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.
