Writers: Rob Liefeld, Eric Stephenson
Artist: Chap Yaep
Publisher: Image Comics

I’m going back to the 1990s again, with this retro-review. After finishing my review of Dutch #0, where I noted that the character never really stood out to me and that “I’d have to go back and reread my old Team Youngblood comics to remind myself if he had any major storylines outside of his debut,” I thought to myself…yeah, why don’t I do that?

So I went through my old long boxes and dug out some of the Team Youngblood comics that I still have. How does this hold up, almost 31 years later? Read on (spoilers ahead, DUH).

The series takes place sometime after the events of the original 4-issue Youngblood series, which ended with both Youngblood teams (& a third team called The Berzerkers) united to stop some evil other-dimensional alien warlord named Darkthornn (not Darkseid, wink wink) from invading the Earth. If you haven’t read it and are ever inclined to do so, instead of trying to track down the original issues, I’d recommend trying to get a copy of THE YOUNGBLOOD HARDCOVER. Even with the re-writing that Joe Casey did, it still serves as a prequel to this series.

The book opens with Giger and four of his cyborg soldiers invading and taking over an American space station called Liberty II, which is run by a Colonel who’s wearing an eye patch over one eye and is smoking a cigar (not Nick Fury, wink wink). After taking command of the space station, Giger broadcasts a message to the world, threatening to use it to take control of all the world’s communication satellites.

Sentinel is ordered by their team’s director, Keever, to prepare the Youngblood Away Team to launch a counter-strike to retake the Liberty II. Sentinal wants to include the Home Team but it’s explained that they’re being held as backup in case the Away Team fails (which isn’t the greatest excuse but they needed an in-continuity reason why those characters are absent as Rob Liefeld worked on his new Youngblood series). But the Away Team is short-handed, as we see that since the events of the miniseries, Psi-Fire, their powerful telepathic member has been in a coma, while Brahma (a man with the strength of 3 men) has been ignoring all of their calls, and they’re somehow unable to contact him (even though we later see him in his father’s house, which you’d think they’d be able to send someone to just go get him).

So the only current members available are Sentinel. Cougar, Riptide, Photon, and new member Masada, who is making her first appearance in this issue. There’s a brief training session later in the issue, where we see that Masada’s power is that she can grow to giant size, and it’s mentioned by Cougar that she’s from Israel.

Sentinel gets the idea to recruit Dutch, and drives out in his jeep the next day (you’d think he’d just fly there in his armor to get there faster, seeing as this situation is supposed to be so grave) to Dutch’s home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where he finds Dutch outside chopping wood.

From their brief exchange, it’s immediately clear that there’s some bad blood (no pun intended) between the two men. Dutch wants nothing to do with Sentinel or Youngblood, but after explaining what Giger is up to, and with the hint of a personal threat, Dutch puts on his old armor and declares that he’s ready to kill Giger. This is good, because just before that Giger used the Liberty II to cut all communications between the U.S., Russia, and Japan, and caused a power blackout across the Western Hemisphere, leaving us with a dramatic cliffhanger.

It’s not bad. A decent setup for a first issue, although it really does count on you being familiar with most of the characters already. Eric Stephenson, who wrote the script based on a story by Rob Liefeld, manages to slip in some little character moments that hint at future stories. When we see Brahma at home, he’s been heavily drinking and has an argument with his father, and we see some scientists studying Psi-Fire in a lab, trying to figure out how his brain shut down, but right after they leave we see a light flash in one of his eyes.

I also want to note that this issue had the first mention of “the Bloodpool,” the program that new Youngblood recruits from. A few years later, a series under that name would become one of my favorite Extreme Studios titles.

Chap Yaep’s art was decent, especially considering that he was only 19 at the time, but there is clear room for improvement. There are a lot of artistic “shortcuts” here, in terms of splash pages, double-splash pages, and large panels. The first time we see Sentinal in this issue is a double-splash page of just him standing by himself. This is immediately followed by another double-splash page of the rest of the steam posing dramatically as they stand side-by-side (with handy little captions next to each one to identify their names). But he got the job done.

TEAM YOUNGBLOOD