Every few years, Youngblood seems to come round for another revival.  Rob Liefeld's flagship superhero team were a very big deal in the early nineties when Image was launched, but they didn't sustain that interest when the bubble burst.  It's now been some fifteen years since they were popular.  But here we go again.

The odd thing about Youngblood is that the concept, at least as explained by Liefeld in interviews, is actually quite good.  What Liefeld had in mind was a series about a group of superheroes who were also celebrities, and lived a celebrity lifestyle.  Now, that's a fine concept, and also an original one.  It's been done several times by this point, but when the first series of Youngblood came out, it was relatively unexplored territory.  Unfortunately, as the concept was more or less absent from the printed page, it remained that way.

Still, this might explain why, from time to time, other creators have shown an interest in taking a crack at Youngblood and trying to bring out the good idea that was always in there somewhere.  This time, it's Joe Casey and Derec Donovan, using some of the better-designed characters from the past incarnations of the team.

Casey has a strong track record in offbeat superhero team books.  He wrote some very interesting and enjoyable stories for WildCATS 3.0, reinventing Jim Lee's flagship team as a corporation.  However, his approach here is more straightforward.  The new Youngblood is a government project designed primarily to improve America's reputation.  While the group would quite like to be doing good, their paymasters regard the actual business of superheroics as a necessary evil - after all, they've got to achieve something before they can sell merchandise.

It's not bad.  Casey makes good use of Shaft as a sympathetic leader who's been drafted back into costume against his will, and thinks the whole project is a farcical waste of time.  Derec Donovan is a solid artist, a couple of awkward panels notwithstanding, and his more traditional superhero style is probably the best way of playing a series about characters who are being ostentatiously presented to their audience as superheroes.

Admittedly, while this was an original idea fifteen years ago, it's been done several times since then.  The Order is doing something rather similar, and rather more subtle, at the moment.  On the strength of the first issue, I'm not sure this series adds much more to that.  The government are manipulative jerks; the heroes are amiable and slightly befuddled.  But the series makes good enough use of its cast to entertain, and I'm willing to give the book a chance to hit its stride.

Rating: B

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