Writers: Rob Liefeld, Eric Stephenson
Artist: Chap Yaep
Publisher: Image Comics
This issue opens with Giger successfully shutting down all worldwide communication, as his engineers are working on modifying the systems on the Liberty II to launch some big attack on the world in a few hours. Youngblood, now joined by Dutch who is familiar with Giger’s strategies, is headed to the Liberty II to launch their counter-attack.
In a double-splash page (there are only two of them this time), we see the team attacking the space station with handy captions not only naming each character but explaining who they were with dramatic prose.
PHOTON – Pyrokinetic warrior from the far-off planet Acura!
COUGAR – The half-breed outcast of a race of cat people hidden within deepest Africa!
SENTINEL – Team leader and vanguard member of the Youngblood program! No one is more dedicated to the principles for which Youngblood stands…or more determined to stop Giger!
DUTCH – Half man, half machine, and former Cybernet operative reluctantly siding with Youngblood after years of retirement!
MASADA – Israeli super-woman empowered by the souls of her countrymen who died in the battle from which she took her name!
Oh, yeah, and RIPTIDE – ….is not in this issue.
Yeah, that’s weird. Maybe I’m a cynic but I can’t help but wonder if that was an error? Like somewhere between the plotting and the drawing, someone just forgot to include her? Then scripter Eric Stephenson tried to play it off, by adding a line where Sentinel says Riptide is still on the space shuttle that brought the team up to the Liberty II.
There’s some brief dialog with Cougar being suspicious of Dutch’s loyalties (a suspicion that Keever shares), but Dutch swears that he wants Giger defeated more than anyone. The team splits up, with Dutch and Sentinel going after Giger while Photon, Cougar, and Masada (who at one point shouts “oy gevalt!” in case you forgot that she’s Israeli) try to stop Giger’s soldiers from completing their work. Masada appears to be super-strong even when she’s her regular size.
Eventually, the story comes down to a one-on-one confrontation between Dutch and Giger, but to Dutch’s surprise, Giger is able to shut down Dutch’s armor and guns, and then turns the very space station itself against him, ending with another dramatic cliffhanger.
Besides the main story, there are a couple of continued subplots in this issue. We see Brahma at a diner in Baltimore (which is conveniently still open despite the worldwide blackout) where he meets with Showdown. She was a supervillain, who helped a group of four supervillains imaginatively called “The Four” escape from custody in the first Youngblood miniseries. We don’t know anything about her except that she’s completely covered in an all-purple suit and seems really strong and tough. It’s revealed that she and Brahma had both been in the Bloodpool program together and were friends. Then for some reason she became a villain instead of a hero. Nevertheless, Brahma wanted to let her know that he’s getting out of the superhero business because it was not making him happy. She suggests that he join her with The Four, to which he says he’ll think about it.
The other is that when power goes out worldwide, that includes the lab where Psi-Fire’s comatose body was being held and monitored. When a bunch of scientists rush into the lab to check him out, Psi-Fire manages to transfer his consciousness into the body of one of them, a woman, and then uses his mental powers to kill the others.
This issue keeps the momentum going of the first issue. Yeap’s art is the same, a few less shortcuts, but still a lot of big panels. And I always appreciated that Eric Stephenson always tried to give the stories he wrote more characterization than was typically expected from Image Comics of the time.
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