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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, January 1, 2018

Youngblood before Moore

If you'll bear with me, I'm going to mix the schedule up a bit. I want to get into some of the background on Youngblood before we start the Weekly Reading, so I'm pushing this week's Weekly Reading back to Friday. Thanks!

Youngblood was created by Rob Liefeld in the mid-1980s for Megaton Comics before they made their way to Image Comics in 1992. Liefeld was a fan of DC Comics' Teen Titans (the Wolfman/Perez era) and the Legion of Superheroes, and based on those interests he combined them to form Youngblood (not to be confused with Project: Youngblood from Eclipse Comics). The original Youngblood members were Sentinel, Sonik, Cougar, Bhrahma, Riptide, Psi-Fire, and Photon. By 1991, another publication origin for Youngblood came as a new Teen Titans proposal series featuring Speedy, Harlequin, a pair of Kh'undian warriors, a S.T.A.R. Labs android and an unknown character. That proposal was rejected.

At that same year Liefeld left Marvel over their strain relationship and merchandising rights for the success from his tenure on New Mutants and X-Force. He became one of the founders of Image and with his imprint studio, Extreme Studios, he revived his Youngblood comic and integrated his Teen Titans proposal to created new characters to expand the team roaster: Shaft, Badrock, Die Hard, Chapel, Vogue, and Combat.

Liefeld's idea for Youngblood as celebrity superheroes:
"...if superheroes really did exist, they would be treated much the same way as movie stars and athletes."
With large team of superheroes, Liefeld came up with a solution of splitting the team into two fractions: the new characters became the home front team and the original team became the overseas "away" team.

The teams were government funded and did government operations, such as taking out a foreign leader.

To be honest, I've read a ton of these, but they made almost no impression other than Shaft was a young hotshot, Badrock was a young fun-loving guy, and Sentinel was the smart and able leader. So, I guess I can't really tell you what happened in Youngblood before Alan Moore.


According to Liefeld, the conversation about Moore taking on Youngblood went like this: "I called him up one time and said, ‘Hey Alan, how about we do a Teen Titans style book,’ and he went quiet and he goes ‘That’s what Youngblood is.’ I thought that was our Avengers-type book."

Except Moore says he never spoke to Liefeld. So, whatever. Basically, Youngblood was a clean slate for Moore to do whatever he wanted and what he wanted to do was a Teen Titans-style book for the Awesome universe.

2 comments:

  1. Greetings! I just wanted to comment and say how awesome this Blog is! I went back and started reading from the first blog post.

    With the currently Re-booting of the Windstorm Universe. (Led by the awesome Warren Ellis.) I was interested in looking back and reading the early issues/volumes of the Image Comics. YoungBloods and Supreme were at the very end of my list until I learned that Alan Moore was involved and came across this blog.

    Super enlightening and entertaining. Keep up the good work!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks. That's very nice of you to say. I'll have to see what Ellis is up to. I'm writing a thing about his Supreme Blue Rose that'll be going up on the blog in a little bit.

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