It’s hard to believe now that this very comic was the springboard that launched Image Comics, even now the third largest comic book publisher in the US, commercially.

The catalyst for the publisher’s creation was a group of young artists, discontent with their lot at Marvel. Their splashy, edgy art was bringing fans to comic stores in massive numbers (not to mention several relaunches and gimmicks bringing collectors, and speculators, along for the ride), resulting in the unprecedented sales figures of several high profile Marvel comics.

Yet they felt as if they weren’t being treated, or paid, in line with their record-breaking accomplishments, and jumped ship, with the success of founding group member, Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood #1 being the proof that they could shift enormous numbers of comics with full ownership of their concepts and characters,  without any involvement of Marvel.

Image absolutely dominated comic book stores in the early to mid 90s, and it was all thanks to Youngblood #1.

On a flying visit to Vanguard Comics (hi Mark!), I happened to find a second printing of the 1992 Youngblood #1 at a great price, and it dawned on me that, despite how heavily I’d been into comics back then (from the early 80s onwards, only drifting away from the late 90s to the very early 00s), I didn’t recall ever reading this comic. I do recall the massive hype around it, but I was such a Marvel Zombie that it took until the launch of Todd McFarlane’s Spawn #1 (only a month later, admittedly) for me to check their comics out. Even then, I wasn’t interested in the myriad X-Men/X-Force knockoffs that the rest of the Image comics at the time all seemed to be.

Anyway, the point is that I hadn’t read one of the most important US comic books in the industry’s long history. Though I wasn’t expecting much, what I got was definitely not what I anticipated, even after all this time.

The first story in Youngblood #1 introduces the team in a series of action sequences, and a brief section which shows them in their civilian lives. The second is printed upside down and read from the back of the comic, and sees a separate Youngblood team on a mission, violently taking down a warmonger in the Middle East.

The first story itself is baffling enough in and of itself, with characters acting like assholes, speech bubbles arranged in the wrong places on several pages (making it very difficult to follow the flow of the story) and the colouring being inconsistent. Most of the characters just feel incredibly derivative of X-Men/X-Force characters, and that’s no surprise given Liefeld’s involvement with Marvel’s Merry Mutants, but it’s still remarkable how little changes in the visual depictions here. Though ersonality-wise, who knows at this stage? Everyone just feels like a one-liner-toting edgelord.

What’s even more baffling is that it doesn’t even feel like it’s ended when it reaches the final page; we get an admittedly cool (certainly very 90s-cool) splash page of our heroes leaping into action, and that’s it. Game over. There’s no caption about the next issue, no clue whatsoever to it being the end except for the upside down page that follows, which is the only clue that you should turn the comic over and read the second story.

In fact, it’s so baffling that I assumed it was a quirk of the ‘second printing’ that I picked up. Perhaps this was a truncated issue, or some special edition with the other story added. A quick Google search revealed that nope, this is exactly what Youngblood #1 was.

The second story shows a complete lack of understanding of geopolitics, with a thinly veiled representation of a real dictator being murdered by a US sanctioned superteam. All together now: “America, fuck yeah!”

Liefeld was still really young at the time, and most of his audience were much younger still, so they would have lapped this up without much thought. Hell, I probably would have enjoyed its clumsy jingoism at the time, still being a pretty ignorant teenager myself. To say it hasn’t aged well is an understatement though, and again we’re presented with a big team of poorly named characters, and we don’t get to know them at all, except that they’re perfectly fine with murdering another country’s head of state and then high fiving each other afterwards.

Perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the US comic book industry’s ‘rule of cool’ 90s era, in which it didn’t matter one jot whether plots made sense, or what characters did or said, as long as it looked awesome, Youngblood #1 is, to put it bluntly, awful.

Rob Liefeld has been a bit of a meme-worthy creator in the last few decades, mocked for his inability to draw feet (unless they’re super tiny!), his grimacing characters, their weird body shapes and an odd notion of how guns look and work. He was, however, one of the absolute hottest comic creators in the world, and his name alone could sell books like hotcakes.

I’m still glad I finally got to read Youngblood #1 though, because I don’t have to imagine that I wouldn’t like it any more; now I know just how bad it is for myself!

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