I’m sorry, I don’t have a clever Youngblood-related title for this post.

§ February 11th, 2009 § Filed under youngbloodgate Comments Off on I’m sorry, I don’t have a clever Youngblood-related title for this post.

Thank you for your comments from yesterday’s post regarding Youngblood.

I reread the first issue of Youngblood prior to writing this post. Well, skimmed it, anyway, as it’s hard going. It’s disjointed action pieces and peculiar anatomy and awkward poses and people shouting at each other through gritted teeth…granted, it’s not much different from most superhero books, but it has that extra veneer of sloppiness and amateurishness that made it the embodiment of ’90s comics.

But at the same time…it’s colorful, it’s action-packed, it’s filled with a bunch of unusual characters, and it just plain looks exciting. And at the time, it looked different from, and in some ways more modern than, the more staid superhero offerings from Marvel and DC.

I know I’m not saying anything new here. There have been eighteen years of “how the hell did that thing sell?” commentary and there’s not a whole lot I’m going to be able to add. But I do remember the day it came out, when we had a line stretching around the store, customers each with a copy of Youngblood #1 in hand. Some excited by the prospect of a superhero alternative to the Big Two created by former Marvel artists, some driven into the store by creator Rob Liefeld’s appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show The Dennis Miller Show (or whatever…I wasn’t sure the last time I talked about this either) the night before plugging the book, some picking up the book because hey — everyone else is, and maybe even one or two people who picked it up because they thought it looked neat.

But it sold. A lot. And it continued to sell, for a while.

Some of what you folks had to say explaining why you read and/or enjoyed Youngblood jibes with what I’ve believed regarding the series’ initial success. The hype, the series’ rough promise, the exciting presentation, even its symbolic significance as the first title from this new upstart imprint created by expatriated Marvel artists…all perfectly acceptable reasons to throw down your $2.50 and give a comic a shot. It may not have been, you know, good in a traditional sense…it’s pretty much the very definition of trash entertainment. But here I am, nearly twenty years later, and I’m still talking about it.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I’m probably going to go through and respond directly to several of your comments, so if anyone has anything they’d like to add to the discussion, feel free to join in.

Yes, I’m going for a third day of Youngblood discussion. Hey, I once talked about the Batman and Robin movie for the better part of a week. I’m not proud.


And what the heck…here’s Rob’s jeans commerical:

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