Weekly Reading: Youngblood #10

Never published by Awesome Entertainment

The cover:

Title: If/Then/Else

(Later issues of Youngblood were never in print and can only be read 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.)


One of the things I like the best about our fan creators' issues of Youngblood is the decision to really dive into the characters' backstories, as Moore didn't seem to have much interest in that. In issue #10, it really paid off. And we get a return visit from Szazs! What's not to like?

We start off with some weird robot rising from a river outside of the House of Wax. Meanwhile, we're listening to Sally talking to a distracted Leonard. Sally is recounting when she was on a soap opera in the '60s, but it was just a trap by the Televillain. Leonard is too busy working on a section of code for his Big Brother robot to pay that much attention to her.

(By the way, notice the Iron Man poster in Leonard's room. It's a reference to the original name of the Iron Giant book by the famous poet Ted Hughes, about a dangerous robot designed for war who befriends a small boy. And of course, Ted Hughes was married to Sylvia Plath, whose name has come up a couple of times already.)

Leonard tells Sally about building robots with his parents before they died in the accident in Waxey's lab. Sally asks Leonard if he wants to go visit his parents through the League of Infinity's Time Tower. She says that she's gone back and visited with her birth parents as a way to keep them alive to her. Leonard goes off on Sally, that if she loved them, she would change time for them. She says, of course she loves them and her adoptive family, and it's obvious Leonard does too, since he calls Waxey "Dad." That just makes Leonard storm from the room to his workshop, where he runs into Twilight.

Twilight can recognize a fight with Sally when she sees one and they get to talking. Twilight doesn't go back in time to see her parents, as she uses their deaths as motivation to never let that happen to anyone else. But Leonard doesn't want to talk, instead he goes up to Big Brother to hide.

And then the robot from the beginning is smashing into the House of Wax, looking for something. It soon scans Twilight and she's lost her powers and abilities. Then it disassembles Big Brother and merges the parts onto itself. The pieces fit together so well, Leonard wonders if there's a reason why. He rushes off to get reinforcements.

Meanwhile, Jeff is showing Rachel the trophy room he's made for Youngblood, and she mocks him. He mentions a cartoony adventure from last month, which is the back-up story later in this issue. The robot follows Leonard through the trophy room and scans both Jeff and Rachel, so Leonard goes looking for Sally.

But Sally's still ticked off about their fight. She slices the robot down, but doesn't notice it reforming as she lectures at Leonard. Then the robot scans her and then Leonard.

He wakes up as computer code to his mom and dad. They're amazed he's grown so much (and even more amazed to learn he's dating Suprema!). Leonard's dad Malcolm explains that they're in the prototype for MAGNO, the power-absorbing robot that fought the Allied Supermen of America.

On a monitor, Malcolm shows Leonard how Waxey (as the Waxman) stopped the prototype (during a poetry reading in London in the '50s--another reference to Hughes?) and Supreme hit it into space. There it merged with a TV satellite and saw Waxey hawking his car wax in front of the House of Wax on a commercial. When it landed on Earth, it attacked the House of Wax, where it ran into Malcolm and Claudette. Malcolm attempted to hack the robot while Claudette blew the whole thing up (likely into the river where we saw it arise from).

They have to shut down the visualizer that let's us see them as an antivirus program called the ECP, which looks like something out of the Matrix, comes looking for them, but can't find them as long as they're powered down. When it leaves, Malcolm explains that their personalities are bits of code in MAGNO's programming now and that the ECP could revert the code back to before the personalities were there. He also explains how personalities are largely the result of if/then/else choices.

In a little heartbreaking moment, Leonard then explains that they've been dead for more than 10 years. They're glad that he was able to get out unhurt, which he doesn't dissuade them from thinking, as he can stand in this computer program.

Leonard, of course, doesn't remember the explosion or MAGNO, but he must have been inspired by MAGNO's design when he started to build his own robots. He hatches a plan to shut down MAGNO, but they'll have to make their way to the permanent code in the ROM. But they'll need to occupy the ECP. So they wake up all the other personalities.

Classic Supreme is there, as is Sally, picking up her lecture from when she was just scanned. Leonard introduces her to his parents, and Sally is so excited. Amazingly, she and Claudette hit it right off. Then Leonard sees young Waxey, but refers to him as "Dad." Malcolm picks right up on it.

He pushes Leonard for an answer about why he calls Waxey Dad and Leonard admits, in shame, that he thinks of Waxey as his dad, since Waxey has raised him for the last 11 years.

And then there's this beautiful moment where Malcolm asks: "And he made you go to school?"

Leonard: "Yes, sir."

Malcolm: "And he made you eat your vegetables?"

Leonard: "Yes, sir."

Malcolm: "And he made sure you had someone in this world?"

Leonard: "Yes, sir."

Malcolm: "Then I love him too."

Aw man, did the room suddenly get dusty?

Maybe it's just because I'm a dad, or maybe because African American dads have been portrayed really awfully in a lot of stories, but the idea of a proud, educated Black father being grateful, rather than pissed, that someone, even a white guy, took in and loved his son really got to me.

Malcolm: "Oh Leonard. Never, ever apologize for being loved. Be proud of it no matter where you find it. Don't let anyone take it from you. And certainly don't throw it away."

I feel like that should be on one of those inspirational Facebook posts that gets passed around on the social media network forever.

Sally and Claudette return and Leonard, probably using the newfound confidence from his conversation with Malcolm, sort of apologizes for the fight with Sally before and then tells her that he loves her. It's such a nice little moment in an issue that is really filled with them.

Whew... okay. So, they then have all the heroes create a diversion with the ECP while they head to the ROM. Leonard and his parents turn up in a room filled with floating blue code, which Malcolm gets to work rewriting. Meanwhile, in code, Supreme gets deleted along with Shaft and Glory.

I like the irony of the action is all in code and the visual we get is of three people in a room with a bunch of words.

Malcolm is struggling to revise the code before they run out of heroes when Leonard volunteers to help and father and son manage to rewrite the code. But Leonard isn't done, copying some of the code from the RAM into the ROM (perhaps his parents' personalities?). Meanwhile, the heroes engage one final stand. The ECP, overwhelmed, triggers a reversion and the whole robot shuts down.

And then we're outside the robot in the House of Wax where Sally is taking the opportunity to lecture Leonard. But this Leonard didn't have any of the experiences that happened inside MAGNO, so he never talked to his dad and never told Sally that he loved her. In a cruel twist on the if/then/else theme, Leonard tells Sally he wants to break up.

She takes it about like you would expect Sally to... badly. She punches the MAGNO robot into pieces, before flying off, leaving Leonard to stare at the lifeless head of the robot.

And then we get our promotion for next issue: Sylvia Plath's book, "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams." Hmmm... maybe it's time I got around to talking about that.

Taking a page from Moore's Supreme, there's a back-up story, from a month ago, when Johnny was still on the team. They're in the backyard playing tag as a team exercise, which is kind of futile with someone as fast as Doc Rocket. She explains that by flickering her eyes, she can see where people are now, but a line of images of them stretching back to almost a minute prior.

Leonard says that it's like she's seeing the fifth dimension. He explains that while time is the fourth dimension, it exists as a point, just like a first dimension object. You can only see one point of time at a time. But because Rachel can see a trail of Twilights, she's seeing a line, which is like a second dimension object.

Since Szazs can only exist in prime-numbered dimensions, he takes this opportunity to pop up. He doesn't like how grownups treat him, so he turns everyone to children and the whole city into a fun land of an amusement park.

And of course, it's all titled "Youngerblood."

There's a funny line from Alan Moore about how he believes DC would have eventually exploited Watchmen to the point of putting out a Watchbabies. He was giving them too much credit. Instead they just put out toasters. I wonder if the fan creators are playing with this idea here or just think having Youngblood turn into kids is fun. I can sort of see it either way.

Anyway, the Youngbloods' personalities revert to children, too. While Li'l Twilight is as capable as she was when she was little, Li'l Shaft is lovestruck. Li'l Suprema thinks boys are gross. Big Brother has become an excited and happy Little Brother. Li'l Doc Rocket is a prankster. And Li'lJohnny Panic is still a smoker.

They chase after Szazs, but Li'l Doc Rocket gets called to the hospital to play a gigantic game of Operation. Little Brother ends up down a subway shaft, where he finds that the subway has become a roller coaster. Li'l Suprema goes to grab Szazs, but she ends up bouncing around in a three-story bouncy house (which, by the way, I would like to try).

They all wind up on a street corner. Little Brother finds Sally passed out and regrets ever mentioning the fifth dimension. That gives Li'l Johnny an idea. He takes some crayons from a nearby flower and some paper from a tree and starts drawing a picture. That gets Szazs' attention.

Li'l Johnny shows them all his picture, a comical kid drawing of teenage Johnny giving a sack of money to a hippy drug dealer. "It's what I was going to do today, if I never met you," he tells Szazs.

Li'l Leonard grabs the picture and explains that if seeing one point in time is the fourth dimension and seeing where we've been is the fifth dimension, the sixth would be branches off from that line, to alternate times. And people can see that, explains Leonard, with their imagination. And six is a prime number. Szazs disappears and everything returns to normal. And Johnny runs off to meet his drug dealer.

What a fun story, and the concept of time as the fourth, fifth and sixth dimension is such a great idea, even if I'm pretty sure it's nonsense. But I love the way it incorporates the concept of imagination as one of the forces of this universe, holding the multiple dimensions together. It's an idea the fan creators will bring back in the next couple of issues.

What a great issue. I think that's my favorite of the fan creators' issues. And more importantly, it established the heart of this Youngblood series, which was really necessary from where Moore had left it. By making Leonard and his confidence issues about his relationship with Sally, and her desperate need for some sort of connection to this modern world, the central emotional core of the series, Moore and the fan creators gave the series more heft than I probably thought was likely for these lost issues. They've given us something to really care about.

So what do you think? Did you like it as much as I did? Or was it too much?

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