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

Thursday, December 10, 2020

Moore's unpublished Gen13 script

Immediately after Awesome went bankrupt and Alan Moore moved on, Editor Scott Dunbier at Wildstorm gave Moore a call and offered him a gig: doing a story for a Gen¹³ Annual. Moore, no longer pumping out scripts for Awesome, said yes, and wrote a 13-page script.

For those who don't know, Gen¹³ was a superhero team and comic book series originally written by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi and illustrated by J. Scott Campbell. It was published by WildStorm under the Image Comics banner, which went on to become an imprint for DC Comics, who continued publishing the Gen¹³ title. 

The comic features a loosely organized team of super-powered beings composed of five teens and their mentor. It was basically outrageous teens with superpowers.

The annual never happened and Scott Dunbier sat on the script for decades until recently when he showed it on his Facebook account and said that the faxed copy is likely the only copy anywhere. With Moore's permission, Dunbier is now selling it on eBay to raise money for Bob Wiacek. You can see it here (where it's already near $4,000): https://www.ebay.com/itm/Alan-Moore-RARE-UNPUBLISHED-script-ONE-OF-A-KIND/333818947766?hash=item4db928e8b6:g:FwEAAOSwCH9f0CcQ

While you can't read it all, check out the first page and the last:

 




My interest in this script is that it was one of the first things he wrote after Awesome's collapse and seemed to continue Moore's fun, experimental style he was using on Youngblood and likely lead to the creation of ABC under Dunbier's watch.

The story is about some cosmic collector (like a comic collector) who comes to collect Gen¹³. While we don't know the specifics of the plot, read that last page and see if you don't think that this little Gen¹³ script might have something to say about the state of superheroes and the industry in general in 1998 and the apocalypse happening to many comic book companies... just like the one he had just seen come to its own armageddon.