Weekly Reading: Youngblood #12

Never published by Awesome Entertainment

The cover:

Title: He Forgets Not His Own

(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.)

Welcome to the double-sized final issue of the fan-creators' completed series. This thing is mind-bendingly weird, more than a little pretentious, but comes together surprisingly well at the end. I never figured I'd have spent this long on the work of someone other than Moore, but I think it pays off so much of what Moore started that it was worth it.

So, let's jump into the madness!

The issue begins with Lady Lazarus, who is really an immortal Sylvia Plath who made a deal with the devil electrocuting herself with jumper cables from a car. (There's a sentence I never thought I'd write!) As she does so, we pull up and up and see that madness is reigning on that portion of the Earth. We also hear her quote from the Plath prose story, "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams," which I talked about last week.

Lady Lazarus: "The only thing to love is fear itself. Love of fear is the beginning of wisdom. The only thing to love is fear itself. May fear and fear and fear be everywhere."

In the story, this is a chant the crazy people make to their god, Johnny Panic. By embracing madness and fear will they understand the world as it really is. And that was Lady Lazarus's plan, as seen in last issue, to bring the madness and fear of the Azure into the world, so that her god, the Azure's Johnny Panic, could set the world free to realize what madness and fear is. And apparently, the blue mist from the Azure makes people go truly nuts.

Safe in their asteroid base, The Allies have gathered with Youngblood, Badrock, Waxey and Maximage (who we find out were rescued by teleporter) to try to deal with this disaster. And, just for fun, Janet Planet has shown up to help, too!

The heroes decide to split up to deal with the problem. Glory, Maximage and Johnny are going to head to the crack to see if magic can seal it. Supreme, Suprema and Spacehunter will defend the Earth from any crazies who set off nuclear or biological weapons. Big Brother, Doc Rocket and Die Hard are heading to Conqueror Island to prevent any of the powerful monsters there from getting hit by the mist. And Professor Night, Badrock, Shaft, Waxey, Janet Planet and Twilight will stay on the asteroid and try to transport other sane people off the planet.

We follow Glory's party to the crack. They protect themselves in a magic bubble to avoid getting hit by the mist. Glory decides she needs to consult with the gods to understand what's going on here, and turns into her waitress counterpart (which we'll see more of once we get to Glory).

Meanwhile, on Conqueror Island, the three heroes help the New Men (last seen in Judgment Day: Aftermath) take down a rampaging dinosaur before heading into the research center there. Doc Rocket geeks out about the science happening there, but she doesn't get very far before they notice the mist moving in on the horizon.

On the asteroid base, Twilight and Professor Night are transporting Roman off the planet. Shaft can't concentrate, though, as he just stares daggers at Badrock, who is seemingly making the moves on Janet Planet.

Patrolling outer space, Supreme explains that he thinks the threat is coming from Idea Space, specifically the are devoted to fear and insanity. But Supreme doesn't know how the realm broke through into the real world, or how to heal it. And then, as they see the mist spreading out to more and more of the planet, they see the nuclear missiles start flying.

In the realm of the gods, Glory is climbing the world tree to see her aunt Selene. Selene is feeling triumphant as the power of the moon (lunar = lunacy) grows and sends Glory away, unable to talk sense to Selene. But then she's called to the higher realm of Selene's brother Helios. His light of reason is losing out to Selene. But he tells her there is a way to break Selene's power. A hero familiar to Selene's realm could cast a ray of light from within to, "restore balance, he must mend the rift." And then Glory climbs down and takes control of her body again in the magic bubble.

On Conqueror Island, the New Men barricade the research facility while Doc Rocket uses a sail and her superspeed to send back the mist. Die Hard and Big Brother wait for the boats to arrive with the crazies. While they're waiting, Die Hard shares some technical talk about robotics before getting into a conversation about confidence. Die Hard gives Leonard a few tips on how to have more confidence (including one from Teddy Roosevelt?) before the boats arrive and the crazies start coming ashore.

On the asteroid base, Badrock and Professor Night are contacting Vogue to get her off planet when Roman, who has been infected all along, stabs Professor Night with a harpoon. Shaft knocks him out with a boxing-glove arrow and Janet Planet binds him with her energy gun thing (I think). Twilight, in real fear, takes Professor Night to the medical bay while Badrock takes Roman to the holding cells.

Then Shaft and Janet are alone working the machine and start to flirt. Really? Okay.

In space, the heroes are collecting the last of the missiles when one breaks loose and starts heading for the planet. Spacehunter dives after it and manages to destroy it, but blows up in the process.

By the crack, Glory explains that Johnny Panic must go into the Azure and stop it from within. Johnny, thinking it's a bad idea, steps into the crack anyway. And then things go completely upside down. Literally.

So, I mostly don't like this aspect of this issue, but I get it. To be fair, Moore used turning pages in Promethea and V for Vendetta, among others. But this feels like an amateur trick, trying to do something different, but it mostly comes across as annoying. I had to turn off the screen rotation on my tablet to be able to read it.

Anyway, Johnny is in the Azure, along with his mother, Lady Lazarus, in a younger, more witch-like form. There's a crack open, revealing Glory and Maximage on the other side, and a glass splinter wedged into it, being the visualized form of Peter/Cosmo/Bishop's splinter from last issue.

(Did you notice that this panel has symbols from the reversed moon, the tarot card from last issue?)

Johnny goes to remove the splinter, but Lady Lazarus attacks, sending him into the tentacles from below who make the world fill with water. Sharks move in for the strike. Johnny, even though he knows they're not real, reacts with fear and thrashing. Because fear is more powerful than reality, Lazarus tells him.

Then she sends him hurtling down from the top of a skyscraper. And he falls through his fears, reverting into a little boy. We see his fear of the supervillains he has helped fight. We see his fear of The Goat (from issue #5). We see his fear of almost having killed Rachel's grandfather (from issue #8). We see his fear of spiders and the dark.

All the while, Lady Lazarus is repeating her saying about love of fear from the beginning. And I wonder if this is where she was at the beginning of the issue. She's trying to convince Johnny to go crazy.

Li'l Johnny is hiding when an old friend shows up and offers him a hand: Sparky!

Johnny: "But... you're dead.

Sparky: "If a drug-induced hallucinatory sidekick can't come back from the dead, who can?" Ha.

Johnny takes Sparky's hand and they agree to go terrorize Johnny's mother. They find his mom, but she's young and naked and we soon realize that this was Sylvia's first visit to the Azure. And the Johnny Panic god she sees is really the team of her son Johnny and Sparky reflecting back her own fear.

Sparky thought that was great fun, but Li'l Johnny isn't so sure: "Something... didn't feel right..."

Then Sparky sees an older version of Sylvia and goes to scare her again. While this Sylvia is asking about having a child, Sparky/Johnny say that the child has become a god. The god of fear.

Sparky then sees another person floating in the Azure, who I think is the Veil's volunteer from page 1 of issue #1. But Johnny is realizing that Sparky was never real and that what he just participated in was how Sylvia became Lady Lazarus. And then Sparky becomes a Lovecraftian monster. But not any monster, he's the Occupant. This is the powerful version, full of all the knowledge he gained from all his inhabitants.

The Occupant goes to grab him and it's not clear if the Occupant accidentally activates Johnny's illusion suit or if Johnny does it, but a beam of light comes out and burns up the Occupant, turning him into a small little thing devoid of his knowledge. That thing attaches itself to the volunteer, who then gets pulled out again, sending him back to issue #1. Did I mention that this was confusing?

And then Doc Rocket runs up. She's going to make Johnny feel what it's like to lose a loved one and be helpless to do anything about it, just as he had done with her grandfather. In a cool page that shows one room cut into various scenes, Doc Rocket shows Johnny a version of Rachel, working in her lab. An accident starts to kill her. Johnny wonders why Doc is showing him a version of herself, but she says that it is his feelings that are driving this scene. That he cares most for Rachel. When asked why, he explains that he never had friends and she was his favorite person in Youngblood, but when he tried to play a prank, it went wrong and he felt like crap.

Doc: "Why didn't you say anything?"

Johnny: "Because my mom was right about me. I'm just a piece of $#!%!"

Ouch. This is an interesting place to go with Johnny, who had always been treated as a wisecracking character before. But, as we've seen and will see more of, he really didn't have anyone who cared about him growing up. It's not surprising if he'd think little of himself.

Doc and Rachel become one and give Johnny a bit of a pep talk before leading him on a tour of Idea Space. I love this bit. Doc explains that there's no time in idea space, as ideas exist when an author writes them just as they exist hundreds of years later when the reader reads them. That's why Sylvia exists here at various ages.

In a very meta bit, Doc explains that only moments exist, which are called panels. When you have enough of them, they become a story. Everything is a story, including how we understand our lives.

Apparently, Lord Sin's realm of shame and despair is near the Azure and he's trying to take it all over. If Johnny doesn't put the splinter back, the binding holding the dimension together will fall apart, merging it with all the other alternate dimensions out there. Or something. It's really kind of confusing. But only Johnny can do it because he and his mother are the only sentient creatures currently in Idea Space. So they can create new ideas and change old ones. Johnny can do it through his illusion suit, as we saw with how he handled the Occupant.

Okay, so if all that wasn't weird enough, Johnny then goes to confront Lady Lazarus. He has the splinter and goes to get out when she shoves him underwater again. But this time he turns the shark in Jabberjaw, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, which I vaguely remember from the Laff-A-Lympics.

Lady Lazarus: "I knew those cartoons would rot your brain!" Ha.

She blows up Jabberjaw, but Johnny turns him into the Goat. Darius Dax shows up and romances Lady Lazars, while stealing the splinter. And then more villains show up, led by Sentinel. Johnny turns the Goat into a billy goat, and they all start falling down a mountainside. Sentinel goes to take the splinter from Dax, but it drops and Night Eagle grabs it. That is until he gets eaten by a gigantic daddylonglegs.

Johnny grabs the splinter and goes to end this, but he's wrapped up in darkness by Lady Lazarus. And she takes him back to his bedroom as a little boy, where he was afraid of monsters. And his mother would tell him that they were real and if he stayed quiet, maybe they wouldn't bite. (Sound parenting advice!)

Johnny, remembering being little in that house of horrors: "I thought that if I was dead, they couldn't hurt me. You couldn't hurt me, anymore."

Man, this is dark.

He remembers sneaking in and stealing a sleeping pill. It made him see things. And then Li'l Johnny sees older Johnny, from the foreshadowing scene last issue. This was his dream.

Older Johnny tries to make Li'l Johnny see that he can control his imagination and turn the things that scare him into whatever he wants. And that to stop Lady Lazarus, he needs to use the one thing she seems most afraid of: the light. So he blasts the light from his suit and it reveals a naked Sylvia with tentacle around her.

But then a pit opens (or Johnny opens it) and Lady Lazarus falls into Lord Sin's realm. Johnny tells Sin that he can't take over the Azure (and he changes Sin into the seven-headed cartoony version we've seen in Supreme). Johnny closes the pit, leaving Lady Lazarus as a trophy for Sin.

And Johnny climbs out of the Azure. But the world is not as he left it. We see a different-garbed Maximage, who tells him that the world is continuing to go crazy. Glory has become a "bodybuilder with family issues." Supreme has become a killer. Youngblood became reality TV stars. And the government is too busy with a Jon Prophet cloning program.

Interestingly, these are descriptions of all the series that followed the characters after Awesome. I'll get into them all later, but I think Maximage is saying that these are all different timelines that smashed together, like Doc Rocket warned inside the Azure. And then Doc is there, but she reveals that she is in fact an older, wiser version of Johnny, from "one where you put things right." Older Johnny tells him that he still has to mend the rift.

So Johnny goes back in the Azure and figures out that to heal the rift he has to rescue his mother. He trades a version of Satana for Lady Lazarus. But before she can attack, he rips the tentacle out of her. And then she's the teenaged Sylvia Plath again, with no memory of what she's done. All she remembers is crawling into the hole in her basement to kill herself. There's a nice bit where she asks Johnny who he is.

Johnny: "Um, well, I'm Johnny Panic, god of fear."

Sylvia: "Really?"

Johnny: "Sure, why not."

He gets her to explain about her suicidal feelings. Most of them come from her overbearing mother. "Do you know what it's like to have a mother trying to shape you into something you hate?"

She fears it will always be this way and that she'll never get to live her own life. But Johnny says it won't, and in a beautiful page, he shows her.

They're in a fig tree. And as they climb down it, they climb through Sylvia Plath's life. She graduates from college and leaves for England. She marries a poet who supports her to write her own words, which will be heard by millions. She's on the radio in England, where her words, "transform the world, making it easier for girls to be who they want. To be seen and heard, even when they're in pain."

She has two children, "and maybe later on, there's a third. A boy who doesn't always do the right things or say the right words, who screws up a lot. But you'll love him anyway. And you'll comfort him when he's scared. You'll help him to eventually find his right words." I like that this is is what Johnny hopes for.

Sylvia asks what she has to do for all of this, and Johnny tells her she has to do the scariest thing of all, even when all she feels is fear. "You have to live," he tells her.

Sylvia: "I hope you're right, god of fear. I hope this can be my life."

And then she quotes her line about the love of fear again, but now the line means something different. The love of fear is the love of life. And then she goes back through the hole in the crawlspace, back to her life.

There really is a beauty here that I wasn't expecting.

Johnny is now alone in the Azure. He grabs the panel walls and turns them as we rotate the page and then he climbs up (down?) back into his world, where Glory and Maximage wait. The mist flows past him down the hole he turned.

(Did you notice the seven stars? This is the last tarot card. So, the fool is Johnny. The tower was the terrible revelation of Darius Dax being his father. The reversed moon was the madness of Lady Lazarus and the Azure. And the star was the restoring of order to the universe.)

And then they're all back on the asteroid base. Supreme tells Youngblood that while more cleanup needs to be done, Youngblood deserves a rest. Twilight comes out and tells everyone that Professor Night is stable, but will never walk again.

Badrock and Vogue say their goodbyes and it turns out that Badrock and Vogue are together (she's just using his movie fame). Shaft makes amends with Badrock before Janet Planet comes to say her goodbyes. She asks Shaft to give her a call sometime, if he's not seeing anyone.

Shaft: "What? No. I know one girl who's obsessed with me, but the feelings aren't mutual." Ha.

Then she kisses him.

And what's great is in the background, Suprema rests her head on Leonard's shoulder. At first it looks like he's going to push her away, but then he takes her hand. It's such a nice sweet way of settling their breakup. I'm amazed they pushed it to the background.

And then they're all sort of talking over each other, with Johnny describing the Azure like being on LSD (a Moore/drug reference = ha!) and Rachel geeking out about Conqueror Island. Twilight could use a beer and when Johnny asks if anyone else wants one, Suprema says she does. This surprises everyone and even Johnny has something nice to say about her.

While Surema and Leonard start making out in the corner, Rachel apologizes to Johnny for kicking him out of Youngblood. And Johnny apologizes for being a jerk. He says that his mom has disappeared. "So, an alternate universe where Sylvia Plath didn't die? That's a nice idea."

They joke about Johnny still hasn't completely grown up. And that's the end.

Man, did a lot happen in those two issues, which is their biggest flaw. Too many ideas, too much stuff, too much weirdness. Moore could have tackled this story and simplified it and made it more elegant, but of course Moore is long gone from the Awesome Universe. And I think that's part of it. It seems like our fan-creators decided to close out the whole Awesome universe. It's like a bookend to Judgment Day: Aftermath, which informally launched Moore's universe. It featured all the same characters and even attempted to deal with all of the craziness that's followed these characters since the end of the Awesome Universe. So it's not surprising it's packed.

But even without Moore, there's enough wonderful moments and interesting ideas that I still really like this two-parter. They even pulled out the Sylvia Plath story, which I thought was a mistake to pull in.

And then we get a 4-page epilogue that copies the journal idea from way back in the Awesome Holiday Special. Here it is if you want to read it, and I'll talk about it afterward.

Apparently that was the end of 1998. Youngblood continued, fighting villains like Stormhead and the computer program Y2K (ha ha - now I want to see that!) before the team started to fall apart.
Jeff: "It's hard to fight super villains when you've all got better things to do."

Twilight became the new Professor Night. There are rumors about Linda and her uncle, but he thinks, "I'm sure she regrets letting me get away."

A now walking Leonard (in Steve Jobs clothes) has introduced a tiny robot called the "Little Mother" that is a little cleaning robot. Die Hard and Sally look on in support. Jeff: "Even still, the poor guy probably misses my advice."

Suprema has formed a Youngblood Away Team with Skipper, a now-older Lamprey and Doc Rocket's sister, Cat. Jeff: "She says they're getting along great, but this is Suprema we're talking about, so they probably hate her guts."

Johnny is continuing to explore Idea Space in a scene that looks like the Gil Kane scenes from Judgment Day: Aftermath. Jeff: "He said Idea Space is the ultimate drug. That guy will never learn."

Doc Rocket became chief of research on Conqueror Island and even moved the Corvus there (and apparently Crow John wasn't murdered). Jeff: "Probably just a matter of time before we have to thwart another of John Crow's evil schemes."

Meanwhile, Jeff is continuing to operate out of the House of Wax, with just Waxey left to join him. Apparently Waxey says, "Everyone seems to be doing well."

Jeff: "It's sad how he's deluding himself." Ha ha.

Jeff started dating Janet Planet, but it's hard with it being a real long distant relationship. She's asked him to come out to space with her, but he hasn't decided.

And then we see him packing up his trophy room. And we get a nice bit of backstory for Jeff. Apparently he was called "Straight Arrow" as a kid in a term of derision. But he wore it as a badge of honor and worked his way into being the youngest FBI agent. They called him Doogie Howser, but in his mind, he heard Straight Arrow again.

And he remembers the original Youngblood was a mess of broken, older people. But this new Youngblood, "they weren't damaged, they were figuring themselves out."

It was a fun time for him and it helped him to realize that being a superhero could just be fun. And then he watched as they all, "went off to their new things, new friends, new family, new goals, new lives." And he's left staring at trophies.

Man, who hasn't been there? I love this idea of Shaft, remembering such a fun time, because that's what this version of Youngblood really was. But also being nostalgic for it, as he struggles to grow up and move on with his life while everyone else around him already has. I think that happens to some people.

But also, I love that what Youngblood ended up being about was about growing up. Johnny became a better person. Suprema learned to relax. Leonard learned to try to be confident. Rachel learned there was a place she wouldn't feel restless. Linda learned that her place was where she always thought it had been. And it makes sense that even teenaged superheroes would eventually grow up.

Jeff concludes, thinking about his trophies: "Now I'm left, staring at trophies, basking in the glow of remembrance. But what a glow. It was Awesome!"

What a perfect ending. Thanks fan-creators!

Next week we'll jump over to the very short-lived Glory. Unfortunately our fan-creators haven't finished off that series.

Drat.

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