Weekly Reading: Awesome Adventures #1/Youngblood #3

Published by Awesome Entertainment in August 1999

The covers:

 

Title: Dandy in the Underworld

(Youngblood is currently out of print. There are a number of ways to read it, which can be found on the How do I read Moore's Awesome works page.)

A full year after Youngblood #2 came out, Awesome put out Awesome Adventures #1 (of 1). Awesome had just relaunched Supreme: The Return and seemed to be making an effort to get back to publishing. So, Awesome scraped together the pages Steve Skroce had completed for Youngblood #3 -- nine of them -- and hired two other artists to finish off the script. Except, to keep costs low, they truncated and skipped large parts of the script, ending up at 18 pages from a 24-page script. And some of those pages did not look good. Then they slapped on a cover of colored sketches from a failed Alex Ross Supreme project, because at least Suprema is in Youngblood. (And for the love of all that is holy, Suprema would never wear an outfit like that! The whole point to her introduction was how dowdy and wholesome she was!) Ugh. Yet Awesome advertised this as the start of Awesome Adventures. Because people were going to want more comics like this, right?

Sigh. You know the punchline to this joke, right?

Here's Rob Liefeld explaining the decision to rebrand Youngblood as Awesome Adventures:

"In regards to Youngblood#3 I made the decision to reroute it into Awesome Adventures

after I recieved the Abysmal numbers on the book. As many of you know, I

am self financing this venture and cannot afford to lose money on these

titles, so I am forced to pursue whatever means necessary to make these

books work. I apologize for the delay."

I assume he means the terrible numbers on the Youngblood issues, but can't be sure.

Anyway, this was the last anyone ever saw of Alan Moore's Youngblood for a long, long time. Liefeld has come out with like five different versions of Youngblood since then, some including characters from his run. But very little hope remained that Moore's Youngblood would ever be completed.

But that's not where the story ends. Many years later, Alan Moore's script for issue #4 turned up online here. Then later in 2014, Alan Moore's scripts for issues #2-7 turned up here. My plan had been to review those scripts as though they were issues, but then, just recently, a fan-drawn version of Alan Moore's unpublished scripts (and more) turned up. I've found them online, but you'll have to see if you can still find them out there.

I love the internet!

Obvious pseudo-lawyer language: If anyone who owns the rights to these issues/scripts has a problem with me linking to them or posting pages from them, let me know and I'll remove them. (Please don't sue me!)

So let's get into it, shall we?

We start at the House of Wax. Shaft and Twilight are talking about how Twilight is adapting to being in the 1990s (she was put in suspended animation in the early 1970s), noting that there are a lot of mutant and cyborg heroes around. There's a nice meta joke about how it seemed like a new superteam was popping up every six months.

Then they're attacked by the Jackettes, the lovely henchwomen of Professor Night's old villain, Jack-A-Dandy. They say they want to kill Youngblood so Jack can win his wager at the Miskatonic Asylum. Twilight assumes that the wager must be with the Lounge Lizard, who we saw return to the asylum at the end of last issue. They joke a little more about old times versus new times:

Twilight: "There was a lot of cackling in lab coats that went on, as I remember. Did the early 'nineties villains cackle?"

Shaft: "Nah. They just nuked everybody."

We see one Jackette sneak off while Johnny, disguised as a T-Rex joins the fight. The Jackettes decide to depart in a plume of talcum powder, saying that the master will have to win his wager some other way.

Meanwhile, Leonard happens upon the Jackette in the computer room, so she blasts his chair and takes off. I like how Moore reveals how angry Leonard is and how he's not really okay with Twilight helping him back into his chair.

The heroes find out that the Jackette was looking through old Professor Night case files for May 1965. There's a nice bit of humor in relating all the cases each hero was dealing with that month, which were clearly from their comics that month. They come across The Allies file from that month, who were fighting The Allies of Evil in "The Mystery of the Missing Millions."

Basically, all of The Allies main villains teamed up:

• Jack-A-Dandy vs. Professor Night
• Darius Dax vs. Supreme
• Doctor Clock vs. Glory
• Humandroid vs. Die Hard
• Killer Crab vs. Roman
• Arctura vs. Spacehunter
• The Marlin vs. The Fisherman

Doctor Clock had used his Time-Trader to move money from bank vaults to periods in the past where the villains could retrieve it. The money was never recovered. Youngblood and Twilight deduce that maybe Jack's wager is just a ruse to cover his tracks while he looks for the loot.

With Arctura in an 8,000-year prison sentence; the Humandroid dismantled; and Killer Crab, Marlin and Darius Dax dead, Jack is the only one alive and on the planet. Twilight goes off to interview Jack.

And with that we get our last page of Steve Skroce's pencils. The coloring and inking were definitely weird toward the end there. What a sad way to go out. Next up we have three pages by Dietrich Smith, whose style isn't too far removed from Skroce's.

Two pages of Moore's script are truncated to a single page of art. It mostly works, but I think it needs the snuff:

 

  

  

  

 

Jack is looking worse for the years he's been in Miskatonic. Twilight accuses him of sending the Jackettes to kill Youngblood.

Jack: "A boy has to have his hobbies."

Twilight turns the conversation to the missing money, but Jack swears that he's genuinely trying to kill them. "You have my word as a gentleman!"

Twilight doesn't believe him and goes to organize a treasure hunt. Jack says, "Curses," but that's quite a smile he has on his face.

We're now under the sea at Killer Crab's base, as Shaft and Big Brother check it out. Sadly, we didn't get a modified underwater Big Brother. Again, two pages of Moore's script are truncated into a single art page. And Suprema gets removed from this one entirely!

 

  

  

  

 

Shaft and Big Brother find lots of damage to the base from its last fight with Roman. That base looks kind of cool, and apparently was the easiest to find. But they don't find any money.

In the script, the action cuts to Omegapolis, but the issue then shows us Arctura's base. What a strange way to make this comic.

Suprema is in outer space at Arctura's base near Algol, "the star the ancient persians called the Demon's Head, because of its resemblance to a malevolent and winking eye." Um... okay. Thanks for that, Suprema.

The base is filled with the dead bodies of Spacehunters (are they a race or a profession or clones of a single character?) but no money.

Again, two pages in the script become one in the comic:

 

  

  

 

What we really lost in these truncations was giving room to the villains' interesting locations and letting us see them before rushing through and saying there's no money there.

It would have been great to see Skroce draw them, with his attention to detail, but at this point, Dietrich didn't have the space or time to do them justice, anyway.

Unfortunately, our fans didn't redo these pages to break them back into two pages, each. That would have been nice, to get Moore's full intent. But I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when the gift horse is so amazing.

So we may as well move on.

We're onto Omegapolis and our fan-made pages. Just compare this first page to the real Marat Mychael page in Awesome Adventures:

Yeah, I'll stick with the fan-made ones. The characters are a little stiff, but they have a nice, classical look, a little like Chris Sprouse. The colors and lettering look very professional, too.

As for Marat Mychaels, we'll see him again when we get to Glory.

Anyway, Youngblood interviews Ethan Crane (someone knowledgeable about Supreme) about Darius Dax and where his hideout was. As they walk in front of the abandoned Omegapolis Museum (where we'll find out Dax's hideout actually is in Supreme: The Return #2) Crane says that he doesn't know where the hideout is and that Dax probably didn't have the money as he was living in Littlehaven as Judy Jordan up until his death.

In a cool page design, we then see Rachel run to Chicago to investigate all the scrap yards looking for the Humandroid's lair. She eventually finds it, but it's all dusty and rusty with no loot.

As Johnny and Twilight head back from Omegapolis, they stop to talk to the Marlin's widow. Just as Twilight's about to talk to the widow, her son shoos them out, angry about them looking for money where there obviously isn't any. It's kind of a fun little thing to see a villain's family, but that's also the problem with this issue. There's a lot of cool little bits, like that and Doc Rocket investigating in Chicago. But the overall story is kind of dull: They go someplace. No money. Repeat.

Johnny even says, "Look, I'm sorry, but this is really boring. I thought Youngblood would be, like, fighting villains. This stuff is like police procedural work or something!"

Yeah, but police procedurals usually involve more clues.

Anyway, then they're all together to check out the Knave & Toff gentleman's magazine publishing headquarters, where we saw Jack-A-Dandy in the old Supreme flashbacks with Professor Night. They head to the back of Jack's den and find a weird, giant-prop-filled hideout. Twilight asks Suprema to look for the cash.

Suprema: "No. There's just piles of dirty magazines... and I don't know how that woman on page forty can live with herself!" Ha.

The only place left to check is Doctor Clock's Clock-Tower, outside Omegapolis. As they head there, Twilight explains that Doctor Clock's Time-Trader would swap things of equal mass from this time and another time. The Allies had to go to the stone age, ancient Rome, etc.

Doc Rocket opens a hole for them into Clock-Tower where they find some electronic equipment.

A video screen turns on and powerful doors slam shut, trapping the heroes. On the video screen, the villains (from back in the '60s) greet The Allies, whom they think they've trapped.

The Time-Trader powers up and is soon bombarding the heroes with supercharged tachyons. It's interesting that Rachel turns to Leonard for protection. But even his mighty machine can't save her. They soon disappear in a band of light. And it's a cool technique to see how they get absorbed in that light.

Moore talked about wanting to do more psychedelic imagery in Youngblood and it comes across pretty well.

We see that same band of light reflected in Jack-A-Dandy's monocle back at the asylum. Jack had put tracer snuff on Twilight's chair when she came to interrogate him so he would know when she was finished off.

That's one of the reasons it would have been nice if they had stuck to the script. It's a little detail, but it would have helped.

And now he collects on the wager from the Lounge Lizard: a half pack of cigarettes.

That's where Youngblood ended for more than a decade. At the time, Rob Liefeld added this note to the end of the issue of Awesome Adventures. He talks about publishing more Youngblood, Glory and even the long-lost Warchild maxi-series (of which, he has two scripts for) in Alan Moore's Awesome Tales (did he not even remember what he was calling this series or was he proposing another series that featured Alan Moore scripts? It's all so confusing! And yet, on the back of the issue was an ad for something called War Child: Merlyn with a story by Rob Liefeld.). You know what, just never mind. Here's the note...

...as well as a bunch of Dan Fraga sketches for something called Black Seed, which as far as I know, never saw print, either.

You know what, it doesn't matter. Next week we move away from the failing Awesome to the Awesome that should have been with Young Guns! Aw man, this is so exciting!

As always, please check out the Annotations Page for more details and references and be sure to let me know any that I missed.