Image credit: Jason Brown, midlifegamergeek.com
It’s hard to believe now that this very comic was the launching pad for the commercial launch of Image Comics, which remains the third largest comic book publisher in the United States today.
The impetus for the creation of this publishing company was a group of young artists who were dissatisfied with their positions at Marvel. Their flashy, edgy art brought in tons of fans to comic book stores (not to mention several re-releases and gimmicks that brought in collectors and speculators), resulting in unprecedented sales for some famous Marvel comics.
But they stood up because they felt as though they weren’t being treated or compensated commensurate with their record-breaking accomplishments. The success of founding member Rob Liefeld’s YUNGBLUD #1 was proof that a large number of comics could be transferred with full ownership of concepts and characters without Marvel involvement.
In the early to mid-’90s, Image completely dominated comic book stores, and it was all thanks to YUNGBLUD #1.
When I was flying to Vanguard Comics (hello, Mark!), I happened to find the 2nd printing of 1992’s Youngblood #1 at a reasonable price. And then I realized that despite how much I was into comics at the time (I’ve been into comics since the early 80’s and all the way through the late 90’s and early 00’s), I don’t remember reading this one. I remember all the hype surrounding this one, but I was such a Marvel Zombie that it took me a while to check out the comic until Todd McFarlane’s Spawn #1 came out (admittedly only a month later). Even back then, I wasn’t interested in the countless X-Men/X-Force knockoffs that the rest of Image Comics all seemed to be at the time.
Anyway, the point is that I haven’t read the most important American comic book in the industry’s long history. I didn’t expect much, but even after time, what I got was definitely not what I expected.
The first story in Youngblood #1 introduces the team with a series of action sequences and short sections showing their civilian lives. The second, printed upside down and read from the back of the comic, depicts another Youngblood team going on a mission to violently defeat a Middle Eastern warmonger.
The first story itself is baffling enough on its own, with characters acting like crap, speech bubbles being placed in the wrong places for several pages (making the story line very difficult to follow), and inconsistent coloring. Most of the characters feel incredibly derivative of X-Men/X-Force characters, which isn’t surprising given Liefeld’s involvement with Marvel’s Merry Mutants, but it’s still notable that there’s little variation in their visual depictions here. Personally, no one knows at this stage. Everyone feels like an edgelord with one-liners.
What’s even more puzzling is that even when you reach the last page, it doesn’t feel like it’s over. We get a decidedly cool (admittedly very ’90s cool) splash page where our heroes jump into action, and that’s it. game over. There’s no caption about the next issue, and there’s no clue at all that this is the end, except for the next issue’s upside-down page. The only clue that requires you to flip the comic over and read the second story.
Image credit: Jason Brown, midlifegamergeek.com
In fact, it’s so baffling that I thought it was a quirk of the “second printing” I picked up. Perhaps this was a canceled issue or a special issue with another story added. A quick Google search revealed that no, this is exactly Youngblood #1.
The second story shows a complete lack of understanding of geopolitics, with a thinly veiled depiction of a real dictator being murdered by a US-sanctioned superteam. Right now we’re all going to say, “America, damn it!”
Liefeld was still very young at the time, and most of his audience was still much younger, so they would have lapped this up without much thought. Oh, and since I was still a pretty ignorant teenager myself at the time, I probably enjoyed that clumsy chauvinism. But to say it hasn’t aged very well would be an understatement, and once again we’re presented with a large team of characters with bad names, but we know nothing about them, except that they have no qualms about murdering heads of state of other countries and then high-fiving each other afterwards.
It’s perhaps the perfect summation of the ‘law of cool’ 90s era in the American comics industry, where it didn’t matter in the slightest whether the plot made sense or what the characters did or said, as long as it looked great. Youngblood #1 is, frankly, terrible.
Rob Liefeld has been a meme-worthy creator for decades, mocked for his inability to draw feet (unless they’re tiny!), his grimacing characters, his odd body shape, and his strange notions of how guns should look and work. But he was one of the hottest comic book creators in the world, and his name alone was enough to sell books like hotcakes.
Still, I’m glad I finally got to read Youngblood #1. Because you don’t have to imagine that you won’t like it anymore. Now I know how bad it is for me!
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