Writers: Rob Liefeld, Eric Stephenson
Artist: Cedric Nocon
Publisher: Image Comics
This issue takes place an hour after the end of the previous issue. That’s how long it took Sentinel, Riptide, Cougar, and Masada to make it back to the Pentagon from Africa. They’re quickly filled in by Keever about what’s going on. Psi-Fire, in his new female body, has gone nuts and is levitating around randomly killing people.
He’s also changed into a new skimpy skin-tight outfit, of course.
Photon’s unconscious and Dutch is pretty beaten up by the time the others arrive. They encounter Psi-Fire, who helpfully recaps how he got into this position, and now he just wants to kill everyone because he can. Thankfully for the members of Youngblood instead of killing them instantly, he insists on wasting time bragging about how powerful he is, and how easily he could kill them while fighting them, giving them time to fight back.
I just noticed that I’m referring to Psi-Fire as a male but in this issue, after Psi-Fire reveals himself in that female body, everyone uses the pronouns “she” and “her”, as well as the words “lady” and “wench.”
There’s a lesson there, somewhere…
Psi-Fire is defeated when she tries to use her mind powers against Masada, but then quickly passes out becoming comatose again. It turns out that all those voices in Masada’s head that we saw her plagued with in issue #4, “the souls of my people who gave their lives in the struggle for Judaism,” were too overwhelming for Psi-Fire’s brain to handle.
I’m still not sure how Masada’s power works, but there you go.
*And just as I was finishing this review, my friend Ben shared a blog post he wrote about Masada years ago*
It Came From The 90s: Masada of Youngblood
Overall I have to say that this ending is a bit anti-climatic. They’ve been hinting at this story since the first issue of this series, and it just amounts to a one-issue fight where the villain is defeated by accident.
And when I say one issue, it’s technically just 16 pages. Then there’s a 3-page “prelude,” that leads into what’s coming next, a multi-issue Extreme Studios crossover called Extreme Prejudice.
The rest of the comic contains a 4-page letter column, and 3 pages of a creator-owned project by Art Thibert called “Black And White.” This is part 2 of a 9-part story that ran as backups throughout all of the Extreme Studios titles. But I had no interest in that.
In conclusion, I have to say, this series is better than I expected to remember it being. I’ve said before that I was an original Image Comics fanatic. I was there in the store the week Youngblood #1 came out, and back a month later when Spawn #1, and for those next few years I bought literally everything Image Comics published. And I was especially a fan of Rob Liefeld’s comics. But I know I wasn’t incredibly discerning regarding my tastes at the time, so in the years that followed you could say I bought into the hype that many of those early Image Comics were just flashy art with little substance that I just liked because I was young and these were new.
It’s like when I catch reruns of old TV shows I liked as a kid and now I’m like, I thought Three’s Company was funny?!?
But maybe I need to give younger me some credit. This book was not bad. No, it’s not perfect, it had flaws, but I can see why this book kept my interest at the time. And, as noted before, the talent in this book were all young men, but they showed promise. They were learning on the job, gaining experience. And not just the artists, but writer Eric Stephenson. In his early 20s, he hadn’t written comics before Liefeld hired him. That dude was trying his best to write good stories with these characters, as he would write for almost every title of Rob Lielfeld’s at some point. Talk about an unsung hero from the Extreme Studios days. It’s no surprise that he’s the publisher of Image Comics today.
That’s it for now. I’ll get back to Team Youngblood when I can, although I’ll likely skip the new two issues which are parts 1 and 5 of an 8-part crossover, since I don’t think I have all the other parts.
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