The last Awesome comic, Brigade, came out in July 2000. That same year, Rob Liefeld began soliciting for a new Youngblood series (even though he was still sitting on several Alan Moore Youngblood scripts) written by Kurt Busiek and called Youngblood Genesis. It was essentially to be Youngblood Year One.
That comic never came out in 2000 and it turns out that Busiek never wrote the script for the issue #1 that finally came out in 2003 under a new company, called Arcade. Busiek and Liefeld had an online war of words as Busiek demanded that he not be credited with writing the series, as he only provided plots. Liefeld, however, solicited the series as by Busiek, which led to Busiek asking his fans to avoid the series.
I haven't read the issue, so I can't comment on it, but as it deals with Liefeld's original version of Youngblood and not Moore's (which is the purpose of this blog), I don't feel like I'm missing anything.
That same year, Mark Millar started writing Youngblood: Bloodsport, the worst version of Youngblood that actually made it to print. While a number of versions over the years were bad or just mediocre, Bloodsport is downright repugnant. And it revels in it.The series deals with a situation where there are too many superheroes and not enough job opportunities. When a new version of Youngblood is being put together, all of the various members show up to audition. The problem is this will be a group put together from superteams from alternate dimensions, so there can be only one Youngblood member from this dimension. In order to decide who it'll be, the Youngblood members have to fight each other to the death to decide who it will be.
Remember all the jokes Moore made through Suprema and the Dazzle Comics about how bad comic writing had gotten, this is exactly the kind of thing he was talking about. Everything is a bad drug or sex joke, designed to offend. Here's an early page so you can enjoy it yourself:
Fortunately, the series only lasted a single issue in 2003. A bootleg version of issue #2 came out, but it's so hard to find that I haven't read it. But here's the description:
Shaft vs. Battlestone! Cougar vs. Doc Rocket! Sentinel vs. Die Hard! Suprema vs. Twilight! There can be only one as the fight for ultimate survival spills into the streets of Los Angeles! Who will reign supreme and lead the inter-dimensional squadron into the next era!
Yeah, I don't think I'm going to read a comic where Suprema kills Twilight. So you'll have to forgive me for not trying too hard to find that.In 2004, Robert Kirkman (of Walking Dead fame) started writing a new Youngblood series called Youngblood: Imperial. In this version, there are more than 1,000 Youngblood members in the expanding United States (it just swallowed up Canada).
Great Britain is next, but it has some heroes of its own who look like they have something to say about it. It wasn't a particularly interesting issue, but it doesn't matter because Kirkman left, claiming to be too busy, and it was just another version of Youngblood that lasted a single issue.
There was this nice little aside, though, about Waxey refusing to give up the licensing for Youngblood:
But, that just makes me miss Moore's version.
Speaking of Waxey, he made an appearance in another Arcade series called Nitrogen, which was published in 2005. Nitrogen were a bunch of young superpowered beings who decide they don't want to be heroes and so join with a now-evil Tang (the formerly good guy from Kaboom!, which I talked about here) to kill lots of people. It actually makes almost no sense, but it's definitely tied to whatever's left of the Awesome universe.
In the first issue, we see that the Nitros are led by Superion, who might be Kid Supreme or another of the Supremes from the Supremacy, and they decide to steal something from the House of Wax. Waxey tries to stop them:
Yeah, this is an awful comic. There was never a Nitrogen #2, but almost a year later in 2006, a comic called Nitrogen: Extreme Forces came out. Half of it was some sort of continuation from the Awesome version of Prophet (not Alan Moore's version) that I talked about here. The other half is a fight with the League of Infinity, which for some reason, now seems to feature the same characters with new names:
Anyway, it doesn't matter because there was never any more of Nitrogen.
The last issue to come out from Arcade was for a series called Supreme Sacrifice in 2006. It's basically two little pieces put together in a single issue.
The first is from Kirkman again, this time writing about Supreme dealing with a weird cult that absorbs people to become a singular entity from the bodies. Supreme never had to deal with anything so awful and, at a loss, he heads back to the Citadel. But when he gets back, Radar's room is different and he knows something is wrong. The story ends with the merging of two worlds as we saw at the start of Moore's Supreme run:
The second is about Suprema and was written and drawn by Liefeld. Suprema (maybe our version, but it's hard to tell as she's wearing the same costume from Youngblood Bloodsport) is flying along when she is confronted by several of the Supremes and Supremas from the Supremacy. She's surprised by the encounter, as her brother never told her about the Supremacy. The alternate versions tell her that the Supremacy is no more and that they've overthrown '60s Supreme. They're out to conquer, but a sacrifice has to be made. Does Suprema stand with them or against them?
Of course we never find out, as there was no part 3. But the one nice thing, if you choose to see it this way, is that Supreme Sacrifice separates everything that comes after Moore's version. Liefeld later said that he took this to be the placing of Moore's Supreme (and by my own interpretation, the entire Awesome Universe) in the Supremacy. That's a nice thought, except the next time we saw Supreme, it was back to Moore's version for issue #63. Oh well.
The Arcade comics were Liefeld trying to get his act back together. They tried releasing the issues at conventions to prove there was an audience for them before publishing more. From the limited output, unsurprisingly, it didn't work. His most productive time had been at Image, so maybe a return to Image would help?
We'll see. But first, DC decides to offer a new take on it's all-time star.
I imagine a Busiek Youngblood series could have been great. He's a consistently good superhero team writer in my opinion and at this point, he'd been writing (my childhood favorite comic) Avengers vol. 3 for quite awhile. The online war of words sounds likely. He's an outspoken guy online. His Twitter gets pretty interesting sometimes.
ReplyDelete"Mark Miller started writing...the worst version" is pretty consistently true no matter how you end the sentence, in my opinion. I'm not sure I've ever read a Miller comic that didn't rub me the wrong way. Edgy for edgy's sake is not really my style. He's the ultimate "mature" comic writer and I don't mean that as a compliment.
I imagine that "Suprema kills Twilight" version of the character doesn't get invited to a lot of parties on the Supremacy.
I'm very surprised that Liefeld spun his wheels with these random series instead of just completing Moore's Youngblood books that were already written. The existing issues are high quality and I have to imagine "ALAN MOORE'S COMPLETE YOUNGBLOOD" could sell. I remember there was at least a little hype for Larsen drawing Supreme #63, so there's interest there.
There was interest in Moore's Supreme. But that had 22+ issues and it came out regularly for a long time. Since there were only two issues of Moore's Youngblood and then a bastardized third, and they came out months/years apart, I doubt there was as much public interest in seeing more of moore's Youngblood. And Liefeld had already had his public spat with Moore, so Liefeld probably wasn't all that interested in printing anything more of Moore's until larsen came along.
DeleteBesides, when you can somehow get well-known talent like Busiek and Kirkman and Millar to write for you, maybe you don't feel like you have to finish an Alan Moore series. It's weird becasue Liefeld is supposedly just sitting on all kinds of scripts and pages from all kinds of top-name talent, and he just doesn't do anything with it.
I sometimes feel that Liefeld put all these #1 issues out to test the market and based on low sales he wasn't encouraged to continue forward with more material.
ReplyDeleteWhich is in sharp contrast to how he went on about business back in the more popular Extreme days, when as a youth of 20-something his name was marketing books that were selling in millions.
I think he keeps testing the market, but the market is only getting worse for his brand of comics. There's not much money in them and you have to work like crazy to keep a comic going beyond six or ten issues. I can see why Liefeld would rather sell his IP to Netflix than work that hard at it.
DeleteA friend also explained that for an artist with a name, you can make more money doing commissions and conventions than doing a regular series. How sad is that?
The 2011/2012 relaunch has proven there’s life in these properties given the right take which means that they would have certainly benefited from a stronger presence in the market. The original Extreme line and its subsequent permutations could be compared to Jim Lee’s Wildstorm universe whose properties thanks to the DC buyout have at least enjoyed some kind of constant circulation in the market.
ReplyDeleteYet, even there you could say that both DC and Jim Lee haven’t substantially benefitted from the efforts to maximize the Wildstorm characters potential, at least not since the days of Authority and the Sleeper launches that were supposedly eyed towards potential crossmedia adaptations. Warren Ellis is currently at work on updating the Wildstorm universe to a near future spy story which could conceivably work as a tv series, and will hopefully prove more influential than the Blue Rose Supreme update.
Maybe. I think you give the 2012 relaunches more credit than I do (but I hated most of them, so I'm certainly biased). The Youngblood only lasted a handful of issues. Same with the Supreme (and that had the benefit of at least one Alan Moore script). Glory lasted 12 issues but was told it had to finish off its run early because the numbers weren't there to keep it going (supposedly). Prophet was the only one that seemed to break out and that had almost no ties to the original Prophet and could have been called anything.
DeleteI think the most recent Youngblood series is a better example. It was a well-reviewed, well-drawn series that got some attention. Supposedly, even with all of that, the print issues were making terrible numbers and the digital sales were doing only a little better.
At least with Wildstorm, fans are mostly fond of the older properties and willing to give them another chance (especially if Lee or Ellis are willing to work on them). Who is fond of the older Extreme comics?
Liefeld seems to think (rightly or wrongly) that the only Youngblood comic that fans want (and will buy in significant numbers) is one drawn by him. And he's too busy doing other things.
Yeah, I mostly had Glory and Prophet in mind when I was talking about the 2012 relaunch.
ReplyDeleteI think we can name Michel Fiffe as a fan of the original Extreme line considering his work on the recent "Bloodstrike brutalists" project, and reading those same old stories recently I can find some merit in these concepts, no matter how crude, derivative and underdeveloped they were. Most of the original Golden age superhero comics were likewise very raw but the continuous relaunches and reworkings of the loose basic concepts have made them into multi million dollar franchises.
Yeah, though I think that it's not necessarily the concepts themselves that keep the Extreme (or DC or Marvel) heroes going, but the constant reinvention and keeping them in print. Just as Glory and Prophet could have emerged from any publisher, that they were done with Extreme characters keeps the Extreme characters that much more viable for a future go around. As long as Liefeld keeps letting others play in his sandbox, they'll occasionally do great things. (They'll also make some terrible comics, too.) I think that's what keeps drawing me back.
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ReplyDeleteTo bring this whole thing back to your original point about artists making do with comissions, isn't it strange that on one hand Liefeld has just successfully kickstarted the printing of the first two new issues of the "Brigade" relaunch, while on the other hand Deadpool has netted untold millions for Marvel as a Disney subsidiary. He seems content to maintain his presence at the company doing X-Men variant covers and serving as a spokesman for Cable and Deadpool.
ReplyDeleteYou have to give Rob credit that he knows where the money is to be made.
DeleteBut it also leads to where I was trying to get to in my After Awesome series, which is that there's very little interest (and probably even less money) in the Moore-based Awesome characters and that ultimately if fans want more of them, they have to create those stories themselves. (That was partly my justification for ripping apart Larsen's Supreme run and turning it into an actual ending for Moore's run.)
I sometimes wonder how Rob would respond to a sudden surge of interest in his creations, such as ideally if the Netflix deal or his other announced deals resulted in an at least somewhat popular film or tv series. Most of his Extreme/Maximum/Awesome/Arcade output is spottily or not at all collected, with some of it incomplete. How would you collect Moore’s second year on Supreme that lacks an ending, not to mention his Glory or Youngblood work. Even if you comissioned the original artists and let’s play pretend Alan Moore himself to bring them to completion, would they be able to match the tone set by their 20 years younger selves? It has been done with New Teen Titans Games and several other projects, but has it ever lead to something that lived up to the expectations?
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine thinks Rob is keeping new Youngblood and Bloodstrike and other comics in print (well, from time to time) just so that he can keep awareness about the IP. But there's not a ton that is worth collecting in the Extreme catalog that hasn't already been collected.
DeleteMoore will never come back. Hell, he won't even finish off Halo Jones!
That said, see what you think about this as an ending for Moore's Supreme season 2. It's gotten good reviews and (obviously) I like it quite a bit:
http://forgottenawesome.blogspot.com/2018/05/after-awesome-part-13-end-of-supreme.html
And Moore's Youngblood has been completed by other fans. I think they're really good in places, even if they'll never be Moore: https://forgottenawesome.blogspot.com/2018/01/weekly-reading-awesome-adventures.html
Glory still has a few Alan Moore scripts out there that I'm hopeful will get found and released some day, which might just make for an okay miniseries. But, I'm an optimist on this one.
I never read your fan-edit of Supreme #64, but it's not bad at all. The girl who found the Judgement Day book could have been foreshadowed at least a bit in the preceding pages, but The End scene I found pretty interesting. The final narration mentions the lack of Radar and Talos' presence, but I guess there's only so much you can do with these things. Regarding the idea space that closes the issue of, I think you have as good a handle on it as anyone who is not Moore. These are heady concepts that have traditionally been handled in the comics usual strange and unsubtle ways.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Youngblood continuation, I wasn't aware of it prior to visiting the site. I have read up to #9 and am planning on finishing it one of these days but it's been a bit of a rough go for me, I'm afraid. At first I was surprised that such things existed and thankful that someone continued Moore's scripts, but once they ran out and the fans started plotting themselves from Moore's loose ideas in the Youngblood proposal my interest started to wane. From the start it was a thankless task continuing someone else' vision, especially one as distinct as Steve Scroce's visual stylings, seen most recently in the Image's Maestros mini-series.
Thanks. Yeah, there are a few revisions I would do to my fan-edit if time and money were not an issue, including adding Talos' and Radar's planets, as well as exploring the mystery of supremium a little more. So, maybe one day.
DeleteI think I like the fan-made Youngbloods better than you, but #9 was not my favorite. If it makes any difference to you, I really liked #10, so I'd at lease suggest trying that one and seeing if you liked it any more than the others. It's a thankless task to continue after Moore, and at least Supreme had a clear thread going through it. I liked Moore's run on Youngblood, but there wasn't a lot to it beyond some kids having fun adventures. That the fans found more to the series than I would have expected and ended the series well, even if it got really weird in issues 11 and 12, is something I will always mark in their favor.
I think it all boils down to consistancy of the tone. Moore was fortunate when he worked on "Swamp Thing" that the editorial managed to pair him with artists who maintained the series' visual identity. Same thing happend with "V for Vendetta" and "Watchmen" whose stiff artwork is inseparable from the way we think of when it comes to these comics.
ReplyDeleteRegarding "Supreme", there is obviously regret that Chris Sprouse didn't produce the whole body of work, but even there I felt that the first year had a kind of visual identity. The second year was unfortunately choppy in every way including this one and I never felt regret for not purchasing Checker vol. 2.
As for Youngblood, it would have of course been interesting to have seen any follow-ups. You mentioned "Halo Jones" at one point, but there's a wide birth of cancelled Moore projects, which seems symptomatic of the industry as a whole and did no doubt play a role in Moore's current disenchanted mood when it comes to comics as whole. Thankfully he was able to eventually complete "Miracleman" and "V for Vendetta" at Eclipse and DC.
You're not the first who has mentioned the inconsistency of art on Supreme's second year, but for some reason it never bothered me as much. It could just be rationalization, but I enjoy seeing how different artists approach the stories, which has less narrative consistency and artistic consistency compared to The Story of the Year. I love Sprouse's issues, but I also quite liked Matt Smith's issues, Jim Baikie's bit and some of Ian Churchill's art. Mostly, I think some of the standalone stories in season 2 are the best written in the entire series, including the Ballad of Judy Jordan, the Szazs issue and the Radar story. I think Supreme would still be a brilliant series with only the first 12 issues, but I'm not sure I'd love it without those.
DeleteI think the fact that Moore was able to give so many of his series endings is more the exception than the rule when it comes to comics.
Halo Jones ended prematurely because Moore didn't want to work for IPC any more - his disenchantment with the industry caused it rather than resulting from it. Because of its serialised nature it also feels like it ends with a proper conclusion rather than just abruptly stopping mid-story.
DeleteApart from Halo Jones and the Awesome Universe the only major Moore projects that seem to have been completely abandoned are Big Numbers and 1963. We had to wait a long time for some things - e.g. Lost Girls - but they got out in the end.
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ReplyDeleteYeah, most of these superhero runs were cut short in some fashion. Kirby kept on Thor and Fantastic Four until he left the company, Simonson's Thor was cut short, Ditko left Spider-Man abruptly, it goes on and on. Thankfully, despite the lack of a clear narrative resolution, they still left a bunch of great comics behind.
ReplyDeleteI think the later Moore Supreme issues worked despite the artistic inconsistancy mainly because of their episodic fashion. I find that whole part of Moore's career fascinating - that he went from "Watchmen" and at what seemed at least like his final word on superhero comics to "Big numbers" and "From Hell", only to return to Image and work on Spawn spin-offs, a continuity heavy WildCATs run and eventually Supreme. I guess that his biographers skim this period and skip as soon as they can to the ABC line, but like you, I still find some of these work for hire projects interesting on some level.
True, I think creators getting endings for their runs is really a more recent innovation, probably corresponding with when people started buying TPBs.
DeleteI'm right there with you. I don't understand the people who sort of forget about Moore's early Image work, especially when they think ABC came out of nowhere without acknowledging how influential Awesome was to ABC. Moore's Spawn and WildCATS runs were not great, but there's some interesting stuff in that period. If I get around to it, I'd like to do some read throughs from those other series.
I have some affection for Moore's "WildCATs" run, even though it was mired in crossovers and therefore wider Wildstorm continuity at the time. Some of his other Wildstorm projects though haven't aged as well (Voodoo, Deathblow: Byblows and the like), although I didn't find much in the Spawn/WildCATs crossover to my liking.
ReplyDeleteGetting back to the point, his Spawn work led to the Violator run, which in turn lead to the Badrock vs Violator series. This one is important as it pertains to a popular Youngblood character. It's bizarre seeing Moore writing in Badrock's absurd new costume mid-series, but it gave way to the character of Celestine and in turn influenced the non Moore written "Rage of Angels" Extreme properties crossover led primarily by the Glory and Angela characters.
Eventually, the character of Celestine was even given her own Warren Ellis-written two issue mini-series. Despite technically being Rob Liefeld publications, these issues have much more in common with the Spawn-verse and should primarily be of interest to the Spawn readers, despite having provided the context in which Moore started working for Extreme.
I think my feelings on his pre-Supreme Image work lines up pretty closely with yours. I just read the Spawn/WildCATS thing and it was almost completely forgettable.
DeleteAs vanilla as Moore's WildCATS work was, his Spawn work is probably the most misunderstood. He was interested in doing zany, crazy comedy and everyone thought he was coming on to do Watchmen. If you can separate it from his grand reputation, there are actually things to enjoy in it.