After Awesome Part 10: Tim Seeley's Bloodstrike

(Welcome to After Awesome, where I take a look at all the subsequent series having to do with the characters from Moore's Awesome Universe.)

Also in 2012, Tim Seeley, known as an artist and writer on G.I. Joe and later on some Batman series, revived Bloodstrike for Image from a mostly-forgotten series. If you do remember it, it's probably for the cover concept of issue #1, where you could "rub the blood" on the gimmick cover.

There was an actual concept to the series, that being the government is bringing back superheroes from the dead and sending them on suicide missions. While the idea was interesting, the execution was about what you'd expect from a Liefeld clone book. This revival is much better.

The main character is a guy named Cabbot. He used to be a hero named Slingstone and is the brother to Battlestone, an Extreme Comics heavy who was too strict for Youngblood. He is also the son of a radical superpowered terrorist standing up for the nu-gene (the Extreme comics' version of mutants) kind.

Seeley decided to keep all of this backstory, but adds a layer of irony and wisecracking that makes the series a lot of fun. But that's not why I recommend the series so highly (I'll get to that in a minute).

The series begins with Cabbot going to Pakistan to deal with some terrorists. But when he gets to Pakistan, the terrorists are dead, having been killed by three Egyptian mummy-looking zombie cyborgs.

Meanwhile, back at Bloodstrike headquarters, the philosophical connotations to what they're doing causes the staff psychiatrist to kill herself and take out the director. The next-in-charge refuses to bring the director back from the dead and ropes in a poor technician named Kendra to help him.

Cabbot fights the mummies and ends up meeting their boss, a religious telepath, who is gathering the undead and the nu-genes to create a new paradise. He intrigues Cabbot and they part in peace.

Meanwhile, Bloodstrike brings the rest of the team back from the dead, including a superspeedster, a strong woman, an invisible killer and a Japanese-inspired warrior. They're sent to kill Cabbot's dad, but accidentally take out some famous rich girl in the process. (There's a nice bit about her being brought back to life that I won't spoil for the two of you who might look up this series.)

There's a whole subplot with Battlestone that doesn't really matter, but then we get to the psychological profiles of the new team. They're an interesting bunch, and Seeley writes them with more personality and depth than you'd expect in a comic like this. Unfortunately it's paired with some hideous, partially-finished Rob Liefeld art that is best left ignored.

There's a nice bit where Cabbot and the tech girl, Kendra, go to New York for a mission. He gets distracted taking out a supervillain, which reminds him of his old Slingstone days, while she completes the mission.

For me, all of this is prologue to the two-parter that ends the series. It starts with Kid Achilles, from the League of Infinity (sort-of), who dies from some brain disease. But he was supposed to be invulnerable.

According to Cabbot, Kid Achilles was in a teenaged supergroup back in the day with Slingstone, Suprema, Twilight and Skipper, called the Young Americans. It's basically the Youngblood team that Suprema and Twilight suggested in the alternate timeline of Youngblood #6. Bloodstrike intends to bring Achilles back from the dead as an operative but Suprema shows up, pissed off, and wants Achilles' body.

What happens next is awesome. We get more about Twilight and Suprema and it's the most Moore-inspired book that has come out since Awesome went kaput.

Tell you what, I'm just going to put the pages up here (until the Image guards come to drag me away like in that scene from the Shawshank Redemption) and let you read it for yourself.

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, that was it for the series as, supposedly, Rob Liefeld got a new idea for the series and was trying to sell the movie rights, so he basically shoved Seeley out. It's sad, but I am so grateful for the stories we got!

Seeley was the first writer after Moore who really got the Suprema character and had so much fun with the series. This felt like the best continuation of Moore's Awesome universe that could work with modern comic writing. The series was only nine issues long and you can do a lot worse than going out and digging them up.

Edit: Seeley was nice enough to let me interview him, which you can read here.

Next time, Warren Ellis takes Supreme to a whole different place with Blue Rose.

After Awesome Part 9: John McLaughlin's Youngblood

(Welcome to After Awesome, where I take a look at all the subsequent series having to do with the characters from Moore's Awesome Universe.)

In 2012, John McLaughlin, a screenwriter for the movie Black Swan, wrote the relaunch of Youngblood. Like the other revived Extreme books at the time, it reverted to Youngblood's original numbering (which makes no sense since it largely ignores much of what came before), starting at #71. I've watched some of McLaughlin's movies and TV and I have no idea how he came to write this series or why it is as awful as it is, but wow is it terrible. To top it off, Rob Liefeld wannabe Jon Malin handled the art and it compliments the shitty writing perfectly.

This arc follows a reporter from Entertainment Now magazine as she is embedded with Youngblood to write a nice puff piece on them. This Youngblood is made up of Die Hard (back to being a cyborg), Cougar (now a horndog), Vogue (a female horndog, mostly, but not exclusively, lusting after Die Hard), Lady Photon (who was an alien he but has now become an alien she) and a new Shaft (Jeff Terrell marched into President Obama's oval office to quit).

Terrell has returned to the F.B.I., where he is investigating a weird serial killer, who is killing future incarnations of Vogue and sending them back in time for him to find. That sentence was the most interesting thing about this arc and it was never resolved, basically because this is a Rob Liefeld comic.

There's also an ongoing B-story about Badrock who is in some kind of coma. He nearly died when he used his body as shielding for a space shuttle that was re-entering the atmosphere. But something punches out of the shell of Badrock. We never find out what, basically because this is a Rob Liefeld comic.

Anyway, Youngblood's first mission is to deal with a bunch of clones of a wannabe model at a mall. They handle it by punching out the original girl, who popped out the clones as a stress mechanism.

McLaughlin tries to make jokes about modern mass media, but as he's not as savvy as Joe Casey was, it just comes across as amateurish. Well, it's all amateurish, really:

 

 

Then Die Hard is being honored by some military bigwigs in Washington. Something turns the dead in Arlington Cemetery into zombies, who attack. Youngblood dispatches them, but then it turns out to be some conspiracy by a police gear-garbed alien/demon, who has somehow possessed President Obama:

 

But since it's never mentioned again, I guess it wasn't that important.

That's one of the major problems of this arc. McLaughlin writes the action so poorly and wraps things up so stupidly that it took me a while to realize that each issue is a standalone story and none of it adds up to anything.

The next issue dealt with a bully gamer who picked on another character in a video game. She got revenge by sending a real axe-wielding beast to kill him through the internet. But Youngblood took care of her by killing her in real life, too. Case closed!

Then Youngblood goes to Las Vegas to find out why all of the people are missing. Turns out an alien gambler won them by playing a game of cards with the mayor of the city. (Jesus Christ, were there no editors at Image who could say this was a stupid idea?) He offers to play Youngblood and if they win, they can have the people back, but if they lose, he gets the entire planet. Instead Vogue hits him and the people are saved.

 

The Entertainment Now article about Youngblood comes out and says Youngblood is great. That was an entire issue.

Then we get an issue that promises to reveal the fate of Badrock! But it's a flashback to him on the space shuttle and Jeff quitting because of it, so it doesn't reveal anything. And that was McLaughlin's last chance to reveal anything because starting with issue #77 Rob Liefeld took over writing the story and hit reboot on the whole thing again. Yagh!

Now Troll and Chapel's son reincarnate the original Chapel, who is still a lord of Hell. (All of this is from the early days when Rob Liefeld's Youngblood played in the same sandbox as Todd MacFarlane's Spawn.) 

Badrock puts together a whole messload of old Youngblood members to fight Chapel, including Moore's Youngblood members. They're all needed as Chapel opens a portal to hell, which comes through to terrorize New York (always New York!). Of course that fight never happens because the series ends on a cliffhanger in issue #78... say it with me now... because this is a Rob Liefeld comic.

I feel dumber for having talked this long about this comic.

Next time, let's look at one of my favorite bits of After Awesome: Bloodstrike. No, seriously.

After Awesome Part 8: Erik Larsen's Supreme

(Welcome to After Awesome, where I take a look at all the subsequent series having to do with the characters from Moore's Awesome Universe.)

I've already discussed Erik Larsen illustrating the last Alan Moore Supreme script back in this weekly reading. In May 2012, he started writing his own issues so we could see what happened when the Daxes attacked the Citadel in Supreme #64. I remember back in 2012 being so excited for the last Moore script that I was willing to overlook everything I had ever thought about Erik Larsen and give him the benefit of the doubt on his continuing with Supreme.

How could it go wrong?

It ended up being a short run where he brought back Rob Liefeld's "Mean" Supreme while also dealing with the fallout to Alan Moore's Supreme characters. "My thought was to marry the two and take what Alan had done and what came before and try to find something in the middle which might appeal to both audiences," he said.

Oh...yeah. That's how it could go wrong.

Picking up immediately after Supreme #63, the Daxes downed the Citadel and when Supreme and Diana opened the door to the Supremacy, the Daxes blew up the Supremacy. They decimated all but a handful of the Supremes, including Radar (Larsen ignored the fact that Radar was off on his own planet). New Supreme and Original Supreme decide to let Rob Liefeld's Mean Supreme out of the prison where he'd been chained since Supreme #41. He kills all the Daxes and then finds silver supremium in the Citadel wreckage, which he uses to strip the five remaining Supremes of their powers.

It's not a particularly good start to Larsen's run for fans of Moore's Supreme.

From there, Larsen separates the book into two parts. The first involves Mean Supreme feeling betrayed that no one came to rescue him for the last 24 issues (he acknowledges that it was a decade and a half). He goes and beats up Super Patriot, demanding to know why he didn't help. Super Patriot says that Supreme was always so confident, how were they to know he needed help, when he never needed it before.

The better part of the book involves the five non-powered Supremes: New Supreme, Sister Supreme, Fifties Supreme (with lion head), Original Supreme and Squeak. When the military takes them into custody, Suprema goes to rescue them. But New Supreme tells her that they have to cooperate with the authorities.

While Suprema goes to confront Mean Supreme, Ethan and Diana discover that Dazzle Comics and all the other aspects of their existence are gone, including Ethan's whole apartment building. When they go to Diana's apartment, she has a message on her answering machine from a boyfriend named Ken. Um, what? Did she always have a boyfriend or is that just in this new revision? 

Suprema and Mean Supreme end up in a fight where Mean Supreme beats her into a bloody pulp that is so beyond the boundaries of good taste that I'm not sure how Larsen thought he could possibly appeal to fans from the Moore run. Just as he's about to finish her off, this revised universe's Omni-Man (an alien from Image Comics' Invincible series) comes and fights Mean Supreme to a standstill.

Ethan rescues Suprema and takes her to the hospital. He is also thinking about moving on with his life and getting a new job as a comic artist. But the other non-powered Supremes want to do something about Mean Supreme. They decide to team up with the only Dax who survived the Dax massacre, Darius Duck, who gives them gloves that can help them steal Mean Supreme's powers.

Mean Supreme, unconscious from the fight with Omni-Man is abducted by an old Liefeld villain, Khromium, from an antagonistic alien culture.

By issue #68, the writing was on the wall for the Erik Larsen series as Cory Hamscher, the artist who finished Larsen's layouts, left the series. The result looks like barely-finished chicken scratches, which suggests that no one finished the layouts and they just put it out anyway. But it doesn't really matter, since this was the last issue and it doesn't end with any real resolution.

While Mean Supreme kills Khromium and all of his race, Ethan realizes he doesn't have any artistic abilities without his Supreme powers. He ends up sleeping with Sister Supreme. They discuss whether it was even possible for the Daxes to have destroyed the Supremacy, since it was just a limbo realm, and that maybe the real versions of themselves with their powers are now in the real Supremacy. I took this as Larsen acknowledging the Moore fans who hated Larsen's version, and that their version still existed somewhere in the Supremacy.

Meanwhile, Diana goes to see Suprema in a coma in the hospital. She says she remembers being Supreme's girlfriend and that she's pregnant.

The end.

Larsen has the audacity to say in the letters page that he always planned to "do the book but just long enough to set the pace and get the ball rolling. And now my job is done."

Bullshit. The sales on the series were awful and it was clearly cancelled before Larsen thought it was going to.

And as with all Rob Liefeld series, none of it mattered because the next team ignored all of this and did something new. We never find out if the Supremes are in the Supremacy. We never find out what happens with Mean Supreme, or Diana and her baby, or if Suprema recovers.

Now there's quite a lot of this arc on the series that I not only don't like, but actively hate. Everything with Mean Supreme, which was mostly mind-numbing overlong fight sequences, was a total waste. The way Larsen abuses his characters, especially shooting Radar and beating up on Suprema, show a complete disregard for common decency, which was one of the hallmarks of Moore's run on the series.

But there are elements that work. The subplot about Ethan having lost his abilities to draw along with his Supreme powers is a nice touch, and almost everything involving the powerless Squeak is a lot of fun. While I don't like the idea of Ethan and Diana having a falling out, the character of Sister Supreme was a hoot and a unique character for Ethan to interact with. And Cory Hamscher's art really had a nice, comic look to it that made the series easy on the eye. There was potential here and I wonder what would have happened to these characters if the series had continued.

Ultimately, these issues seem like a lost opportunity to continue Moore's series and find new stories to tell. Larsen was right not to try to duplicate what Moore did, but Larsen was the wrong choice to lead the series forward, as few people really missed Rob Liefeld's version of Supreme. And no one wanted him to try to split the difference between Moore and Liefeld.

Up next... wait, what? Yet another shitty version of Younglood? Yay.