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

Tuesday, May 3, 2022

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: