One of them was Youngblood: Bloodsport. Here's what I said about Bloodsport before:
...Mark Millar started writing Youngblood: Bloodsport, the worst version of Youngblood that actually made it to print. While a number of versions over the years were bad or just mediocre, Bloodsport is downright repugnant. And it revels in it.
The series deals with a situation where there are too many superheroes and not enough job opportunities. When a new version of Youngblood is being put together, all of the various members show up to audition. The problem is this will be a group put together from superteams from alternate dimensions, so there can be only one Youngblood member from this dimension. In order to decide who it'll be, the Youngblood members have to fight each other to the death to decide who it will be.
Remember all the jokes Moore made through Suprema and the Dazzle Comics about how bad comic writing had gotten, this is exactly the kind of thing he was talking about. Everything is a bad drug or sex joke, designed to offend.
Only one full issue came out. There was a bootleg version of issue 2, but it was printed in such limited numbers it's impossible to find a scan of it online and I've never seen a physical copy for sale.
Josh Hines recently found a copy and was nice enough to send me photos of it. So if anyone has spent all these years looking to read about a fight to the death between Suprema and Twilight, your wish is granted!
Most likely Bloodsport 2 wasn’t really ready for whatever convention they were going to, so they just put it out in this bootleg edition. But because of this we get to see a bit behind the curtain.
One of the more interesting parts of this find is the bits of Millar's script. Clearly, this was intended as a four-issue miniseries. But he also wrote in cameos by the likes of Swamp Thing, the Man Thing, the Heap and even Namor. He meant this as a send-up of all superheroes and not just the Liefeld/Awesome ones. I don't know if that would have made the series any better, but it was interesting, at least.
Anyway, check it out for yourself:
What'd you think?
This was clearly the best iteration of Youngblood. It stood out. The original series, nobody liked. No one really bought past issue #1. Bloodsport was definitely the correct way of actually integrating these characters into people's homes. It gave you something to care about, for one thing. I personally enjoyed it. But to each their own. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure Bloodsport gave people anything to care about, but I can definitely see an argument for Bloodsport being a fun way to deal with characters nobody cares about. If you care about them, why would you want to see them kill each other?
DeleteInterestingly, Alan Moore seemed to write Judgment Day and his Youngblood as though there were fans attached to these characters and I've always wondered whether that was true and whether there were people upset with the changes he was doing. I suspect not.
For the record, I was a fan of those original character and initially I did not like what Moore was doing to them. I'd been buying Supreme from the beginning and I actually stopped buying it 2 or 3 issues into Alan Moore's run. It was such a drastic departure from the original concept and it just seemed like he was making a cheap Superman parody, so I quit. I missed Judgment Day, but I do recall seeing an add for Moore's Youngblood and I just wasn't interested. Again, he changed the whole concept, from a U.S. Government-sponsored team to a private team, and with almost all new characters! So I skipped that too.
DeleteIt was only several years later when I started to become familiar with the work of Alan Moore, finally reading Watchmen and Swamp Thing and his other major works, that I went back and tracked down all of his Supreme and other Awesome books, and I now I could appreciate what he was doing with them. Although I do still like the original "mean Supreme" (I loved how Erik Larsen revived it later), I think Moore's version is entertaining alternate take.
That's totally fair. I think there are more fans like you out there who enjoyed the pre-Moore Supreme and Youngblood than I knew before doing this blog. My favorite post-Moore runs are the ones that combine his love of superheroes with the dark humor of the old Extreme days. Seeley's Bloodstrike, I thought, was the perfect combination of both. I liked some of what Larsen was doing, but it felt like maybe he didn't understand what the other fans liked about the Moore run.
DeleteWell Larsen wasn't doing Moore's Supreme, so yeah fans of that probably wouldn't like it. Larsen was bringing back the original version, which was more like "What if The Punisher had the powers of Superman?" which I originally liked and thought it had potential that it never lived up to because the original series went though a dozen different creative teams over its 40-issue run. Which is why now I can say I don't blame Moore for scrapping all that and going in another direction. But I loved what Larsen did, and which he'd stayed longer.
DeleteAnyway, I've got a whole category on Supreme on my blog:
https://iblogalot.com/category/supreme/
Wow, I only just now noticed that my initial reply to you is a year to the day after yours, November 14, 2019 and November 14, 2020. Even the time of the posts is similar, yours at 8:17am and mine at 8:16pm. I swear that wasn't planned.
DeleteBut I'll note that I've been going through more of your old posts here which I hadn't read before. I definitely understand more of your mindset, you're clearly an Alan Moore fan first and foremost, not specifically a fan of Rob Liefeld's characters. So I can see how most of the non-Moore work doesn't appeal to you.
Ha ha... well, the blog is called Alan Moore's Forgotten Awesome. I basically started it when a bunch of Moore diehard fans said they'd never read Supreme. With it out of print and the terrible trades, I figured it was worth doing a blog to remind people about it.
DeleteYeah, we'll probably just have to disagree on Larsen. In all he said, it sounded like he was trying to thread the needle on Moore fans and the "Mean" Supreme fans. You can probably speak to how he did on the second part better than I can, but I thought he went too far in a number of ways and turned off the Moore-Supreme fans.
And that's fine. It's comics. Writers come and writers go. I think it would have been different if Moore had written an ending. The fact that there isn't one left people like me looking for something... something they didn't get from Larsen, which probably isn't particularly fair to him.
Anyway, it's fun chatting with people who like Supreme and Awesome for all different reasons.
You make a good point in regards to the end. Technically the Mean Supreme did get his ending, with Supreme #40, and then #41 launched the new direction with Moore Supreme. But Moore Supreme never got his proper ending, certainly not the one that Alan Moore intended. He did say he was building up to a massive Daxia vs. Supremacy War and then he was going to be done, but he only left behind that one final script showing the start of the war, which Larsen drew but then wrote his own ending which just brought back Mean Supreme and had him take over. For someone who'd been waiting so long for a conclusion I can see why that was unsatisfying to you.
DeleteAnd then of course I'm now in that same boat you were in, as Larsen ended his run with a major cliffhanger that we'll likely never get a proper ending to. Warren Ellis chose to just ignore everything and do whatever the heck he was doing in Supreme Blue Rose. And likewise Chad Bowers was doing his own thing in the last Youngblood series, where he just had Suprema as "Supreme," with hints of it being due to another revision, but never explained what how that happened.
That's the thing. I liked a lot of the series after Moore's. I loved Seeley's Bloodstrike, and enjoyed a couple of the Youngblood series. But they never got proper endings and the continuity changed, so they spent all that time setting things up that were ignored in the series that followed. It's incredibly frustrating.
DeleteAh, Bloodsport. Another unfinished creator-owned Rob Liefeld project. I remember being active on the Millarworld forums at the the time and Rob's story about this kept changing. Multiple times he claimed that issue #2 was complete, and would be out "soon." And this original announced 4-issue miniseries was changed to just 3 issues. He then found time to complete a 6-issue X-Force miniseries for Marvel with Fabian Nicieza, and at one point claim that he was deliberately holding back on releasing Bloodsport #2 because he was waiting until the X-Force book was finished so that Bloodsport could benefit from the renewed publicity that Rob was getting. Obviously that never came to pass. I did managed to snag a copy of the bootleg issue on Ebay, I don't recall what I paid for it, but I don't think it was too bad.
ReplyDeleteHa ha... yeah, Liefeld's claims of things being complete should never be believed.
Delete