The Judgment Day card set

Merry Christmas! I hope your holidays were Awesome! Mine brought a funny bit of Awesome... the Judgment Day card set. These came out in 1997 with the publication of Judgment Day.

Let's back up for a moment. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, comic book card sets became very popular. They started off publishing artwork lifted from comics. Sometimes there was writing on the back and sometimes there was part of an image that combined nine cards to make a larger image. They weren't really all that interesting, but it was fun to buy a pack in the comic shop and open them up.

Then came the first Marvel Universe set, which featured new art and specific information about the heroes, their powers, etc. (There's a great article about how it happened here) The set was incredibly popular. The second set featured popular artists such as Jim Lee, Art Adams, etc. and was even more popular. When Jim Lee then did an entire set of X-Men cards, the popularity of card sets had exploded. They moved to fully painted sets and ones with sketch cards. (Eventually, like the comic market itself, the trading card market for comic characters imploded.)

So, it's a bit of a surprise that this set is almost entirely made up of artwork from the miniseries:

The first 16 cards feature art from Judgment Day Alpha. On the backs, we find out who drew the art and a bit about what's happening in the story:

The first 46 cards focus on Rob Liefeld's (and his imitators') art from the "present" storyline. The flashbacks don't appear until later.

Next, we get 15 cards for Judgment Day Omega:

And another 15 for Judgment Day Final Judgment:

Then we get 13 images from the flashbacks, featuring the art of Gil Kane, Chris Sprouse, etc. It really feels like they skimped on the flashback art, which was my favorite part of the series:

Then comes a subset of 9 cards with brand new art by longtime Extreme artist Dan Fraga. They let Fraga draw just head shots and busts and one wonders whether this art was even made for this set as Prophet barely appeared in the series at all:

 

 

Then comes a three card subset that's basically an advertisement for the Sony Playstation Youngblood game. It never came out (you can read more about why it never came out here), but these three images wouldn't do anything to convince me to buy it.

 

 

The final normal card was the checklist card, which got us to 72.

But this was the 1990s, so there had to be some gimmick chase cards, right? They made six "chromium" cards from some of the many covers. The cards are basically see through with bright metallic ink on the back that made it kind of shimmer. They are, admittedly, kind of neat.

I know the focus was on Liefeld art, but they could have at least done the third Dave Gibbons cover to complete the three-panel image. Sigh.

They made two promo cards to give away to promote the set:

And Liefeld autographed about 500 of these cards:

 

I think I paid about $15 for this set on eBay as a gift to myself (not including the autograph card). Mostly I laugh at this stuff now, but 15 year old me would have loved it. So it was worth every penny!

Hope your holidays were as Awesome as mine!

Norm Rapmund, Awesome inker!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

 

I need to say thanks to the incredibly nice Doyle Dodd, who sent me a scan of a Chris Sprouse Supreme commission he picked up on eBay. I’ve wanted to get it turned into an inked commission for years now. I tried both Al Gordon (Sprouse’s inker on Supreme) and Karl Story (Sprouse’s preferred inker) and didn’t get very far with either one.

So I decided to approach Norm Rapmund. Rapmund inked a lot of other artists on Supreme and does a lot of work for DC and elsewhere. He’s also very approachable on Twitter. He graciously agreed to ink it for me.

 

I also asked (bugged) him a bunch of questions about his time with Awesome:

 

“I remember working on Supreme being a blur. Lol”

 

He said he didn’t read the Moore scripts for Supreme: “Heck... I don't even read the scripts now. Lol.

The in-house inkers of Extreme was like a well oiled machine. Me, Danny, Jon, and Marlo would pump out as much work as possible.”

 

He got into inking really young: “I was 22/23 going on 18. Even though Rob is only 5 months older than me, he was so much more mature than I was in leaps and bounds. I still hung around with high school kids. Lol”

 

He was an Orange County kid, so that’s how he latched on at Awesome.

 

He didn’t really appreciate the Moore run at the time he was working on it: “I knew working on Alan Moores Supreme was important, but it wasn't till years later for me to appreciate what it really meant to be working on his stories.”

 

He didn’t want to leave Awesome, but had no choice: “I didn't. I was the last to go when Awesome Entertainment was shutdown but I still had one foot in DC working on Aquaman.”

 

He said that he was surprised by the layoff: “It was horrible. No one saw it coming and at the time Awesome was doing so well. Rob being the great guy he is, paid me everything I was owed from Awesome. He didn't have to do that, but he did. Then Rob paved the way for me to get into Marvel on Wolverine. That was fun!”

 

I’m so thankful to have gotten the chance to talk to him about his time at Awesome and it made the commission mean that much more to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fixing the Checker Supreme The Return hardcover

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Checker hardcovers of Supreme. So, when I saw a damaged Supreme The Return hardcover for sale for cheap, I picked it up and decided to fix it... but more than just the spine.

So, I added the lost page for Supreme: The Return #1...

I fixed the lettering in Supreme: The Return #2 (the relettered pages are here if you want them)...

added Supreme #63...

and added the fan edit of Supreme #64...

giving the collection a better ending...

I still prefer my custom binds from the issues, but this was still a fun project. What do you think?

Alan Moore + Alex Ross = World War Infinity?

For the longest time, there was a rumor that after Awesome's financial implosion, that painter Alex Ross wanted to do a series or graphic novel called World War Infinity. Supposedly Alan Moore, who was working on his ABC line at this point, might have collaborated, but Ross would have been the primary creator. 

Here's Rob Liefeld explaining the project's genesis:

"Alan and I are talking about a project that would team him with Alex Ross,"

Liefeld says. "It originally stemmed from me calling Alex and Alan in October

and telling them that if I only had a limited amount of dollars left to

publish comics in this business, I would give it to Alex and Alan and ask them

to do a book together. They both thought that was funny, and said they'd think

about it. It turns out that Alex really took to it and has talked to Alan

about it. Through their discussions, Alan really got interested, so it's

something that's in the development stages at the moment. Can't say if it will

happen for sure, but the possibility of it coming together gets better with

each day."

Later it seemed that Ross's Earth X writer Jim Krueger came on as to help with the writing. Here's a bit more about the proposed series (from Greg Williams' wonderful Supreme site), from a webpost in 1999:

ROSS, KRUEGER ON SUPREME

by Rob Allstetter

Awesome Comics' Rob Liefeld said that Earth X collaborators Jim Krueger and

Alex Ross will be working on a Supreme mini-series to be released next year.

"I'm a huge fan of these two gentlemen's work and we're going to be doing a

huge project with them in the middle of 2000," Liefeld said. "Alex Ross and

Jim Krueger are doing a Supreme Prestige Format, three-issue mini-series.

"I can't tell you the title, but Alex called me months ago and said, 'I've

created a hundred new characters for this series.' I said, 'You did not.

Don't tell me a hundred because I'll go repeat that.' He said, 'I'm telling

you, it's a hundred new characters.'

"It's a story I've never seen done in comics before. Alex will be doing the

third book. He's designing all the characters, painting all the promotion

pieces, he's painting all the covers and he's doing the third book of the

series."

Liefeld said he couldn't announce the other artists for the project's first

two issues because the deals haven't been signed yet.

"You're going to see a lot of build-up over the next year," Liefeld said. "I

think of it as our Kingdom Come. I'm extremely flattered that someone as busy

and talented as Alex and Jim have decided to do this for us.

"Alex has shown me some of the sketches and they will blow you away. Alex

continues to cement himself as one of the most versatile creators in the

field and this stuff is going to take him to the next level.

"He said, 'Rob, this will be the most controversial thing I've ever done.'

And I said, 'Well, if you're doing it with me, I can guarantee that will be

the case - whether you want it to or not.'"

For the longest time, I couldn't find anything that said what the project actually would be about. But recently, Ross appeared on the Word Balloon Comic Podcast (at about the 1:30:00 mark) and shared a bit about the project:

"...Later in that year of 1998, I was starting to push this idea towards [Alan Moore]. I forget how much I fully described to him in rough form. I had this thing called World War Infinity, where the Infinity word would be represented by the symbol instead of a Roman numeral. And it would have involved a sort of play upon the... making fun of things like Crisis on Infinite Earths and even Kingdom Come, the idea of just this constant warring amongst a multitude of superheroes. So using the Extreme Studios part of Image as sort of its own universe and having this constant war seeming to come to a full conflagration of everything getting destroyed and then everything is starting over again. So my concept was a play upon Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray movie. So, Supreme keeps reliving the same day but in the telling, it would be different artists doing different sequences of pages. My hope at that time was to have gotten the then-recently kicked off of Superman team of Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway and Jon Bogdanove and anybody else I could get in there, like Perez, thinking we could have this all-star kind of thing where we're making analogs for DC-type characters, have Alan write it, and then ultimately we would break into a sort of metaphor for... Supreme breaches from fictional reality into the real reality of publishing where there would be these analog characters for DC editors and management. So it would have been this sort of cruel thing... This was never drawn out. This was just described by me to Alan and to anyone else, like Rob, who would listen. And the idea was Supreme would basically complain to these men representing the writer, the editor and Paul Levitz, basically, "Why are you putting me in this constant cycle? Why doesn't anything ever change?" So it's kind of an open critique of the way comics are written, if not Superman alone. And Alan heard all this pitch, was open to it initially and then said it sounded like him criticizing the way other people write and he can't put himself in that position. And I thought, well, I'll put myself in that position. So then Jim Krueger and I were talking it over and we were possibly going to do that for Rob as well, so Alan kind of bowed out of it. I wound up getting so stuck in the development of Earth X with Jim that we had our table very full at the time. And then Extreme Studios went kaput, went away and then came back and then was very confused in this moment of stuff where we were building up to something and then the rug got pulled out by the people funding Rob's thing. I had no idea that he didn't own it completely. But you know, hard lesson. Luckily we weren't engaged in any deals so nothing had to go away. ... There's more to the story I don't want to tell so I should stop there.Let's make it seem like no hard, no foul. Nobody got hurt. Nothing happened. Everybody is glorious. ... It would have been a fun idea but it was almost intended to somehow knock then-DC because I was becoming critical of my own conflicts with them internally."

Bringing it back to Supreme, Ross did a number of sketches, most likely for World War Infinity, which showed new uniforms for Supreme, Suprema and Radar. These sketches ended up being used by Awesome and Checker, even though they looked nothing like Moore's run.

 

What do you think? Could Ross's vision have worked or was it too meta?

A look at a piece of film from Supreme #41

Hey everyone! I wanted to show off this little thing I bought on ebay (thanks to Koom for pointing me toward it). This is a page of separations from Supreme #41. 

  

Essentially, a separation is four clear sheets, each with a different color from the four-color printing process: Cyan (C), Magenta (M), Yellow (Y) and Black (K). When you line them all up, they make the full page as it should look like when printed.

Here it is without the black layer. You can see the colorist's contribution pretty clearly.

 

Your desktop color printer does this all at once for anything you print. But for a comic that was printed at around the 40,000 number, it would go on press, with four gigantic drums (one for each color). Inside each drum is the plate, which allows that color (C,M,Y or K) to go through. 

 

It takes a pressmen to ensure that the final product has the correct amount of ink, lines up perfectly and looks like this separation. They do this for every page.

 

Here it is with magenta and yellow

One interesting to note about these separations. Generally, they're saved by the publisher and called the "film." When Liefeld licensed Supreme to Checker to print the trades and hardcovers, Checker didn't work from the film. Instead, they made scans from the printed pages. It's why they don't look as good as the original comics, which were printed from the film. But also, it's clear that Liefeld doesn't have the film anymore, either. So if there's ever going to be a reprint, it's going to be another one from scans.

Recreating Chris Sprouse's Supreme #50 cover... but with more characters

Thinking about Alan Moore's Supreme run, there are very few great covers. Perhaps the best was Chris Sprouse's special cover for issue #50:

 

 

Looking at it, it's got a lot of characters and highlights the breadth of the world Moore is creating. But #50 was early on in Sprouse's own run on Supreme. Looking closer, Supreme's face doesn't quite look right... maybe too rounded?

Also, some of the character choices are... interesting. I love the Glory, Die Hard side, with the Televillain and Vor-Em, Judy and HILDA, Billy Friday and Lucas Tate. On the other side, Professor Night is great, but does Roman really play any sort of role in the series? Diana is nice, but that Korgo is terrible. Shadow Supreme isn't shadowed. Fortunately, a really nice Suprema and Radar round it out.

 

Here's a better look at the line art for the cover:

 

 

This art is in the hands of a private collector and congratulations to them on their great piece of art! But I have a friend who does recreations and I mentioned that I wanted a recreation of this cover, but not an exact one. I wanted a cover like this that Sprouse would have done at the end of his run, after he was more familiar with the series and characters. 

My friend took up the challenge as long as I found all the reference images of the characters as Sprouse had drawn them and assembled them in a balanced design. I did so and he made this for me, complete with fake paste ups of the Supreme and Awesome logos:

We used the same Supreme body from the cover of #50 but used a head from later in Sprouse's run. The head is squarer and has the tufts of hair up front, which I think looks more in line.

We took out Roman and added Twilight from Sprouse's variant cover to Youngblood #1. Twilight felt necessary to combine with Professor Night and she appeared in Supreme #56 in her modern costume.

Over Supreme's shoulder, we kept Diana, but moved Billy and Lucas and added Carl and the issues of Omniman to make that whole corner feel themed around Dazzle Comics. Over them are MAGNO, from Sprouse's cover for #52b and Optilux from Return #1. As long as Diana was going to appear on the cover, I thought we needed to include young Judy nearby to play off their rivalry, so she appears from #54. Below them are Shadow Supreme, now shadowed, and we added Slaver Ant from Return #1.

Suprema and Radar keep their spot, but since we moved the Omniman comics, we added the League of Infinity below, with Future Girl here and Achilles here from Sprouse's League pin up from the gallery in #50.

On the bottom left, we included the other original members of the League with Witch Wench, Wild Bill and Giganthro. Above them is a better Krogo, from Return #1.

We combined Korgo with Vor-Em and the Tellevillain, below old Judy and Hilda and Darius Dax from Sprouse's cover for #52a (one of the only times he drew Dax). This creates a nice villain sections.

Above the villains we kept Glory and Die Hard. We included Dax's hand, reaching toward Supreme because it felt menacing.

And it wouldn't be complete without Szazs, appearing in Supreme #53.

Sprouse only worked on about 6 issues of Supreme, and many of those issues weren't completely done by him, sharing chores with Rick Veitch and others. But even in so few issues, he managed to portray so many of the quintessential characters from the series that we were able to put this recreation together. There's a few more characters I wish we could have added, but Sprouse never worked on Squeak or 60s Supreme. But I think this came out great and I have it hanging over my desk so I can enjoy it everyday.