It’s understood that IPC, who published 2000AD weekly, were unimpressed by the poor sales of DC’s Batman at the time.Presented for the first time with stark, stunning new coloring by Bolland, Batman: The Killing Joke is Alan Moore’s unforgettable meditation on the razor-thin line between sanity and insanity, heroism and villainy, comedy and tragedy.Īccording to the grinning engine of madness and mayhem known as The Joker, that’s all that separates the sane from the psychotic. I’d already started drawing a few things for DC at the time so contact had been made with the other side of the Pond. There were even discussions between IPC, publishers of 2000AD, and DC Comics about a “Batman vs Judge Dredd” one-off. There were plans afoot to team up Alan and me to draw an alternative take on the American Superhero trope called “Rocket Redglare”. The guys at Forbidden Planet had formed a publishing group called Titan Books. All signals that here was a writer of some standing. His darker political magnum opus “V For Vendetta” with David Lloyd. “The Bojeffries Saga” with Steve Parkhouse. Literate, ingenious, irreverent, moving and funny. Alan Moore’s writing, however, was in a league of its own. Pat Mills and John Wagner’s stories for Judge Dredd were outstanding and made that character rightly popular. We were mainly artists but soon joining that group was hairy Midlander (you could tell from his accent) Alan Moore. We met annually at the recently established Forbidden Planet shop in London to sign for 2000AD fans and monthly in local pubs for drinks and pizzas. We were a closely knit bunch of young artists. Skipping back a few years to 1977 - Dave Gibbons, Mick McMahon, Kevin O’Neil and I and a number of other artists had been in at the beginning of the UK’s newly launched 2000AD.

You'll find the lost Youngbloods in the Youngblood section and the fan-edit of the last Supreme in After Awesome.īelow is the archive of posts broken up by book. 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. Over the course of a year, I put it all together here.Įach week I did a main 'Weekly Reading' post that was a read-through of that issue. Having gathered quite a bit of information about Moore's Supreme and Awesome runs, I decided to create a home for the forgotten Awesome. And then it all went out of print and was forgotten by way too many. 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. He would radically reshape the character, the book, and due to forces beyond his control, a whole comic book universe.

So a long time ago (the mid-1990s), the greatest writer in comics agreed to take over the writing duties for Image Comics' Supreme.

Batman comics alan moore