After Awesome Part 5: Joe Casey'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 2004, Rob Liefeld announced that Joe Casey, a writer who had gotten an early start with Liefeld before working extensively at Marvel, would reconfigure and rescript dialog for Liefeld's first run of Youngblood into something called Maximum Youngblood. Basically, Liefeld was acknowledging what we all knew, that he desperately needed a real writer.

Before Maximum Youngblood could come out, Liefeld returned to Image Comics, allowing them to put out the Youngblood revamp in 2007. In 2008, Liefeld announced that Casey would write a new Youngblood series for Image, illustrated by Derec Donovan.

The 2008 series took place after an unseen falling apart of Alan Moore's version of Youngblood. However it followed several of the characters from that series.

Casey had a strong interest into going back to one of Liefeld's initial ideas, which was what would the interaction be with superheroes and media in a world where superpowers are real? To that end, he launched the series following Douglas McGarry, the nephew of Leo McGarry (the character on NBC's The West Wing who was the chief of staff for the president and was eventually voted as vice president, though his death prevented him from being sworn into office). Douglas McGarry, a former ad agency exec, is now working for the National Security Council, putting together a new Youngblood team. He recruits Shaft, Cougar, Doc. Rocket, Johnny Panic, Badrock and a fully robotized Die Hard.

Casey never does much with the characters, nor is it clear why he picked these characters since none of them are given much to do. There are a few acknowledgements to Moore's Youngblood as something nostalgic but earnest.

But Casey has a fun time mixing the Youngblood characters into our media universe, seeing Doc Rocket on real Time with Bill Maher and Johnny Panic on the Late Show with David Letterman. McGarry has camera crews following Youngblood around, turning their interactions into a reality show. It's an interesting idea and certainly enjoyable.

Shaft is suspicious of McGarry and his motives. In the meantime, he's having visions of a purple woman from outer space, who talks like Spacehunter did in Judgment Day: Aftermath.

Their first mission is to take out a familiar-looking robot. When Badrock lands on it after jumping out of a helicopter, he injures his leg. The series spent a lot of time on his injury and what it means, never really getting anywhere (something we'll see time and again in the other Youngblood series from here).

McGarry starts recruiting a group of supervillains, led by Giger, a superintelligent mastermind. The group, Mayhem Inc., includes villains geared toward each Youngblood member. Poppy turns up from Moore's Youngblood #2, but she doesn't do much but follow Giger around and do his bidding.

Shaft tracks down Leonard, who is now working for the CIA, to confront him about the design of the robot that attacked Youngblood. He wants to know why he's being played. So Leonard shoots him.

The news reports that Shaft was killed in a terrorist explosion and a funeral is played up on TV. McGarry quickly brings in a new leader named Task. Even though he's given almost no character, for some reason Doc Rocket starts sleeping with him. Um... okay.

Mayhem Inc. makes life worse for Youngblood and show that they can't be as controlled as McGarry thinks, attacking Johnny and Cougar and then later, Badrock.

Meanwhile Shaft wakes up having had all the bugs and trackers removed from his system. Leonard and Waxey explain that McGarry is using TV to get Youngblood super popular. Then he's going to have Youngblood enter the U.S.'s unpopular war with Kazakhstan for oil rights. Anyway, Shaft gets all the other Youngbloods (except Task and Badrock) to join him in an underground Big Brother robot to hide out and figure out their next move.

That leaves Task to get defeated by Mayhem Inc. on national TV. But McGarry puts together a new team of Youngblood, but these "characters" are given even less personality, so why bother listing codenames.

Meanwhile, out of nowhere, the Televillain shows up and starts killing people to reassert his role as the media supervillain.

And Scion, Spacehunter's daughter lands on Earth and joins the underground Youngblood to help them so that they can protect the Earth from a now-evil Spacehunter's imminent arrival.

There is a cool bit where McGarry teams up with Don King to promote the fight between the new team and Mayhem Inc., but it also kind of shows that the only parts of the series that are really working are the media references.

The underground Youngblood go after the Televillain, who is going on a psychopathic rampage, which may or may not be solely on TV. They confront him and he manages to escape into an episode of Oprah with Scion and then traps her there. She'll vanish once the signal dissipates, so underground Youngblood come up with a way for Shaft and Cougar to enter the television while Johnny controls the remote, like the old Jack Ritter movie, Stay Tuned.

The Televillain teams up with Giger and McGarry starts using Stormhead to control the weather to make the fight between Youngblood and Mayhem Inc. into a true event.

But none of that matters because with issue #9, Rob Liefeld pulled the plug on Joe Casey and offered up a new version of Youngblood, offering no explanation for what happened after issue #8, and basically just doing his own thing, using some of the same characters and some new ones. Now Youngblood works for newly-elected President Obama and they have to rescue him as some heroes(?) from a future abduct him and the White House. Liefeld only did one issue and we have no idea what happened next. But since it didn't matter to him what happened before, it shouldn't really matter what happened next either.

I've heard rumors that it's a very Liefeld thing to do to get an idea and scrap whatever anyone else is working on so that he can do his idea, which doesn't go anywhere because Liefeld can't stick to doing more than a few (often just a single) issue(s). Supposedly David Messina was already contacted to take over the art chores after Derek Donovan left (you can see his sketches here and some almost finished pages here) to continue Casey's run, but Liefeld pulled the plug. Donovan said that he thinks that Casey wasn't writing Youngblood the way Liefeld wanted, anyway:

"I think that we were putting the book out to get the attention of all the other potential book makers who maybe had ideas that they wanted to bring to market and show them that Image was the place to be. This was before the Walking Dead TV show aired and I think that we were bringing the Youngblood brand back to life, a brand that has always been known for huge sales numbers and bringing it down to a level that seemed like anyone could do it. And then the series ended with all of these television references, even going as far as putting Oprah into the book. It’s not the direction that I would’ve taken the book if I wanted it to be a huge success. We didn’t have the big double page action spreads with characters fighting and blowing things up. It seemed like we were deconstructing all of that and inviting other creators to come and bring all of that in with their own creations. I may be wrong, but that’s just how it felt from inside the fish bowl. It was fun, but not what I would have done with those characters and that title if I was looking to make a big, splashing success."

Anyway, let's forget Obama Youngblood and just talk about Casey's Youngblood. It's a mostly enjoyable comic and the references to Moore's Youngblood are welcome, but it suffers from Casey thinking he had more time than he did. He never wrapped up anything. Mayhem Inc. continued to exist out there as a threat. McGarry and his goal were never confronted. The Televillain just escaped to kill more people another day. Scion and the threat posed by the now-evil Spacehunter were never dealt with. What about the new Youngblood? No idea. What about dealing with the fact that Shaft wasn't dead even though he had a funeral on live TV? Nope. He had eight issues and it was mostly set up.

The other problem is there's not much to the characters. Shaft says he doesn't want to be on Youngblood. And then we see him join Youngblood. Why does Doc Rocket join up? Why does she sleep with Task? Why is Johnny there? Does he have any motive other than to provide witty meta banter? Why are we supposed to care that Badrock might have to stay Badrock forever... we've only ever known him as Badrock for 15 years?

[Update: I reached out to Casey to interview him about what he was trying to do and where he wanted to go, but he didn't take too kindly to my criticism of his run and passed on doing an interview. Oh well, I guess now we'll never know why Spacehunter developed such rage issues.]

Ultimately it's a waste. And the real waste was that because Liefeld had moved on with Busiek, Millar, Kirkman and now Casey, he had probably killed whatever opportunity there was to finish Moore's Youngblood. That's why I'm so grateful the fan-creators finished it because there seems little opportunity for it ever to be released professionally.

Oh well, next time we'll look at the rebirth of Extreme. Because that's just what had been missing in the world.