After Awesome Part 9: John McLaughlin'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 2012, John McLaughlin, a screenwriter for the movie Black Swan, wrote the relaunch of Youngblood. Like the other revived Extreme books at the time, it reverted to Youngblood's original numbering (which makes no sense since it largely ignores much of what came before), starting at #71. I've watched some of McLaughlin's movies and TV and I have no idea how he came to write this series or why it is as awful as it is, but wow is it terrible. To top it off, Rob Liefeld wannabe Jon Malin handled the art and it compliments the shitty writing perfectly.

This arc follows a reporter from Entertainment Now magazine as she is embedded with Youngblood to write a nice puff piece on them. This Youngblood is made up of Die Hard (back to being a cyborg), Cougar (now a horndog), Vogue (a female horndog, mostly, but not exclusively, lusting after Die Hard), Lady Photon (who was an alien he but has now become an alien she) and a new Shaft (Jeff Terrell marched into President Obama's oval office to quit).

Terrell has returned to the F.B.I., where he is investigating a weird serial killer, who is killing future incarnations of Vogue and sending them back in time for him to find. That sentence was the most interesting thing about this arc and it was never resolved, basically because this is a Rob Liefeld comic.

There's also an ongoing B-story about Badrock who is in some kind of coma. He nearly died when he used his body as shielding for a space shuttle that was re-entering the atmosphere. But something punches out of the shell of Badrock. We never find out what, basically because this is a Rob Liefeld comic.

Anyway, Youngblood's first mission is to deal with a bunch of clones of a wannabe model at a mall. They handle it by punching out the original girl, who popped out the clones as a stress mechanism.

McLaughlin tries to make jokes about modern mass media, but as he's not as savvy as Joe Casey was, it just comes across as amateurish. Well, it's all amateurish, really:

 

 

Then Die Hard is being honored by some military bigwigs in Washington. Something turns the dead in Arlington Cemetery into zombies, who attack. Youngblood dispatches them, but then it turns out to be some conspiracy by a police gear-garbed alien/demon, who has somehow possessed President Obama:

 

But since it's never mentioned again, I guess it wasn't that important.

That's one of the major problems of this arc. McLaughlin writes the action so poorly and wraps things up so stupidly that it took me a while to realize that each issue is a standalone story and none of it adds up to anything.

The next issue dealt with a bully gamer who picked on another character in a video game. She got revenge by sending a real axe-wielding beast to kill him through the internet. But Youngblood took care of her by killing her in real life, too. Case closed!

Then Youngblood goes to Las Vegas to find out why all of the people are missing. Turns out an alien gambler won them by playing a game of cards with the mayor of the city. (Jesus Christ, were there no editors at Image who could say this was a stupid idea?) He offers to play Youngblood and if they win, they can have the people back, but if they lose, he gets the entire planet. Instead Vogue hits him and the people are saved.

 

The Entertainment Now article about Youngblood comes out and says Youngblood is great. That was an entire issue.

Then we get an issue that promises to reveal the fate of Badrock! But it's a flashback to him on the space shuttle and Jeff quitting because of it, so it doesn't reveal anything. And that was McLaughlin's last chance to reveal anything because starting with issue #77 Rob Liefeld took over writing the story and hit reboot on the whole thing again. Yagh!

Now Troll and Chapel's son reincarnate the original Chapel, who is still a lord of Hell. (All of this is from the early days when Rob Liefeld's Youngblood played in the same sandbox as Todd MacFarlane's Spawn.) 

Badrock puts together a whole messload of old Youngblood members to fight Chapel, including Moore's Youngblood members. They're all needed as Chapel opens a portal to hell, which comes through to terrorize New York (always New York!). Of course that fight never happens because the series ends on a cliffhanger in issue #78... say it with me now... because this is a Rob Liefeld comic.

I feel dumber for having talked this long about this comic.

Next time, let's look at one of my favorite bits of After Awesome: Bloodstrike. No, seriously.