The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1911: Youngblood #8, March 2009

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And that's it. Shaft and Cougar rescue Scion from her virtual prison, Diehard stops Stormhead's attack, and a deranged Spacehunter makes planetfall - and then nothing. The entire story disappears in favour of a Rob Liefeld helmed reboot where the team hang out with Barack Obama, and the original lineup is basically reinstated. No word on how Badrock stops from crumbling, no word on how the planet survives the impact of a crazed killer from space.

 

I honestly just can't understand Liefeld's decisions when it comes to this team. Indeed, I've just read an article in which he now reveals that the doesn't own the rights to the team anymore, which is why the most recent series simply stopped as well.

So how do I sum up Youngblood? The same way I always do - they're a crap team, a Teen Titans riff that is eventually given the chance to shine in the hands of excellent creators, until their original creator decides that they're popular enough for him to jump on the coattails, at which point the series tanks. I'm glad to see that characters like Doc Rocket, and later Suprema, have made a significant enough impact to be included in later iterations of the team. Indeed, that might be one of the motivating factors for me to have a look at the two series that follow this one, in 2012 and 2017 respectively.

But for now, I think we're done with them. I was going to read the older stuff I have kicking about, but I think I'd rather get back to my alphabetical indie creators. I think I need something a little less mainstream, and a little less inevitably disappointing. I honestly can't think of too many other forms of media where a story gets cut off in the middle like this. The occasional television series, I suppose, but this is truly one of the great drawbacks to producing serialized narratives - there's always the chance that the serial simply won't run long enough to contain the narrative.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1910: Youngblood #7, January 2009

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As we near the end of this iteration of the team, everything that's old is new again in a lot of ways. The Televillain didn't get much chance to be a villain in his initial appearances in Supreme, but Casey and Donovan are playing him to the hilt at the moment. It's cool to see some of the uses of his powers, rather than simply being able to travel through television signals and insert himself into broadcasts. In today's issue he uses his remote to actually rewind action in the real world as it's happening. He also appears to have trapped Scion in a virtual version of the Oprah show, and if she's not rescued soon she'll simply vanish into the ether. I don't recall the Televillain being quite so murderous in his other appearances, but perhaps he's realized that TV is much more violent in the modern era, and he's adapting.

I have to hand it to the creative team with regard to the number of plot threads they're keeping up in the air. At no point do things get confusing, and it never feels like too much is going on in the story. The comics from which Youngblood originally springs were not quite like this. A few of my reviews of Supreme from this era (which I re-read last night) note that entire battles sometimes took 2 or 3 issues, with no other story content to break up the fight. Or there were simply jumps from one place to another without any context or delicacy to the shift. I've read a few interviews with Liefeld, and even he admits his story-writing skills were lacking at the time of the original Youngblood series. I guess once we get to the final issue of this series, we'll find out if he's grown much. I don't recall being particularly impressed by it.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1909: Youngblood #6, November 2008

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Just to add on to a thought I had yesterday, I don't think that this current Youngblood series is delving deeply enough into the ways in which we're shaped by celebrity culture, but this is certainly not to say that writer Joe Casey isn't capable of such depth. Have a look at G0dland, for goodness' sake. So what we have in Youngblood, instead, is simply intelligent entertainment, rather, I suppose, that didactic entertainment. Though, in a lot of ways, all entertainment is didactic.

I've decided to read the rest of my Youngblood comics from the collection after I'm done this series. I'm curious as to how much of each iteration of the team is included in this later (but not latest) series. There's obviously a lot of Alan Moore's influence, with the use of the Spacehunters, the Televillain, Johnny and Doc, and the shared history that was set up in the Awesome U. But we also get characters from the older iterations, some of whom are only just now getting the proper character development one might expect of an almost 20 year old superhero. As with Prophet, the retroactive reading of various Youngblood series will be enhanced by the brilliance of the comics that follow them.

It also makes me curious, however, about the series that follow this one. I know that there was a revival of the title a few years after this one crashed, but I've no idea how much of the previous continuity is included in that revival. As part of the Extreme Studios initiative at Image Comics, the later series also takes on legacy numbering, so there's a chance it will also take on legacy aesthetic. That said, some of the other comics to come from this era, all legacy numbered, took the various Extreme heroes in some pretty interesting directions. I've waxed lyrical about them in previous posts about Youngblood, so I won't link again, but, honestly, just go read the Keatinge Glory or the Graham Prophet. Just really bloody good.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1908: Youngblood #5, September 2008

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 Seemingly out of the woodwork a new Youngblood team is assembled for network television, even as our heroes (the old Youngblood, that is) decide it's time to stop the rampage of the Televillain. I wasn't around comics for the introduction of Youngblood all those years ago, but I hadn't realized that the celebrity aspect was such a huge part of the initial idea of the team. I quite like how it's all playing out in this series, especially with the added threat of the Televillain. Though I don't think the series is delving as deeply as it could, we're getting a nice little surface commentary on the ways in which we're programmed, pun intended, by television and celebrity. It's something I've always had a difficult time understanding, the cults of celebrity that grow up around particular people in the public spotlight. And much like Shaft's Youngblood team, some public figures realize what a joke the whole celebrity industry is and step away from it. They often tend to be the ones that we respect all the more, as I'm sure the case will be for Shaft's team.

Brain's a little sleepy today. That's all I got.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1907: Youngblood #4, July 2008

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One of the things I really love about this project is that I get to go back and re-read stuff that I haven't read in, in this case, over a decade. In 2008, when this comic was coming out, I'd quit my job as a gas and hydro meter reader and was preparing to re-enter university in the coming Autumn. In fact, given comics publishing dates, there's a good chance this one came out as I was being inundated with reading from my classes. Which is probably why I don't remember it that well.

 

Joe Casey definitely has a long game in mind while writing this series, proof of which comes from not least the proclamation that, as of next issue, "phase 2" begins. Sadly it only gets 4 issues, but what a four issues it's likely to be. The new Spacehunter has just crash-landed on Earth with a warning, Leonard and Waxey Doyle jump back in as support characters, and the team finally flips the bird to the government who have been manipulating them, and gets on with the job of being superheroes. In fact, at the end of the issue, Shaft himself says this - that superheroes are not meant to be manipulated or scripted - they're meant to stand in the front when no one else is willing to. The rest of the team seems to be on board.

 

I noted Alan Moore's command of character in his brief Youngblood series - Casey isn't quite there. Johnny seems to have virtually no personality, unfortunately, though that may be from all of the recreational pharmaceuticals he's "tested" on himself. We're getting a little bit of Doc and Cougar, but the focus is definitely on Shaft, and Badrock a little bit. Actually, Badrock's story is really fascinating - I don't remember how it turns out, but it's not the story I was expecting from him. Something is going drastically wrong with this powers.

 

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1906: Youngblood #3, April 2008

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Well, as the above cover attests, Image's oldest superhero has fallen.

Youngblood v.1 #1 is an important comic. Now, this is not because it's a good comic. In fact, it's well-known throughout the industry as being a particularly bad comic. Rob Liefeld's artwork has, of course, gotten better over the years (though it's still not my cup of tea), and I think he's finally, for the most part, acknowledged that he needs a scripter, if not a writer, to achieve some level of good story. Youngblood #1, however, suffers from what I can only imagine was an over-inflated ego that believed it could do everything. All that said, it's an important comic because it was the first Image comic published. I mean, honestly, you can grab it for less than a buck most places, as it was extremely (see what I did there?) overprinted and, as I say, was really not very good.

But what comes out of it is pretty fantastic, as I've been saying for the last few weeks now.

Today's issue deals with the aftermath of Shaft's death - not necessarily how each of the team members deals with this blow, but how it's going to be presented in the reality show. This, I think, speaks again to what I was talking about yesterday, the idea that those in charge seem to think that they know how those in their charge should be acting, thinking, and feeling. It's an attitude that sees people as cogs in a machine, rather than human beings who have an almost infinite range of experience, and reaction, to life.

(Sometimes I read back over these posts, and I think, "Y'know, Tom, you aren't really talking about comics here are you?")

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1905: Youngblood #2, February 2008

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The show continues, and Badrock discovers a problem with his usually impervious derma.

I quite like that there's an undercurrent, mostly from the heroes, of explicit knowledge that this reality show angle is going to blow up. There's a slightly more-archetypal story going on here that I really, really recognize. It's that moment when someone thinks that they have a handle on a situation because they've done all the research and tested everything with focus groups and done all the brand marketing and other bullshit...but they've never taken into account what it's actually like to work on the front lines where all of that research etc. means absolutely nothing. In a much less-superpowered milieu, I've seen it in stores and institutions I've worked at - the higher-ups think that their new ideas and initiatives will very easily be implemented and will make everything wonderful, but they have no experience of how things actually work on the sales floor or in the classroom, and they get crabby when someone who does know how things work tells them their idea is a bad one.

We are definitely seeing this in Youngblood, and it's thoroughly unsurprising that it's the U.S. government that is refusing to listen to people who, quite simply, know better. That idea that just because you're in a position of authority you somehow automatically know better than those in your charge is so frustrating. It completely discounts particular kinds of knowledge. Just as I was leaving academia, there were conversations about FanAcs, or fan academics, and how much authority such people should be afforded in discourse about fandom. To me, the only difference between myself as a fan and/or academic and a "FanAc" is that I've had the benefit of getting a language with which to have detailed conversations about the subject, whereas a FanAc has not. But a good, well-trained academic can recognize when someone is talking about something for which they don't have the words and then supply those words to the person. It's called teaching, and it's something that, in my experience, a lot of academics need to spend a lot more time thinking about and doing.

Well, that went off the rails into a rant about academia. Sorry.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1904: Youngblood #1, January 2008

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Taking a break from our alphabetical investigation of the small press, just for a week or so.

 

There's a text feature on the inside front cover of this comic that gives a brief history of Youngblood, outlining their status as government agents and celebrity superheroes. There's a brief note about a revival of the team that "collapsed under its own weight," the only real nod to the Moore/Skroce team and what happened to them. Though, later in the issue as the team fights a giant robot, Shaft notices something familiar, and I'm wondering if the tech is Big Brother-inspired. Leonard Doyle is, sadly, absent from the team.

In that vein, along with Leonard, Suprema and Twilight are also missing. I know Suprema shows up in at least one issue of Bloodstrike that I've got that came out around the same time as the relaunch of all of these Extreme Studios titles. Glory, Prophet, Supreme, and a host of others got reboots, and really good reboots around this time. Prophet, amongst the rest, went on to have a respectable run and told an absolutely amazing story. It would have been lovely to see where Youngblood under Casey and Donovan's capable hands would have gone, but, as I've noted in previous posts about the series, in issue #9, partway through a storyline, Liefeld pulls the plug and gives us a really lame issue, and then the series fizzles.

But I don't want to go into the series just waiting for it to end. There's some excellent stuff happening here, stuff that, while it owes a great deal to the previous series, charts its own directions and narratives. I'm excited to read it again, as I haven't since it was first published. The team is reassembled and the celebrity aspect is pushed - the idea is that the government wants to be able to export superheroes the same way that they do Hollywood stars. I get the sense it's just not going to work out that way.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Joe Casey is among my favourite writers - his run on Adventures of Superman is probably one of the best Superman stories I've read.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1897: Awesome Adventures, 1999

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With a whimper and a bang. This is how Moore and Skroce's ends.

We get about half a story by Skroce and half by Dietrich Smith and Marat Mychaels. And, actually, half a story. This is the first part of a two-parter, the end of which has the team trapped by old Professor Night villain in a seemingly inescapable situation. They do escape, though, as Joe Casey's excellent run attests - but really, the team never escapes.

And unfortunately, there only being 2.5 issues, there's not a lot more to say. The first two issues are amazing, the last bit slightly less so. We get a little look at the world that surrounds Moore's Supreme, and at some of the characters that were shown in the flashbacks from that series. And then just about all of that disappears. There are a couple of callbacks in Prophet, and in Glory, and then it's done. Though we also get the alternate, remixed version of the universe in America's Best Comics.

Hmmmm.

Been awhile since I read those.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1896: Youngblood #2, August 1998

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Issue number two is everything issue one was and so much more. The return of Sentinel! The introduction of some new old villains. And the team splits into smaller teams and fends off their nemeses.

I honestly think that this is one of the best team superhero books that I've read. Every character is defined and utilized in just about equal amount, though it never feels forced. And the team functions believably - both in their superheroic and social aspects. One of the great things about Roger Stern and Sal Buscema's run on The Avengers is that they understood, perhaps better than any other Avengers creative team, how a team of superhuman heroes would interact. The egos and the romances and the cameraderie, etc., etc. Moore's Youngblood is probably the closest other team book that aspires to that - but, alas, cut short.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1895: Youngblood #1, February 1998

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It's always bittersweet for me when I pick up this comic. I think, given the opportunity, it could have become a favourite (it already is, really), and it could have become one of the best superhero team books out there. If Liefeld's claims are correct, and a huge amount of what would have been the Awesome Universe went into Moore's America's Best Comics, I'm actually not sure where the Youngblood-inspired stuff went. Top 10 is the only team book in the ABC Universe, and it's very, very different from Youngblood. I do think some of the storylines were recycled. There's some similarities between the story in Awesome Adventures and one of Tom Strong's storylines, but aside from that, I don't see that many reminders in the latter of the former.

As I noted yesterday, Joe Casey picks this team up, with a slightly modified line-up about a decade later, and it's very good, but once again cut short by Mr. Liefeld. For now, however, we have the three short stories and 3(ish) issues of the team from Awesome, and they are, honestly, awesome.

A cool first issue adventure - there's a special that came out just after what's referred to as "The Awesome Implosion," which I take to mean that Awesome lost a lot of money and lot of creators, called Alan Moore's Awesome Handbook - this prose publication outlines Moore's plans for the first years of both Youngblood and Glory in the wake of neither of those series having much chance of ever seeing the light of day. The Youngblood series was seen as a series of single issue adventures, with the occasional two-parter, which I'll talk about in a couple of days. The series sounds fun and interesting and, of course, really intelligent.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1894: Youngblood #1+, 1997

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 Yes, the ladies are in "lingerie." I"m not sure why, and Doc Rocket doesn't appear to be sure either. In my head canon, this is part of a publicity photo shoot that the team agreed to, and then the photographer asked all the women to pose in something other than their costumes. Good for business in the late 90s, perhaps, but not for representation, really. Maybe put Shaft front and center in his tighty-whiteys, and then we'll be okay.

The opening to Moore's Youngblood is a short piece about Twilight, Professor Night's protege, and a reprint of the Awesome Holiday Special story. It functions nicely as an intro, actually, offering just enough background on what's happened in the Awesome Universe recently (in Supreme and Judgment Day) that a new reader would be comfortable picking up the new series. Actually, that's kind of a nice part of this revamp of the team - one doesn't really need to know anything about the previous incarnations of the team in order to enjoy it. Shaft talks briefly about the disbanding of the old team, but their existence and adventures don't seem to have too much bearing on the direction of the new series. I'm sure this was by design. Liefeld's Youngblood comes up for a good deal of criticism - separating the new team from the old seems a good idea, especially since that's basically what the stated purpose of Judgment Day actually was.

Looking forward to the 3-ish issues we get - it also occurred to me that there's the excellent Joe Casey Youngblood that follows this series a decade later, and features basically the same line-up for 8 issues until Liefeld made another horrendous decision, kicked that team off the book, and tried to do it himself. Series ended after his first issue. *sigh*

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I really like Joe Casey's work - he's every bit as good as the Waids and Loebs of the world.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1880: Judgment Day Aftermath, March 1998

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It's hard to gauge when particular issues from Awesome came out, as the cover dates aren't always the dates upon which, or even near to the dates, they were published. For example, today's comic seems to have come out 8 months after the previous issue in the series, but whether either of them came out when they are purported to have is difficult to answer. The reason I'm ruminating on this is that, aside from this issue, most of the characters represented here never make any other appearances in the Awesome U. Spacehunter has this one story, as do the Allies and the new Conquerors/New Men. Youngblood and Glory get a bit more, but only 2 or 3 issues. And Maximage, whose story is very intriguing, vanishes after this. It's a pity, as this gives us, more than many of the other comic published by Awesome, a clear idea of Moore's vision for the universe. From the bare evidence here, I'd guess that the stories Moore had planned around Glory and Maximage became Promethea. There's just too much evidence otherwise. Everything else? I'd be unsurprised to find that most of those story ideas went into Tom Strong. Except maybe the Spacehunter one. That one kind of stands on its own.

Much as I like the idea of metatextual comics, this one is a bit on the nose. Artist Gil Kane actually appears as "Kane, the Imagineer" in the story, and the characters are referred to as characters by Kane in the comic. Moore establishes here a precursor to the Immateria of Promethea, though rather than that realm of dream and fantasy, this imaginary realm is manipulated to influence the material realm of the Awesome Universe. Given his final Supreme story, I wonder if Moore had plans to expand this concept had the Awesome U not imploded.

That finishes off Judgment Day. Today's Youngblood story takes place directly after the prologue story in the Awesome Holiday Special, and then we dive right into the series proper. Well, sort of. We've got one premium comic with a tiny bit more prologue in it, and then we get to the series. If one can call 2.5 issues a series. (I'll explain when we get there.)

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've read a bit more Gil Kane for the project. I think I like his older stuff better.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1879: Judgment Day Final Judgment, July 1997

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So we reach the end of Moore's revamp of the Extreme Universe - this series is really a look in minute detail at the process of a Revision Wave, as Moore more obscurely details in his earliest Supreme stories. The Revision Wave is, of course, the unending process of contemporization that happens to comic book superheroes over the course of their existences. The significant bits and pieces are kept from previous continuities and the rest is filled in as the universe settles into its new form. We'll see this moving forward with the short-lived Youngblood series, as well as with Supreme when I get back to reading it.

I've noted my love of the revision wave theory before, and I've even started scripting a Supreme series set after the next one - though given my disparaging comments about Mr. Liefeld on this blog, I can't imagine he'd ever let me work on Supreme - a shame really. In my version, Diana Dane is Supreme. I think it would be pretty good.

I also love about this comic how Moore uses Mercury's Book to explain exactly how the ultra-violence of the last decade had come to overwhelm the Extreme characters, and, by proxy, how that same violence influenced most major superhero publishers of the time. So not only does Moore give the Awesome U it's back story, but it also offers an explanation for the real-world descent into violence that afflicted superheroes in the early 90s. And given that Moore is a magician, and magicians use words to effect change in the world, could we perhaps see Moore's explanation of the early Image violence and grittiness as a retroactive magical spell that explains what happened to comics then?

Or am I just talking to hear my own voice, so to speak?

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1878: Judgment Day Omega, July 1997

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The history that Alan Moore sets up in this series is really quite fantastic, and the reactions of the characters watching the trial are set up to mirror the readers' reactions as well. This is a situation where it's preferable (perhaps the only situation where it's preferable ;D) to have some background knowledge of the various characters and their style of adventures. When Troll's back story is revealed, it is shocking to his teammates. Similar revelations about Diehard have the same affect. Just as when Supreme is discovering his own history, so too are the younger heroes of the Awesome Universe discovering the history that they had no idea stretched out behind them.  But then, I suppose Moore is writing the book for them at this point.

I'm intrigued by the depth of the history that Moore manages to pack into these three issues. I'm trying to suss out whether or not it's a convincing history because it's well-written (which it is), or if it's because the characters are so familiar, in that they're homages to older characters, that that history is inflecting the Awesome U's history. I'm sure it's a little bit of both, and that's the point of some of the characters, I'm sure. As I've noted before, the Awesome characters, for the most part, are pastiches of older heroes anyway. But Moore performs a bit of comic book alchemy here in much the same way that Warren Ellis does in Planetary a decade or so later. He uses familiar kinds of characters to give us a familiar kind of history. It's a lovely little fictional trick to play, and very much in keeping with the spirit of the story of the book that being told to us.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1877: Judgment Day Alpha, June 1997

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The advertising for this series claimed that Judgment Day was the greatest thing Alan Moore had written since Watchmen. That's a pretty big claim to make, and it sadly is not true. Don't get me wrong - Judgment Day is a stellar series. Over the course of 3 issues, not counting the Sourcebook or Aftermath issues, it manages to create a coherent, internally-logical superhero universe out of the tatters of Extreme Studios and Maximum Press. And, honestly, creating something even remotely logical out of that is quite the feat.

This is probably one of the few comics illustrated by Mr. Liefeld that I actually very much enjoy. It's not that I'm a fan of his art, but the whole point of the series is to transition the characters in Youngblood, and those connected to them, into a very different kind of superhero universe. The violence of the preceding decade or so of comics is in fact a major plot point to the series. Perhaps a good way to compare this series to Watchmen is that the metatextual commentary is even more at the fore this time around. Watchmen manages to comment on the superhero genre by placing them in what we might think of as realistic situations. Judgment Day, instead, takes the superhero and uses it to explore not just the genre, but the very act of writing itself, comic or otherwise. It's this aspect that I think draws me into it, and the Awesome Universe, more than anything else.

Plus they get some frickin' fantastic artists to do the flashback sequences, and I'm a sucker for a good flashback.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Another of the characters who undergoes a significant revamp in the Awesome U is Glory. Her eventual series also has a ridiculous amount of variant covers, which I decided to collect and talk about. 

John Prophet, another Liefeldian pastiche, also undergoes a transformation, and series, that revamps this universe again, and it's utterly brilliant.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1876: Judgment Day Sourcebook, 1997

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 Let's jump back into the Awesome Universe for a bit, shall we? I decided that I'd read Moore's take on Youngblood for the next few days, encompassing this series and the sadly unfinished eponymous series. Moore uses Judgment Day to transition the old Extreme Studios characters into the Awesome Universe, as publisher Jeph Loeb mentions in the editorial in today's comic. Indeed, the idea of the hyper-violent early years of many of these characters becomes a salient plot point in the series.

Today's issue, more than most of the Awesome U stuff, links to Moore's later work in Promethea. This "sourcebook," more a preview story really, is narrated by Mercury, a linguistic deity who plays a prominent role in Promethea's origin. My favourite lines from today's issue are his final words, "Spellbound, forget about the laughs and thrills that words may change a world...and language kills." As well as being a Youngblood story, Judgment Day is a stylized look at the way that language and words shape our world in a very real, phenomenological way. I emphasize this when I teach English and Literature, but I think only a very few of my students consider the real ramifications of this. Even the stories we tell ourselves are built of the language that we know, and it is these stories that shape the very way in which we view, and interact with, the world.

Mercury's only half right, though. Language may indeed kill, but it also births and creates. I guess the point of the series is that the two can, sadly, happen at the very same time.

 

Also, I will always, 100%, read a story written by Moore and illustrated by Sprouse and Vey. Utterly, utterly brilliant combination of creators.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1870: Awesome Holiday Special, December 1997

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In much the same way I wrote a series on the minor works of Steve Gerber, I think it would be worthwhile to do the same for Alan Moore. He's had so many series that just never went anywhere, and for the most part they were going to be amazing. There was a recent interview with Leah Moore in which she described her father's deep love for superheroes and the damage that was done to this love by his time in the comics industry. It's actually quite sad that someone who so obviously loves superheroes so much got treated the way he did by virtually every major superhero publisher in North America. No wonder he's so bitter.

The reason I bring this up is that there's a Youngblood story in today's issue that is the prelude to the 2.5 issues we end up getting of his reboot of the team. As I was reading the story, told in the voice of team leader Jeff Terrel, Shaft, I was amazed at how Moore's voice in the story was so different from his voice in any of his other stories. I know this seems like an obvious thing to point out, but a lot of writers have one voice when they write - their own - and they simply layer it over whatever character they're writing. But one of Moore's great gifts is to give each character their own distinctive voice, to the extent that I'd be hard-pressed to point to a comic that is actually written in Moore's own voice. Like Foucault said, the author isn't a person, it's a function, and at the best of times that function includes an erasure, or subsumption, of the author's own voice.

But there's more than just Moore in this issue. I have to say, at the end of the comic, I was left smiling and feeling pretty good, which is exactly what one wants from a holiday comic. I'm actually surprised that I haven't read this one already, but I'm glad that I was able to leave it until I was reading Fighting American. The FA story in this issue is about S.P.I.C.E., written and drawn (almost exclusively in full page panels) by Mr. Liefeld. It's not bad, but not great, but also takes place after the Rules of the Game series I just finished, as FA is in the process of putting the Allies back together.

What else? Both the Coven and Kaboom stories were good enough to make me want to track down their respective series. Honestly, I'm not that far off from having everything that Awesome produced, and, as I've said before, I just love the hell out of this universe. Back to FA's final Awesome outing tomorrow. Then maybe Youngblood?

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Though I missed it this year, I'm usually pretty good about reading holiday-themed comics (though apparently I have two different tags for them?)

And if I'm going to dive into Youngblood, you can find what I've previously said about them here and here.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1074: Team Youngblood #7, March 1994

I'll write this up tomorrow. There's some interesting things being done in this crossover to do with back story, which I've been thinking about with this read of Supreme.

A few days back I leveled the criticism at Supreme and his Extreme cohorts that the type of drama they were gunning for is simply not possible without the weight of history behind them. The crossover we're (sort of) following is doing some interesting work in filling that history in.

I should mention we're taking a slight detour back in time - I realized I had another part of this crossover, so I went back to read it.

In today's issue, and in the rest of those in the crossover, the reactions of some characters to Quantum help us to understand the history of the Extreme universe. I call it this because, although the Image superhero comics share a universe, very little of what happens in one imprint's corner affects anything in the other imprints' corners.Apparently the Extreme U includes people possessed of the "Nu-Gene," and those who develop powers as a result are something of a cross between the X-Men and the Inhumans. Making Quantum, basically, Magneto. From this vantage, I think we can understand the fear evinced upon his escape. Remember that everything in this universe seems to be totally psychotic, and such is the case with Quantum. He literally just decides to tear it all down.

We also see, in the background, a man named Proctor trying to reassemble a team of "Newmen" who opposed Quantum previously. Here, too, we get a glimpse into a past that is slowly being both built and revealed. Much like Moore's Supreme, the past is being filled in in fits and starts...only to be hit, inevitably, with a revision wave in about 30 issues.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1041: Youngblood #3, August 1992 (What I Missed in the 90s Week, Day 1)

Happy New Year, all. To kick off the year, I'm going to read comics from Image that came out in the period between 1989 and 1995, a dark period in which I neither read nor collected comics. Apparently I missed quite a lot.

So.

Youngblood.

Let me tell you why I actually really enjoyed this comic. It was not for the art, though I'll say that of all the Rob Liefeld comics I've read, this one is the one where I think I kind of get his art style. I see what appeals to people about it. Well, maybe. It's just that everything is so hyper-realized, so over the top proportionately ridiculous, but it's taking itself so seriously. And it wasn't for the story, which at times seemed to be poking fun at the consumer collector culture that it itself was in the midst of fueling....or something? I don't really know what was happening. The reason I liked it is because of Prophet. I gushed enough about that series a few months back. It really is one of the finest superhero comics I've read. And many of the characters I read about today have futures in that series. It retroactively takes these barely defined characters and gives them identity, which is kind of a lovely gift to give to these otherwise pretty bad comics. All of the various Youngblood series do this - for me, Jeff Terrel is not just the old man from Prophet, but also the sort-of seasoned hero of both Moore's and Casey's takes on the team. He may look like a horrifying serial killer on that cover, but I know from (future?) context that he's actually a big softie. I hadn't anticipated that happening, but it's certainly going to make reading some of this early Image stuff a lot more palatable. Not to say it was all terrible. But much of it was.

To be continued.

(Oh, oh, I forgot, the flip book!

There's a five-page story that introduces one of my favourite superheroes ever: Supreme! Perhaps this is finally the year that I track down all the old stuff I'm missing, and read the whole thing.)