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

Sunday, July 24, 2022

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.

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