After Awesome Part 12: Chad Bowers' 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.)

For the 25th anniversary of Youngblood and Image Comics, Rob Liefeld announced a new ongoing series (though it's called Youngblood [volume 5], it's at least the sixth version of Youngblood just since Alan Moore's version--eighth if you count Rob Liefeld's two attempts at rebooting the comic right out from under the other creators), this time written by Chad Bowers and with art by Jim Towe.

Bowers has set the comic after a group of anonymous hackers (basically Wikileaks) stole all of Youngblood's secrets and made them public, turning public reaction against the team. The team disbanded and was made illegal. Shaft tried to continue and got tossed in jail. A few others are able to do conventions and appearances without causing too much alarm. Oh, and Diehard was elected president. Um, ok. I'll get into that later.

Subsequently, a Yelp!-like app (called Help!) has been launched allowing victims to call in superheroes to help them. A kid named Man-Up and a girl named Petra (under the alias Gunner) are being heroes-for-call in the Help! app. But when Man-Up goes missing, Petra, a former Olympic shooter, decides to try to find him. But he's nowhere to be found and his records are wiped from the internet. So, at her whit's end, she decides to form a new supergroup called Youngblood (and calling herself Vogue) to raise her profile enough that the authorities will have to seriously search for Man-Up.

You know what, now that I write that down, that's incredibly stupid. But the joy of the comic is that it moves so fast and is so fun to read that you sort of ignore all the stupid stuff on the way.

Seen in flashback over several issues, Petra finds a technological genius who used to be in Bloodstream (the hacker group mentioned before) to become Sentinel (but he doesn't like that name). They recruit Doc Rocket, who is now an older veteran of Youngblood, who is happy to help. Doc leads her to Littlehaven where they find Suprema flying around in a robe. No one really remembers her and the suggestion is that this all comes after Supreme Blue Rose. Anyway, she has decided to call herself Supreme and is happy to join up.

So Diehard sends Badrock, who is in rough shape and is probably going to die from some disease, to get Shaft out of prison and track down the new Youngblood and get them to knock it off. (Why them? Oh, who the F knows? Probably because it's not Youngblood if you don't have Shaft.)

New Youngblood fights this bank robber called Crime Condor who makes them all see things and go a little nuts, which is just when Shaft finds them. They fight. Blah blah blah, Shaft gives them the message from Diehard telling them to knock it off.

Meanwhile, Diehard has decided to endorse and work with the two brother CEOs of Byrnetec, the company behind the Help! app. Unbeknownst to him, though, Byrnetec is up to no good.

Badrock takes Shaft and Youngblood to a safehouse and makes the pitch to Shaft to join up with the new Youngblood. He explains that they need help and since he's dying, Badrock wants to have one last run and leave a lasting legacy.

Petra convinces Shaft about finding Man-Up and some other missing heroes. Shaft figures out that the Help! app must be in on it and fixes the anagram of Byrnetec into Cybernet, an old Youngblood foe. So he takes off by himself to confront Byrnetec.

Badrock accidentally tells Diehard about Shaft taking off and the president sends Diehard-like drones to take Shaft out. Whoops.

Meanwhile, we get to see the Byrnetec kids kidnap another hero, enslave him and sell him to the highest bidder. They complain about being broke, which is apparently why they're doing all this. Really? Again, with the stupid plotting. You create one of the most popular apps, but you can't figure out a way to monetize it, so you use it for kidnapping and the slave trade. Sigh. Okay, moving on.

Shaft takes out a few drones before Youngblood shows up to help him with the others. Teamwork, blah. blah, blah. Diehard decides to take matters into his own hands and flies off to confront Shaft himself.

At the same time, Petra and not-Sentinel are hacking into Byrnetec to find out about Man-Up, but get caught by the Byrnetec/Cybernet kids. They send two Chapel-like henchmen to deal with the Youngblooders. The rest of Youngblood show up and they're just about to fight when Diehard flies through, ignores the Cybernet twins and the two-Chapel-looking badguys, grabs Badrock and flies out to lecture Badrock outside the building. (Why fly out with Badrock? Because if he lectured Badrock inside it would spoil the awful plotting, duh.)

When Badrock tells Diehard that they're Cybernet, the president just says no, "We vetted them ten times over. They're good men." When Shaft comes out and tries to reason with Diehard, it all descends into one big fight, during which Diehard rips off Shaft's arm.

Look, I get this is a superhero comic and one called Youngblood at that, so it has a really low bar for logical plotting that it has to overcome for it to be seen as doing a good job, but this is really, really dumb. Vetting isn't, "Well, they have a website, they must be legit." Presidential vetting goes over everything. Ev-er-y-thing! Birth certificates, bank accounts, who you employ, what you leave off your taxes. If you're a low-budget criminal organization, they are going to find it. And if you just flew through their corporate offices and they are clearly employing two bad-looking bodyguards who ALSO happen to be the genetic offspring of ANOTHER of Youngblood's worst enemies, maybe you don't start fighting your former allies first.

But then again, how does a president go around wearing a mask all the time and people just go, "Yeah, okay. That's a thing now." Or, how does said president decide to go off on his own and fight a couple of superpowered guys and the Secret Service decides to sit back with a beer and say, "Yeah, have fun Eagle One! Let us know how it goes." Gah!

Okay, I'm going to my happy place now. Breathe. Breathe.

Whew. Okay, I'm better.

Inside Byrnetec, Petra shoots one of the Cybernet twins and they sort of combine into a giant cybernetic monster thing. Fighting, fighting fighting. Badrock knocks Diehard back inside the building and he realizes that maybe he was a little rash. Fighting, fighting, fighting until the new Cybernet decides to eat Badrock. When it does, it gets his sickness and blows the whole place up.

Sure. Okay.

Out of the rubble comes Diehard carrying Thomas McCall, the normal teenaged boy who became Badrock. Because apparently Badrock was suffering from a disorder called magical-plot-solution-disease.

Later, Youngblood, seemingly fine from the Cybernet explosion, rescues Man-Up from the Morrocan drug-dealing terrorist who bought him.

That finished the first arc. After that there have been issues dealing with Diehard deciding to come clean about the Help! app and deciding to launch a new Youngblood app instead. Youngblood has been hiding out in Japan with Doc Rocket's old boyfriend, Task, who has convinced them to become Japan's official Team Youngblood. Bloodstream tried to take out not-Sentinel, but he outsmarted them. And there's been a big fight over whether Man-Up can be in the group or not.

Maybe I'm being too mean. It's a fun series that's nice to look at. The callbacks to previous versions of Youngblood are enjoyable. I'm glad that they're using versions of Suprema and Doc Rocket that harken back to the originals. But it's just not a series that demands a lot of thought (clearly it prefers you to not think at all). I just don't know if that's enough for me anymore.

Then again, maybe it doesn't matter. As I write this, Liefeld has announced that Towe is leaving the comic after issue 11, even though issue 12 has been solicited.  At the end of issue #11, it's announced that Liefeld is going to do the art on issue #12. Gosh, that doesn't sound familiar at all.

We're now almost 20 years removed from Alan Moore's Youngblood and even longer from his run on Supreme. Supreme was a work of genius. His Youngblood was a fun series, like this most recent one and the Casey one before it. But unlike this one, Moore's explored interesting and intelligent ideas, such as alternate histories, western heroes and galactic entities in clever ways that didn't fall apart when you started thinking about them. But fun comic series come and go all the time (as we've seen with so many of these After Awesome series). That's the very nature of the comics industry that Moore was poking fun at with his revisions idea in the first place.

So if history is any judge, Rob Liefeld will probably come out with a new Youngblood sooner or later. And a new Supreme. And a new Glory. And a new Bloodstrike. That's comics.

And as much as I enjoyed Moore's Youngblood and am glad that our fan creators finished it, maybe that's enough. Maybe there's just not enough there anymore for me to want to continue with whatever Liefeld and company come up with next for Youngblood. I've spent so long looking for Moore's characters that they've long stopped being the characters I liked. And I've forgotten that the reason Moore came up with those characters in the first place was to explore and illustrate interesting and compelling ideas. The characters without the ideas is just a case of diminishing returns.

So, maybe this is how After Awesome ends, even though there will always be more comics. In a way it feels like that epilogue to the fan-created Youngblood. Maybe I'm Shaft, remembering a fun time and haven't been able to move on from that memory.

What was it he said? It was Awesome!

Yes. It was.

But there's one more bit of unfinished business. Up next: An ending for Supreme.