothers work independently of each other and they have their own group of characters, with Jaime focusing on the Locas stories centered on a social group in Los Angeles.

Locas follows the tangled lives of a group of primarily chicano characters, from their teenage years in the early days of the California punk scene to the present day. (Huerta, is a fictional city based on the Hernandezes' home town of Oxnard, California.) Two memorable members of Jaime's cast are Margarita Luisa "Maggie" Chascarrillo and Esperanza "Hopey" Leticia Glass, whose on-again, off-again romance is a focus for many storylines. The series is often called Locas (Spanish for "crazy women") because of the many quirky female characters depicted.

Moore had this to say about Jaime for an introduction to one of the Locas collections:

“Jaime’s art balances big white and black spaces to create a world of nuance in between, just as his writing balances our big human feelings and our small human trivias to generate its incredible emotional power. Quite simply, this is one of the twentieth centuries most significant comic creators at the peak of his form, with every line a wedding of classicism and cool."

Hernandez has a lifelong fascination with pro wrestling, especially women's wrestling, and it has been a regular part of his work, including in a miniseries for a pair of tag-team wrestlers called Whoa Nellie!

 
Can you imagine Suprema making some of these moves?