Awesome only existed from 1997 until 2000, so it didn't have the time or the money to put out too many series. Of course there was Supreme and the other Moore-scripted spinoffs (which I'm reviewing issue-by-issue), as well as Fighting American, Coven and Kaboom (which I've already covered in standalone posts). But we also have some random one-shots or titles that lasted at most two issues.
The main reason we never got more series was Awesome's financial crash in early 1998. I'll get into the details of that later, but that meant some series that came out just before this crash or were being prepared during this crash lost all momentum and died short deaths. As Awesome struggled to continue, it would release issues that had been completed or were close to completed (with no way to continue them) or start new series and hope that they caught on fast.
So, what we're left with are the odds and ends, which, for some reason that I thought was good at the time, I have read all of. I'll give you quick snapshots of all of them below:
Chapel vol. 3 #1 (Sept. 1997)
So, Chapel, the guy at left with a skull tattoo on his face and fangs, was a mercenary assassin for a black-ops agency of the U.S. government (seriously, wasn't every early Image character a mercenary working for a black ops agency? No wonder the U.S. debt is so high; all those damn mercs!). He was on Youngblood for a while before fighting against them. He also had a whole plot in Todd McFarlane's Spawn, as Al Simmons' (the man who died and became Spawn) friend-turned-killer. Eventually Chapel killed himself to become a dark lord in hell (yes, this really happened).
That's all in the future, though, as this issue's about a mission he had back in the 1980s.
Written by some guy named Robert Napton (According to a note in the comments below, he wrote an obscure 1990 comic titled "Q-Unit" before writing for Liefeld and Image. Later he wrote some comics for Dynamite Comics.) and drawn by John Stinsman (more on him in a minute), the issue reveals that some terrorist has gotten the secret serum to allow him to have the same powers as Chapel and Chapel goes on a mission to kill him. Blah, blah, people are shot and stabbed and otherwise meaninglessly killed until Chapel gets into a fistfight with the terrorist.
Guys, just get a room, already. Anyway, Chapel kills the terrorist. The issue ends with Chapel being assigned the mission to kill Al Simmons! (Twist! Oh wait, we already knew this. Who cares?)
At least the cover was painted well. It's also clear that they hadn't figured out the standard design for the Awesome covers yet.
Yeah, I'm not really mourning for the Extreme days.
Scarlet Crush #1-2 (Jan. and Feb. 1998)
John Stinsman had worked for Extreme for quite a while before Awesome came out, mostly handling Avengelyne. Avengelyne was a fallen angel who had the superpower of doing all kinds of obnoxious poses on covers that for some reason sold comics in the mid-'90s. He finally got the chance to write one with Scarlet Crush! Luck being a two-sided coin, the series came out in early 1998 just as Awesome went through the financial wringer and he only got to write two issues of his life's work. But what issues they were!A sci-fi story, it's basically a mix of so many more famous sci-fi movies: there's spice mining on Venus (I guess Arrakis must be trademarked); there's our heroine, a lady cop gone outside the law, who happens to use a glowing laser sword. She hires a shady, lovable rogue in a bar and gets his larger, non-understandable partner thrown in as part of the deal. (I guess if you're going to steal from sci-fi classics, one should expect a lot of Star Wars elements).
The heroine is looking for a kidnapped scientist (who happens to be her father) who no one else seems to want recovered.
The second issue wasn't much better as it starts with the lady cop throwing her badge at her superior as she quits. (At least it wasn't a rip off of a sci-fi movie?) She then dons the skimpy outfit from the cover at left (seriously, it has a zipper but not enough fabric to be capable to be zipped up - yeah, I wonder why comics got such a sexist reputation?) and with her hired crew break in to an alien stronghold to rescue her father. Despite shooting nearly everyone and not suffering any injuries, the heroes somehow let the aliens get away with her dad.
I wonder why the aliens wanted her dad so much? I wonder how she kept her softball-sized breasts from falling out of that outfit? I'm left wondering about a lot of things because the series went nowhere, lasting only those two issues.
Stinsman's an okay artist, but the dialog feels recycled and the storyline has zero originality. There are at least a few nice beats between some of the supporting characters, which makes me think he may have had potential. That's about all he had as, after Awesome, he pretty much disappeared from comics.
Six-String Samurai #1 (Aug. 1998)
Having seen an early cut of the minor cult film Six-String Samurai, Rob Liefeld felt that he had to make a comic to go with it. Created by Awesome regulars (written by Matt Hawkins and Liefeld and with art by Dan Fraga and John Stinsman), the story is a continuation rather than an adaptation of the film.Here's the summary at the beginning:
"In this alternate universe, in 1957 the Russians took the United States by nuclear force. Only one piece of the American frontier remained free, a patch of land known as Lost Vegas. Through this desert wasteland wanders the 'six string samurai,' a latter-day Buddy Holly who handles a guitar or a sword with equal skill. He’s a man on a collision course with destiny: It seems that King Elvis, who ruled over the land of Vegas for forty years, has finally taken his last curtain call and the throne now stands empty. But it’s a rough road to the big city and the body count is likely to be high, as demonstrated in this postapocalyptic future with a beat we can dance to."
Imagine a mashup of the Mariachi movies and Mad Max. Doesn't that sound awesome? We get two little tales that are not nearly crazy enough. One is of an unnamed hero taking out a gang in a diner as they try to install the Duke as the new king.
The other is of a hero fighting a death-like villain who wants his guitar.
Look, I get that movies are expensive and so they need to do a lot with a little. Indie filmmakers can only afford a diner rather than building giant sets. But comics aren't expensive and you can show the whole, damn, crazy world, rather than just the inside of a diner. Show us this world and make it big and weird and wonderful. Don't make it like something we've seen before and seen better.
Moving on.
Re:Gex #1 (Sept. 1998) and #0 (Dec. 1998)
Oh Awesome, never change.
So Re:Gex, written and drawn by Rob Liefeld, is the story of a superpowered being named Scarab who can identify other superpowered beings. He would find them and kill them for an organization called The Company. However, touched by an angel, he decided to change his ways and save them instead of killing them.
When he sees Genie, a beautiful, scantily-clad blonde with a giant sword and crazy demon boots, fall from the sky, he rescues her and The Company starts chasing after them.
The Company's henchmen are destroyed by Scarab's robot pal Primer, who can turn into any weapon system or vehicle. They're joined by Psidon (an underwater being) and Felix (the fix-it guy). But there's more pages devoted to Genie really enjoying a shower than those guys (four, including a two page spread turned sideways like a Playboy centerfold) so let's not worry about character development, shall we. Here's the pages, after which, you'll need a shower, too.
As long as we're going down this road, here was one of the variant covers for this issue.
Sigh... Okay, so then we get to see the big bad guy in Lord Sharpe, who has captured Avengelyne (more on her in a bit) and put her in the mitts of a looney-looking woman named Tragedy Ann.
So that was all in issue #1. Issue #0 should fill us in on their backgrounds, right? Wrong.
Issue #0 features Scarab, Genie and Primer at some point in the future who have been joined by some guys named Cairo and Beowulf. They fight off The Company's henchmen and make their escape. Two small backups tell us more about Scarab's past (we see him touched by the angel) and Beowulf (he kills a bunch of people). So, um, yeah, that was Re:Gex.
Menace #1 (Nov. 1998)
This issue shows Menace and her cohorts, Crystal and Taffy, as they snort some coke, march in to a rival gang's boss's office and distract them with their scantily clad... look, from now on I'm going to just point out when a woman isn't scantily clad in one of these issues, as it'll be a shock... and kill them, taking the cocaine and cash and running off.
They're summoned to a payphone (back during the pager days - remember those?) by their boss, Black, who sets them up in an ambush, killing them.Menace holds on long enough to make it to the E.R., where she sees an angel-like being named Malick, who judges Menace poorly for her evil deeds during life. And she dies.
We see her dig her way out of the grave during a moonlit night and someone (maybe Malick) welcomes her back to life as a dark angel.
This is just the beginning!
Except it's not, as it was the only issue. Longtime Liefeld artist Dan Fraga doesn't bring anything more to the proceedings. About the most fun you can have with this issue is reading this great snarky write-up here.
Avengelyne #1 (March 1999)
Created by writer Robert Napton and penciller Dan Fraga, Avengelyne starts with the titular fallen angel hanging out in a garden, trying to come to peace with the world and her place in it. A strange being shows up and tells her that she wasn't a fallen angel, she was actually sent to Earth to foil a plan to destroy humanity.
Fast forward to Avengelyne in Sharpe's bondage who tells her that the Bible was a hoax, that aliens like himself gave the word to Moses to make humanity more controllable and that the end of humanity is coming.
Um, okay.
The strange being finds her in her prison and shows her a vision of her being God's warrior angel and frees her. And then we get a small note at the end that Jesus Christ might have returned. And that's the end of the Re:Gex/Avengelyne thread. Or is it the beginning? No. No, it's certainly the end.
Prophet #1 and Legacy (March 2000)
Anyway, Liefeld and writer Robert Napton enlisted two newbie artists in the Walker Brothers for this story about a future Prophet clone/daughter who is a kind of cop. In 3025, she gets attacked by some punks, whom she dispatches pretty easily and then returns to headquarters, where she has a vision she is being summoned by the original John Prophet. There's some future speak dialog that's kind of clever.
There's a backup story in 2025 where John Prophet gets brought back to life and immediately attacks everyone around him. Fortunately for them, the scientists who brought him back used clones to do it and communicate through holograms to tell them that he can atone for his past sins by saving the world. I guess he did it, since the world is still around in 3025! So we don't even need a second issue!
Somehow, Awesome convinced Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane to do variant covers for this issue, which is nice that the Image guys could make up. Meanwhile, the Walker brothers did a little more work for Liefeld before leaving for the video game industry.
Brigade vol. 3 #1 (July 2000)
Sadly, this last series gave us one final hurrah of what the Awesome universe should have looked like.
Written by longtime inker Lary Stucker, this version of Brigade was supposed to be the teenage superhero team for the Awesome universe. Wait, I thought that was Moore's Youngblood. Oh, what the hell, since no one was paying any attention anymore, let's go ahead and say there can be two.
With art by Dietrich Smith (and Stucker's own inks), we get the formation of Brigade as Badrock and the two Kabooms face off against Kid Supreme (a pre-Moore Supreme character), Dash (a superspeedster from NewMen) and a wounded SPICE android. Badrock and the Kabooms want SPICE to answer for blowing up a space station and killing all aboard.
There's an enjoyable fight as one set of heroes takes on another...
...before we find out that SPICE was set up as the government tried to replace her with a new, killier version.
We also find out that Fighting American called in all the available heroes, including Youngblood and Supreme to investigate.
It's fun to see all the heroes from the various comics turn up (kind of what Moore intended way back when Awesome seemed like it might succeed) and a little sad that this is how it turned out: as one forgotten issue of a comic no one really cared about.
Drat.
Back to our teens, who have started to figure out that they need to work together. Fighting American turns up and throws his shield, knocking them over.
(I guess we know the real reason Awesome folded. Marvel followed through on their Fighting American shield-throwing legal threat.) Once he finds out the truth, FA empowers the teen heroes to become a team and find out the truth. But, of course, that wasn't meant to be.
Damn it, I totally would have followed this series if it had turned into anything. It had that enjoyable, bouncy spirit that Awesome should have gone for consistently. Instead, this was it.
But, this being Awesome, in the back of this issue, we then got a 9-page look at an upcoming comic called Century. According to my friend Rob, Century was Rob Liefeld's third attempt at a story set in the future (the first two being Extreme 3000 and Extreme Genesis). Youngblood was the world police with the NewMen being underground resistance. Supreme was married to Glory and had superpowers kids. Several pages were drawn, but nothing came of it. Supposedly, some of the advertising for the series included pages from Liefeld's Legion of Superheroes pitch.
And that's the real lesson one should take away from Rob Liefeld and Awesome Entertainment. He always moves ever onward, creating new things and letting new people tell new stories. It's an awesome way to handle his comic characters even if it can also be frustrating, as we'll see in the comics that followed after Awesome.
