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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

Monday, December 26, 2022

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!

1 comment:

  1. The Youngblood game looked interesting to me, something like an XCom/Early Fallout type experience. But it's described as more of a real-time Diablo-like action game. Interestingly, it looks incredibly similar to a game called "Freedom Force" which, much like Supreme, was a tribute to Silver Age comic books.

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