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.

Binding 1963

My friend Derek asked me to bind together the issues of Alan Moore's 1963 into a collected hardcover book. He asked that it include the Shadowhawk crossover and the A Touch of Silver story, as well as a gallery of unused art he had collected. 

I'm not a good enough binder that I like to do jobs for others, but I had some new tools and techniques I wanted to try, and so agreed.

I started by sewing the comics together. The straps that go through the loops get glued down to the folded endpapers, like so:

 

 

 The endpapers are glued to your first page by a thin strip of glue near the spine. Sewing isn't strong enough to keep your book together, so you apply a lot of glue along the spine. I got a new bookpress to push the comics together, making a really tight binding, which came out well.

 

I wanted to trim the comics and extras just a little so they didn't feel too uneven. 

 With the book block ready, I then made the book cover with some buff colored buckram I had lying around.

 

 

Then I glued the cover onto the book block.

 

 

 

I'm not very good at decorating buckram. I have never had much luck with embossing or anything like that, so I cover up this simple cover with a nice dust jacket. Alex Ross had done a nice piece of art for 1963, so that became the front cover.

 

 

I found this ad for the 1963 series and loved its style and how it listed all the creators and thought it'd be a lot cooler than anything I could design for the back cover.

 

Here's what the inside looks like with the contents page and the gallery of art: