Weekly Reading: Youngblood #9

Never published by Awesome Entertainment

The cover:

Title: Crow John, What You Done?

(Later issues of Youngblood were never in print. The only way to read them can be found online. Obvious pseudo-lawyer language: If anyone who owns the rights to these issues/scripts has a problem with me linking to them or posting pages from them, let me know and I'll remove them.)

You have to pity the writer who has to follow up Alan Moore. Even if they're great, they're never going to be as good. And you either have to come up with a whole new concept and make it work (while still dealing with those upset about the way Moore's run ended... or in this case, didn't) or stick to Moore's style and try to match the master. It's a no win situation.

So, I have some respect for the ambitions of our fan-creators that they even took on the challenge of trying to continue on Moore's story in Moore's style. (Maybe that's why they're anonymous?) Of course it will never be as good, but the fact that so much of it does work is impressive.

And so we get to issue #9 in which some of the big things work while some of the little things don't. But let's jump in and see.

The story starts with captions from Crow John, a bird-man guy, thinking to himself while on trial for the crime of turning on the more bird-like people, known as the Corvus. He thinks about Icarus and how his father told him not to fly too high or too low, how his father wouldn't let him be a bird or a man. I guess that's how Crow John feels.

At the trial, a character named Jackdaw Ben testifies about carrying a bomb for Crow John and dropping it onto a military airfield. For the record, a jackdaw (I had to look this up) is a small bird in the crow family. Apparently they're noisy, so a group of them is known as a clattering, which also describes the sound of the bomb going off on the airfield. It's a nice little bit of wordplay that, again, shows the ambitions of the fan-creators.

The bomb going off brings Suprema and Doc Rocket running at superspeed. Suprema pines for the days before bombs, when villains would be more clever and use puns. The others soon arrive and start fighting the Corvus, who are attacking. Shaft has to tell Johnny to get his act together, as the girls don't really trust him after he slipped the slowing tab to Doc Rocket last issue.

Shaft send Johnny to hook up with Suprema and Doc Rocket, while the rest of them continue the battle. Johnny finds Crow John stealing a military stealth jet and tries to get close, but gets captured by Crow John. When Suprema offers to fry him like a duck, he lets Johnny go and tells them that they shouldn't be helping out Blake Baron and he offers to show them why they should help him. They can't radio their friends, but decide to take him up on the offer, and soon the jet is flying away and Shaft, Twilight and Big Brother think their friends have been captured. The jet is so stealth, Big Brother can't see it on his monitors.

They decide to interrogate Jackdaw Ben, who is one of the prisoners, when Blake Baron shows up and takes the prisoner away. He tells them that Crow John is an eco-terrorist who used to travel with a flying circus. Apparently he can control birds and maybe even bring mythical ones to life. Baron says that if Youngblood does go after Crow John, Barron wants the jet they stole back.

We're back in the trial framing structure. This time Raven Sue is testifying. She is there to testify about what happens when Crow John brought the three heroes back to the Aviary, where the Corvus lives. (As a note, notice how Raven Sue is always around the edge of these pages, spying on them. It's kind of a nice little detail.) She promises to testify to the other ravens, which are sometimes called a parliament or a conspiracy.

Suprema, Doc Rocket and Johnny find out that the minerals in the mountains they're in (and in the jet) can block all electronic signals. Apparently the Veil was coming to mine the material, destroying the Corvus' habitat. When they fought back, they got decimated.

Crow John tells them that he plans to use the jet to get to the middle east to summon the simurgh, a mythical, phoenix-like bird. Meanwhile, Doc Rocket offers to help with the medical care of the injured Corvus. Johnny suspects that she's there for more than humanitarian reasons and that she has a thing for Crow John.

There's a nice little bit about how the Corvus believe stories are magic, and sometimes they need the stories more than truth. But Crow John has spent time with humans and know that stories are usually nothing more than lies.

We switch back to the House of Wax, where Leonard is trying to fix Big Brother so it can sense the missing jet. He's obviously emotional and takes it out on Shaft. I have to say, I really like this B-story about Leonard, his backstory, and his worrying for the invincible Suprema.

Waxey tells Shaft not to take it personally, that Leonard has been through a lot. And then we get Leonard's backstory. His parents worked for Waxey and died in an accident in the lab. With no other family for Leonard, Waxey took him in. Leonard didn't talk to anyone until telling Waxey that he fixed the car (into a robot). There's a beautiful moment when Waxey is so proud that he gets Leonard a whole garage workshop. When Waxey started calling him dad, Waxey gave up superheroing. But since Leonard needed peers, Waxey offered to fund Youngblood.

So Shaft and Twilight hatch a plan to find out where Suprema and the others are.

And we're back at the trial. Jackdaw Ben is testifying again as Shaft and Twilight break into the Veil's Threshold base to rescue him. Apparently Twilight is having recurring dreams from the Occupant's possession of her way back in issue #1 that lead her there. They quickly free Jackdaw Ben and leave.

Then we're back at the Aviary. Doc Rocket is looking for some answers about why they're being watched all the time and Crow John asks her why she thinks that he isn't being watched too. He tells the story of how his human minerologist father explored the area and almost died when his Corvus mother rescued him and fell in love. She died in birth and all Crow John had were his father's stories. And we know what Crow John thinks of human stories.

One night, his father spirited him away to the world of humans and raised him in secret. He joined the flying circus, but came back to the Corvus when they needed his power to summon the simurgh. She also knows something about being split off from normal people and they're soon making out.

The next morning, Shaft, Twilight and Big Brother get to the Aviary with Jackdaw Ben, but Raven Sue says the others have already gone to raise the simurgh. Shaft asks if he can get on the world wide web from inside Big Brother and Leonard says he's got internet access better than AOL. '90s humor!

The three soon find Crow John and the three other Youngblood members in a temple in the middle east. Soon Shaft, Twilight and Big brother are fighting Doc Rocket, Johnny and Suprema to stop Crow John. I love these fights where heroes take on heroes, though Suprema and Leonard quickly make up when Suprema agrees to let Leonard know where she is the next time she gets kidnapped. Ha!

They stop the others and Shaft starts explaining that Crow John is trying to summon the simurgh to wipe this world away and to start again. Apparently his dad had stolen rock samples from the Aviary and taken them back to the Veil, which precipitated their mining. Crow John is just about to summon the simurgh, when in a nice twist, a tiny swift bird pops up from a nest.

Crow John is incensed, but Doc Rocket tells him off, saying he's no better than his father. They decide to take him to Miskatonic Asylum, but let the little bird go. They fly home and we see Suprema holding Big Brother's hand, which is cute. Twilight tells Doc Rocket that she fell for Crow John awful fast.

Doc Rocket: "I do everything too fast." Ha.

Meanwhile Shaft is ignoring Blake Barron's video call, refusing to return the jet. Johnny heads to the back and asks why Crow John took them to the Aviary. Crow John says he's never known anyone who didn't immediately mistrust him and that he just liked them. Johnny cuts him loose with the promise that he'll never try to destroy the world again.

Johnny: "You think you're the only one with $#!tty parents and dreamed of blowing up the whole world?" Um, what?

Crow John goes back and is put on trial. he says that he didn't betray the Corvus and that the simurgh did. He says that for the Corvus to survive they must find a way to live in between being birds and being men.

He's told that the crows will decide his fate. The punishment if they decide against him is death. And so, the murder of crows decides whether to kill him or not. But we never find out what they decided, though it seems to me like they chose death.

Meanwhile, Youngblood decides the fate of the other John... Johnny Panic. As we'll see next issue, they decided to kick him out. (I guess they murdered his membership?)

In an epilogue, a little bird (I assume it's the swift from the middle east temple) flies into the Veil's Threshold chasing after fireflies. In the background, we see Blake Barron trying to warn Shaft about Johnny Panic. And then we see the bird reach toward the monkey in the box we saw from issue #1.

It seems a little too simple as a way to free the Occupant, but I like how this issue moves a number of the pieces forward toward Moore's proposal's two-part finale. And there was a lot I liked, from using the bird plurals and the double trial for John and Johnny, but something seemed off. Maybe there was just too much plot for me? What did you think?

Anyway, next time we'll get "If/Then/Else".

As always, please check out the Annotations Page for more details and references and be sure to let me know any that I missed.

Batman and Robin sitting in a tree...

I've read issue #8 several times now and the thing I get stuck on every time is Professor Night and Twilight...is he flirting with her? I've already talked about how Alan Moore laid out the pieces for that reading of the characters' relationship in the proposal and what he's shown in previous issues, so I won't go over that again. But I think it gives us the opportunity to talk about what he and the fan-creators might be commenting on: Batman and Robin and the gay subtext.

There's this wonderful Slate article about the history of that gay subtext that I'll be quoting from heavily. In it, the author quotes Grant Morrison:

"Gayness is built into Batman. Batman is VERY, very gay. Obviously as a fictional character he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the whole basis of the concept is utterly gay. I think that’s why people like it. All these women fancy him and they all wear fetish clothes and jump around rooftops to get him. He doesn’t care—he’s more interested in hanging out with [Alfred] and [Robin]."

As the article explains:

"from the opening page of Robin’s debut story in the April 1940 issue of Detective Comics No. 38 featured an introductory scroll jammed with breathless declamatory copy about “THE SENSATIONAL CHARACTER FIND OF 1940 … ROBIN, THE BOY WONDER!” It began, “The Batman, that weird figure of the night, takes under his protecting mantle an ally in his relentless fight against crime …”

 

"Or at least, that’s how it was supposed to begin. But the page’s letterer, tasked with squeezing a hell of a lot of text onto said scroll, unwittingly shoved the words “an” and “ally” so closely together as to effectively elide the space between them. Thus, the first thing readers ever learned about THE SENSATIONAL CHARACTER FIND OF 1940 was that he was someone whom Batman “took under his protecting mantle anally ...”

 

There were also all those strange situations the two found themselves in:

 

  

  

In his book, Seduction of the Innocent, about how comics were warping our dear children, Dr. Fredric Wertham devoted several pages to the dynamic duo's relationship.

He wasn't the only one who saw it:

"Queer readers didn’t see any vestige of themselves represented in the mass media of this era, let alone its comic books. And when queer audiences don’t see ourselves in a given work, we look deeper, parsing every exchange for the faintest hint of something we recognize. This is why, as a visual medium filled with silent cues like body language and background detail, superhero comics have proven a particularly fertile vector for gay readings over the years. Images can assert layers of unspoken meanings that mere words can never conjure. That panel of a be-toweled Bruce and Dick lounging together in their solarium, for example, would not carry the potent homoerotic charge it does, were the same scene simply described in boring ol’ prose."

Everyone has been aware of the subtext since Wertham, with DC and later the TV show going out of their way to add female characters to Wayne Manor. But when George Clooney appeared on movie screens with bat nipples, well...

Maybe it's not our business what happens with consenting adults. And if you don't think Moore would agree, maybe you need to go track down SMAX.

The Moore seeds for Youngblood #8

As I was reading the fan-creators-written issue #8, I would find myself noticing elements that suggested Alan Moore's ideas from the Youngblood proposal. I wanted to start a running log to see how those ideas were used in the issue. So here goes.

• Twilight starts in Star City, Moore's Awesome universe of Gotham City as seen in numerous issues of Supreme.
• The Walrus and the Carpenter are two villains we've seen before, most recently in Miskatonic Asylum in Youngblood #2. Their Clam Cannon appeared in an issue of Supreme, too.
• Twilight's decision to leave Professor Night was shown here, from Judgment Day: Aftermath. It's possible to read this and get the impression that Professor Night might be pushing her out or that she's deciding for herself to go:

 

• As for the possibility of a romantic/sexual relationship between the two, there's this from Moore''s proposal (and I'll go more into the historical basis for this relationship in a post on Friday):

• There's also this odd panel from Supreme that I've talked about before (isn't it odd how Taylor is just sort of drinking and watching her try on clothes) that suggests their relationship is more than just partners:

 

• Speaking of that proposal, here's Moore talking about Suprema and her morality and how it can be played for laughs and then for sympathy (as well as crossing over with Supreme):

 

• Moore also showed us Suprema's feelings of loneliness (and her superhearing), both in Youngblood and in Supreme:

 

  

  

• That the elder Doc Rocket is the nicer Doc Rocket is suggested here:

 

• And Doc Rocket not getting along with Suprema can be seen here:

 

 

• Moore also had a story idea about the team losing their powers and using their human skills to win the day. That could have been the inspiration for the third story:

 

Did you guys see any others?