After Awesome Part 12: Chad Bowers' 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.)

For the 25th anniversary of Youngblood and Image Comics, Rob Liefeld announced a new ongoing series (though it's called Youngblood [volume 5], it's at least the sixth version of Youngblood just since Alan Moore's version--eighth if you count Rob Liefeld's two attempts at rebooting the comic right out from under the other creators), this time written by Chad Bowers and with art by Jim Towe.

Bowers has set the comic after a group of anonymous hackers (basically Wikileaks) stole all of Youngblood's secrets and made them public, turning public reaction against the team. The team disbanded and was made illegal. Shaft tried to continue and got tossed in jail. A few others are able to do conventions and appearances without causing too much alarm. Oh, and Diehard was elected president. Um, ok. I'll get into that later.

Subsequently, a Yelp!-like app (called Help!) has been launched allowing victims to call in superheroes to help them. A kid named Man-Up and a girl named Petra (under the alias Gunner) are being heroes-for-call in the Help! app. But when Man-Up goes missing, Petra, a former Olympic shooter, decides to try to find him. But he's nowhere to be found and his records are wiped from the internet. So, at her whit's end, she decides to form a new supergroup called Youngblood (and calling herself Vogue) to raise her profile enough that the authorities will have to seriously search for Man-Up.

You know what, now that I write that down, that's incredibly stupid. But the joy of the comic is that it moves so fast and is so fun to read that you sort of ignore all the stupid stuff on the way.

Seen in flashback over several issues, Petra finds a technological genius who used to be in Bloodstream (the hacker group mentioned before) to become Sentinel (but he doesn't like that name). They recruit Doc Rocket, who is now an older veteran of Youngblood, who is happy to help. Doc leads her to Littlehaven where they find Suprema flying around in a robe. No one really remembers her and the suggestion is that this all comes after Supreme Blue Rose. Anyway, she has decided to call herself Supreme and is happy to join up.

So Diehard sends Badrock, who is in rough shape and is probably going to die from some disease, to get Shaft out of prison and track down the new Youngblood and get them to knock it off. (Why them? Oh, who the F knows? Probably because it's not Youngblood if you don't have Shaft.)

New Youngblood fights this bank robber called Crime Condor who makes them all see things and go a little nuts, which is just when Shaft finds them. They fight. Blah blah blah, Shaft gives them the message from Diehard telling them to knock it off.

Meanwhile, Diehard has decided to endorse and work with the two brother CEOs of Byrnetec, the company behind the Help! app. Unbeknownst to him, though, Byrnetec is up to no good.

Badrock takes Shaft and Youngblood to a safehouse and makes the pitch to Shaft to join up with the new Youngblood. He explains that they need help and since he's dying, Badrock wants to have one last run and leave a lasting legacy.

Petra convinces Shaft about finding Man-Up and some other missing heroes. Shaft figures out that the Help! app must be in on it and fixes the anagram of Byrnetec into Cybernet, an old Youngblood foe. So he takes off by himself to confront Byrnetec.

Badrock accidentally tells Diehard about Shaft taking off and the president sends Diehard-like drones to take Shaft out. Whoops.

Meanwhile, we get to see the Byrnetec kids kidnap another hero, enslave him and sell him to the highest bidder. They complain about being broke, which is apparently why they're doing all this. Really? Again, with the stupid plotting. You create one of the most popular apps, but you can't figure out a way to monetize it, so you use it for kidnapping and the slave trade. Sigh. Okay, moving on.

Shaft takes out a few drones before Youngblood shows up to help him with the others. Teamwork, blah. blah, blah. Diehard decides to take matters into his own hands and flies off to confront Shaft himself.

At the same time, Petra and not-Sentinel are hacking into Byrnetec to find out about Man-Up, but get caught by the Byrnetec/Cybernet kids. They send two Chapel-like henchmen to deal with the Youngblooders. The rest of Youngblood show up and they're just about to fight when Diehard flies through, ignores the Cybernet twins and the two-Chapel-looking badguys, grabs Badrock and flies out to lecture Badrock outside the building. (Why fly out with Badrock? Because if he lectured Badrock inside it would spoil the awful plotting, duh.)

When Badrock tells Diehard that they're Cybernet, the president just says no, "We vetted them ten times over. They're good men." When Shaft comes out and tries to reason with Diehard, it all descends into one big fight, during which Diehard rips off Shaft's arm.

Look, I get this is a superhero comic and one called Youngblood at that, so it has a really low bar for logical plotting that it has to overcome for it to be seen as doing a good job, but this is really, really dumb. Vetting isn't, "Well, they have a website, they must be legit." Presidential vetting goes over everything. Ev-er-y-thing! Birth certificates, bank accounts, who you employ, what you leave off your taxes. If you're a low-budget criminal organization, they are going to find it. And if you just flew through their corporate offices and they are clearly employing two bad-looking bodyguards who ALSO happen to be the genetic offspring of ANOTHER of Youngblood's worst enemies, maybe you don't start fighting your former allies first.

But then again, how does a president go around wearing a mask all the time and people just go, "Yeah, okay. That's a thing now." Or, how does said president decide to go off on his own and fight a couple of superpowered guys and the Secret Service decides to sit back with a beer and say, "Yeah, have fun Eagle One! Let us know how it goes." Gah!

Okay, I'm going to my happy place now. Breathe. Breathe.

Whew. Okay, I'm better.

Inside Byrnetec, Petra shoots one of the Cybernet twins and they sort of combine into a giant cybernetic monster thing. Fighting, fighting fighting. Badrock knocks Diehard back inside the building and he realizes that maybe he was a little rash. Fighting, fighting, fighting until the new Cybernet decides to eat Badrock. When it does, it gets his sickness and blows the whole place up.

Sure. Okay.

Out of the rubble comes Diehard carrying Thomas McCall, the normal teenaged boy who became Badrock. Because apparently Badrock was suffering from a disorder called magical-plot-solution-disease.

Later, Youngblood, seemingly fine from the Cybernet explosion, rescues Man-Up from the Morrocan drug-dealing terrorist who bought him.

That finished the first arc. After that there have been issues dealing with Diehard deciding to come clean about the Help! app and deciding to launch a new Youngblood app instead. Youngblood has been hiding out in Japan with Doc Rocket's old boyfriend, Task, who has convinced them to become Japan's official Team Youngblood. Bloodstream tried to take out not-Sentinel, but he outsmarted them. And there's been a big fight over whether Man-Up can be in the group or not.

Maybe I'm being too mean. It's a fun series that's nice to look at. The callbacks to previous versions of Youngblood are enjoyable. I'm glad that they're using versions of Suprema and Doc Rocket that harken back to the originals. But it's just not a series that demands a lot of thought (clearly it prefers you to not think at all). I just don't know if that's enough for me anymore.

Then again, maybe it doesn't matter. As I write this, Liefeld has announced that Towe is leaving the comic after issue 11, even though issue 12 has been solicited.  At the end of issue #11, it's announced that Liefeld is going to do the art on issue #12. Gosh, that doesn't sound familiar at all.

We're now almost 20 years removed from Alan Moore's Youngblood and even longer from his run on Supreme. Supreme was a work of genius. His Youngblood was a fun series, like this most recent one and the Casey one before it. But unlike this one, Moore's explored interesting and intelligent ideas, such as alternate histories, western heroes and galactic entities in clever ways that didn't fall apart when you started thinking about them. But fun comic series come and go all the time (as we've seen with so many of these After Awesome series). That's the very nature of the comics industry that Moore was poking fun at with his revisions idea in the first place.

So if history is any judge, Rob Liefeld will probably come out with a new Youngblood sooner or later. And a new Supreme. And a new Glory. And a new Bloodstrike. That's comics.

And as much as I enjoyed Moore's Youngblood and am glad that our fan creators finished it, maybe that's enough. Maybe there's just not enough there anymore for me to want to continue with whatever Liefeld and company come up with next for Youngblood. I've spent so long looking for Moore's characters that they've long stopped being the characters I liked. And I've forgotten that the reason Moore came up with those characters in the first place was to explore and illustrate interesting and compelling ideas. The characters without the ideas is just a case of diminishing returns.

So, maybe this is how After Awesome ends, even though there will always be more comics. In a way it feels like that epilogue to the fan-created Youngblood. Maybe I'm Shaft, remembering a fun time and haven't been able to move on from that memory.

What was it he said? It was Awesome!

Yes. It was.

But there's one more bit of unfinished business. Up next: An ending for Supreme.

After Awesome Part 11: Warren Ellis's Supreme Blue Rose

(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 January of 2013, at the end of Erik Larsen's Supreme run, he promised us that Supreme would return with a new creative team and direction (but he didn't know who or what they would be). In 2014 Image teasingly announced that the British team of writer Warren Ellis and artist Tula Lotay would be doing a Supreme miniseries. With that team, we knew it was going to be something different.

And different it was.

The story basically follows a Diana Dane (certainly not Moore's, nor Larsen's), a journalist who has had some kind of episode and now finds herself unemployed and on some kind of medication. She's also having strange dreams, which is how we first see her.

In her dreams, she's in a version of the Supremacy talking to the residents, but they aren't like the residents we've met in previous iterations, nor is this Supremacy like the one we've seen before. There's a boy in a wheelchair and a man with no face called Enigma (gee, I wonder if he's Supreme?).

Enigma remembers all his past lives, but mostly remembers the red-headed woman from the future, who is obviously a version of Future Girl from the League of Infinity. She was surveying the Enigma's last world before it changed again. She is there to rescue as much of the world as she can, because who could bear to have no more world (who indeed?).

Before waking, the boy in the wheelchair tells Diana to not trust Darius Dax. Then she wakes in New York City. And goes for a job interview with Darius Dax.

Dax, now an elegant black man, wants to hire her to discover a secret. He's not interested in journalism, he wants the secrets to sell to people in power. And the best secrets are "blue rose cases." Blue roses do not occur in nature, and so are something different, unnatural and interesting. (It's a reference to David Lynch's Twin peaks, which is a clear inspiration for this series.)

In Dax's office is the remains of a golden arch that says "Supreme." It fell onto the town of Littlehaven, in a reported plane crash (which happens to be the same incident that set Diana on her own breakdown). In the center of the incident was an Ethan Crane, who seemed to fall apart when something emerged from inside of him.

Dax sends her out to investigate, protected by a Reuben Tube (previously the Televillain) with a shifting face, and driven by Linda (who goes by the nickname Twilight Girl Marvel). Linda formerly worked in Dax's "versioning" department, which considered alternative-history scenarios.

So, let me point out this one scene because it bothers me a lot and I'll refer to it later. As Diana is deciding whether to take Dax's job offer or not, she discusses it with her friend Noor, a 27-year old fashion model who tells Diana, "I'm 27. I've had at least eight great adventures, while you trained and wrote." She convinces Diana to take the job.

Anyway, interwoven through Diana's story are serials in the ongoing TV/streaming video/Facebook series Professor Night. This Professor Night is some kind of weird impressionistic thing about a detective and his nemesis/love interest Evening Primrose. It makes no sense, and yet all the characters in Diana's story talk about how much they love it. It's kind of like those friends of yours who tell you how great David Lynch is and when you ask why, they say you just don't understand.

In a scene that goes on way longer than necessary, we see Future Girl take an old/drunk author version of Storybook Smith into the future.

Then we meet Dr. Chelsea Henry, this universe's version of Lady Supreme/Probe (a character Moore wrote out of his first issue). She has discovered something moving backward and forward in time from the 30th century to about four months ago. And there's a bloom of blue radiation that seems to mess everything up coming up in the near future.

Dr. Henry starts hearing messages from the future. They send her a red triangle energy flash and tell her to protect the timeframe.

There's a nice bit in Diana's dream where Ellis uses the League of Infinity's Time Tower to consider mankind's trudge of progress through history. What he seems to be suggesting (or I'm just reading into it) is that the future isn't a time so much as a development. The 30th century isn't important because it's the future, it's important because mankind has furthered itself through understanding and progress.

He also seems to be suggesting that that future doesn't change through the revisions. While our present changes, the path toward progress is the same and when we ultimately attain it, it's the same no matter how we got there. It's a great idea (assuming that's what he was saying) and one I wish the series had explored more.

That said, the boy in the wheelchair tells us that this version of reality is flawed. "The revision started way too far back." Diana needs to find Ethan to defend this revision.

Meanwhile, Dax meets Future Girl in a bar (there's a lot of meetings in bars in this, which I'll talk about later). He wants to know why he wasn't taken to the future and she won't tell him. That confounds him, and Dax is not a man who likes to feel confounded.

Diana wakes in Omegapolis and has a vision of Ethan, lost in this new world. She decides the answers are in Littlehaven and to walk there on foot, so her limo won't disturb the people who live there. As she does, she finds a car wreck (that was foreshadowed in the Professor Night serial) and a black African Albert Einstein-looking man who calls himself Doc Rocket. He runs off at superspeed and ends up in the bar with Future Girl.

She explains that he's come from another version of history. She tells him and us (yet again) that this new revision didn't take right and that Ethan Crane has been "incorrectly instanced." Because of that, there could be a dark ages of centuries. Future Girl is trying to rescue her friends and take them to the future where they'll be safe.

Dr. Chelsea Henry has a disturbing vision of the future circa 2100, which seems to confirm the dark age fears. She knows she has to find Ethan to prevent that and Doc Rocket shows up to help her.


Diana proceeds to Littlehaven, which is a decaying middle American town. She interviews townspeople about the golden structures that fell from the sky. As one tells her, "I want you to think about what it does to a man to see bits of the Kingdom of Heaven itself raining down on your town and killing your friends and neighbors." This is another great idea that is never really explored.

Another survivor, a priest, turns into a floating person with a head of fire (this revision's version of Jack O'Lantern) who wants to stop Diana from finding Crane, since she works for Dax.

In the Professor Night serials, Night is trying to brake out of the fictional world he lives in and enter Diana's. Evening Primrose, at first satisfied to have a world to herself, ultimately decides to follow.

Dr. Henry uses her newfound Probe powers to transport herself and Doc Rocket to Littlehaven but they accidentally end up in the Supremacy instead. Talking to the boy in the wheelchair, who turns out to be a version of Kid Supreme (another character Moore wrote out in his first issue of Supreme), they find out about the idea of revisions.

Dax has decided to take measures into his own hands and heads to Littlehaven, too.

Meanwhile, Diana ends up at Judith Jordan's memorial museum to Littlehaven in the middle of the woods next to a lake that Diana has seen in her dreams. Judy's an elderly, ghost-like figure, refusing to give any answers, but Diana's had it. She threatens Judy until Judy explains that she was the only one who recognized Ethan. She points Diana toward Ethan by the lake.

Ethan is aware of the revisions. His last version was at war with Darius and Darius learned about the nature of the universe and revisions. Dax set off the explosion in the Supremacy, which is what crashed over Littlehaven. The detonation triggered the flawed revision that they're living in now, most likely installing the revision too soon.

Ethan is hiding out because he feels weary and useless. He just doesn't want to do it anymore. He's seen too much. The Supreme being in him wants out, wants to set things right, but he's been holding it back because it didn't seem to save Littlehaven when the Supremacy fell.

Basically, he is the figure that Future Girl talked about to the Enigma (or the Enigma is Ethan) who doesn't want to see any more worlds.

Reuben Tube shows up to shoot Ethan but a bloodied Professor Night attempts to stop him. When Reuben shoots Professor Night, Evening Primrose kills him.

Then Doc Rocket and Probe show up. Followed by Linda and Dax. And finally Future Girl shows up and starts rescuing people into the future until there's only Dax, Diana and Ethan left.

Dax tells Ethan that he sent Diana to find Ethan because he knew she was important to him in other versions of the universe. Dax knows that things aren't right and wants to trigger the revision, but Ethan refuses because he doesn't want to let Supreme out. So Dax shoots him with a ray gun, releasing Supreme.

The story ends with Diana working at Dazzle News with a Linda and a Judy. She's just about to break news that something happened in a town called Littlehaven.

 

So was this a new revision? Was this the same revision, but it's taken root the right way? Or is it a timeloop and they're starting the same story over again? There's a few different ways you can see it. But one point that I read in another review points out that Tula Lotay's art up until this page has had scratches and color marks all over it, suggesting the flawed nature of the revision. But this last page is clean and vibrant, suggesting it is unflawed. That is until Diana hears about Littlehaven.

It wouldn't be right for Ellis to give us a firm ending when he could leave it elliptical. But at least he got an ending and I appreciate Ellis realizing he had a limited time to work on this series, which can't be said of so many who work on these After Awesome books. They're filled with ambition and want to take issue after issue setting things up, but then run out of issues to finish their stories. Better something like this that knows what it wants to do and then completes it.

Speaking of Lotay's art, which, like a lot of other parts of this comic, I'm conflicted about. I appreciate that it's new and different and doesn't feel like an American-style superhero comic. I often love the look of art that is outside the norm, but I don't like this. It feels sketchy and underdeveloped, like fashion designs that never become reality. Maybe that's on purpose or maybe it's just her style. I'm also not a big admirer of the new use of digital art, which leaves the backgrounds looking ill-formed and messy and seems to have stunted the development of traditional linework. The character designs are okay, but the people never feel real. Look at Future Girl. Every time she shows up, she's in an old fashioned dress and standing in a particular lounging fashion. She and most of the other characters look like fashion models pretending to do the things that real people do, but in ways that don't look authentic.

I'm also conflicted about Ellis's story. There's so little plot, which is fine, except it goes on way too long to fill the seven issues. The characters have almost no depth to themselves whatsoever. Ellis gives them tics and witty dialog in lieu of depth. Instead of filling it with characters grappling with the realization that they are in an alternate universe that is crumbling apart (seriously, the characters are told this over and over again and none of them seem to have any reaction), Ellis fills it with too many flourishes that don't fell like they add anything.

Take the conversation with the fashion model I mentioned earlier. It doesn't really add anything. Noor isn't a character we ever see again so what does their friendship matter? Diana never really mentions her again until she's in a new reality. So what is it for other than a pretentious conversation with a fashion model for pretention's sake?

And I'm going to say this, though it probably reflects more poorly on me than it does the work, but there seems to be an added level of hipster New York coolness to this story that is really off putting. They're always hanging out in a hipster bar. Future Girl also has a very retro look to her '40s-era dresses. Ultimately, your appreciation of this aesthetic might be different from mine, so maybe you'll like this series more than I did.

And then there are the impressionistic David Lynch-styled strokes, such as the Professor Night serials which are intentionally vague. I'm fine with Prof. Night and Evening Primrose moving from the fictional to the seemingly real, because that's part of the DNA Moore added to Supreme. But Ellis does it in a way that's meant to invoke poetry rather than explain how or why the characters do it. You're not supposed to question the how of it, you're supposed to appreciate its absurdity and audacity.

It's a frustrating series because it's filled with such wonderful ideas that are so little explored. It's got such colorful characters that have no depth. It's got such unique art that isn't really all that pleasant to look at. And yet, it's the series of After Awesome (the ABC books notwithstanding) that seems the most successful and that has me lingering over what it said.

Ultimately, I'm glad it exists and I'm glad that it is taking the Supreme ideas to a new place rather than continuing to revisit the well that Larsen had probably poisoned. I just wish I liked it more.

Up next: Oh God! Another Youngblood!?!

After Awesome Part 10: Tim Seeley's Bloodstrike

(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.)

Also in 2012, Tim Seeley, known as an artist and writer on G.I. Joe and later on some Batman series, revived Bloodstrike for Image from a mostly-forgotten series. If you do remember it, it's probably for the cover concept of issue #1, where you could "rub the blood" on the gimmick cover.

There was an actual concept to the series, that being the government is bringing back superheroes from the dead and sending them on suicide missions. While the idea was interesting, the execution was about what you'd expect from a Liefeld clone book. This revival is much better.

The main character is a guy named Cabbot. He used to be a hero named Slingstone and is the brother to Battlestone, an Extreme Comics heavy who was too strict for Youngblood. He is also the son of a radical superpowered terrorist standing up for the nu-gene (the Extreme comics' version of mutants) kind.

Seeley decided to keep all of this backstory, but adds a layer of irony and wisecracking that makes the series a lot of fun. But that's not why I recommend the series so highly (I'll get to that in a minute).

The series begins with Cabbot going to Pakistan to deal with some terrorists. But when he gets to Pakistan, the terrorists are dead, having been killed by three Egyptian mummy-looking zombie cyborgs.

Meanwhile, back at Bloodstrike headquarters, the philosophical connotations to what they're doing causes the staff psychiatrist to kill herself and take out the director. The next-in-charge refuses to bring the director back from the dead and ropes in a poor technician named Kendra to help him.

Cabbot fights the mummies and ends up meeting their boss, a religious telepath, who is gathering the undead and the nu-genes to create a new paradise. He intrigues Cabbot and they part in peace.

Meanwhile, Bloodstrike brings the rest of the team back from the dead, including a superspeedster, a strong woman, an invisible killer and a Japanese-inspired warrior. They're sent to kill Cabbot's dad, but accidentally take out some famous rich girl in the process. (There's a nice bit about her being brought back to life that I won't spoil for the two of you who might look up this series.)

There's a whole subplot with Battlestone that doesn't really matter, but then we get to the psychological profiles of the new team. They're an interesting bunch, and Seeley writes them with more personality and depth than you'd expect in a comic like this. Unfortunately it's paired with some hideous, partially-finished Rob Liefeld art that is best left ignored.

There's a nice bit where Cabbot and the tech girl, Kendra, go to New York for a mission. He gets distracted taking out a supervillain, which reminds him of his old Slingstone days, while she completes the mission.

For me, all of this is prologue to the two-parter that ends the series. It starts with Kid Achilles, from the League of Infinity (sort-of), who dies from some brain disease. But he was supposed to be invulnerable.

According to Cabbot, Kid Achilles was in a teenaged supergroup back in the day with Slingstone, Suprema, Twilight and Skipper, called the Young Americans. It's basically the Youngblood team that Suprema and Twilight suggested in the alternate timeline of Youngblood #6. Bloodstrike intends to bring Achilles back from the dead as an operative but Suprema shows up, pissed off, and wants Achilles' body.

What happens next is awesome. We get more about Twilight and Suprema and it's the most Moore-inspired book that has come out since Awesome went kaput.

Tell you what, I'm just going to put the pages up here (until the Image guards come to drag me away like in that scene from the Shawshank Redemption) and let you read it for yourself.

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, that was it for the series as, supposedly, Rob Liefeld got a new idea for the series and was trying to sell the movie rights, so he basically shoved Seeley out. It's sad, but I am so grateful for the stories we got!

Seeley was the first writer after Moore who really got the Suprema character and had so much fun with the series. This felt like the best continuation of Moore's Awesome universe that could work with modern comic writing. The series was only nine issues long and you can do a lot worse than going out and digging them up.

Edit: Seeley was nice enough to let me interview him, which you can read here.

Next time, Warren Ellis takes Supreme to a whole different place with Blue Rose.