Youngblood #2 // Review
Xerxes is grimacing. Supreme is hovering with glowing eyes. Xerxes wants Supreme to join him. It’s not an offer he’s going to accept. There’s going to be a physical altercation far above a large body of water in Youngblood #2. Writer/artist Rob Liefeld mashes together various superhero comic book tropes into a heavily-processed narrative that never quite manages to feel entirely coherent. Color comes to the page courtesy of Juan Manuel Rodriguez. One gets the feeling that Liefeld is simply putting together a Marvel/DC mash-up with thinly disguised pre-existing characters that are used...almost like stock characters without any full presence of their own.
Xerxes launches himself at Supreme. Bites right into his shoulder. Draws blood and everything. So he’s a little crazy. That’s what makes him dangerous. Elsewhere flesh and metal collide as two combatants who look a lot like Deadpool engage in a somewhat brutal battle. There are also analogs to Superman, Superboy and Supergirl as well as The Watcher and...well...quite a few others. Xerxes has been messing with the natural flow of time and there’s a hell of a lot going on that could really throw things into extreme instability.
Liefeld is throwing way too much at the page. Theoretically any one of his characters might actually have the opportunity to be something more than an echo of a pre-existing character if he ever allowed himself enough time with any one character to manage a deeper characterization. As it is, the action-packed narrative is pulling way too much onto the page to feel too terribly interesting. It’s really difficult to care about anyone on the page because they largely lack the deeper emotionality that would allow them to have more depth on the page. Without that, it’s just a lot of incoherent action.
And even the action would be cool if Liefeld was even reasonably competent at bringing it to the page. It’s all flung across the page with exaggerated anatomy and awkward stiffness. Muscles, eyes, teeth and form-fitting costumes contort their way across the page in a conflict which covers roughly the first half the issue. Then it’s a lot of brooding characters looking grim and serious as they contemplate the weight of everything in a large aircraft filled with people from Jerusalem from 2000 years ago. It’s all pretty weird. Rodriguez does some of the best work in the book lending depth, luminosity and intensity to the visuals that generates some dramatic weight for the issue.
Liefeld might actually have something if he were to slow things down a bit and allow the moments to play-out without forcing them across the page at a breakneck pace. There are a lot of fun ideas in the issue that might actually develop into something intersting if Liefeld ever bothered to take a serious interest in the characters he’s working with. He’s holding them at a distance and crashing them into each other like action figures. It’s pretty silly.
