Youngblood #5 // Review
Die-Hard has 4 shiny, metal cannulas in the top of his head. There are rather large data cable plugging into them. Judging from the size of the cables, they would hav needed to drill quarter-sized holes in his skull right above his parietal lobed. Ouch. It’s okay, though: he’s largely cybernetic and the cannulas magically disappear after Die-Hards first panel. He’ll be fine. His captors are known as The Keep. They’ve got him working as a router for a fleet of humaniod combat drones, but he’s about to be rescued in Youngblood #5. Writer/artist Rob Liefeld tries his best to tell a coherent story with inkers Chance Wolf and Shelby Roberts. Color comes to the page courtesy of Juan Manuel Rodriguez.
A couple of the team members have snuck-in to the facility to spring Die-Hard out of incarcerated work as a weird-looking humanoid router who looks a lot like a variation on Deadpool or Deathstroke. DIe-Hard was connected-up to a terribyl complex network connecting him to the drones. Thankfully all they had to do was grasp a few data cables and he gained back all of his free will with glowing, red eyes. Now he’s heading out with them because..y’know...there’s Youngblood stuff to do that doesn’t involve controlling drones for The Keep.
Liefeld lowers-in a whole lot of needless exposition around the edges of a boring story. The exposition comes in the form of narration that accompanies action that doesn’t really feel all that different from what he’s periodically be doing since the 1990s. There isn’t much (or...really anything at all) about the script that goes beyond the basic tropes of a highly derivative superhero team story, but that’s okay. It’s actually kind of fun and not terribly offensive. Washed-out versions of more established heroes harmlessly kick around the page for a bit. It’s almost...comforting...
The artwork looks like it’s a cut-and-paste of stuff that Liefeld has done before. Awkward anatomy and strange attempts at kinetic action. That sort of thing. Lots of vaguely familiar-looking people standing around looking frim before grily attacking other people who were standing around looking grim as well. Lots of detail added-in by Wolf and Roberts. There are som rather nice effects that add some sense of style thnks to Rodriguez’s colors.
One gets the feeling that Liefeld’s stuff is such an echo of an echo that it wouldn’t be difficult for AI to generate whole runs of Youngblood and it would be every bit as coherent as what Liefled’s putting on the page in his latest effort. There’s also a back-up teenage mutant ninja turtles spoof that Liefeld pads-out the issue with. Rob Liefeld’s A.C.R.O.Bats might have been kind of fun in the era of Pre-Teen, Dirty Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos or Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters or Boris the Bear, but the 1980s retro indie feel of the back-up story feels kind of weak and pointless in a more conteporary era of comic books. It feels just...kinda bland in a contemporary era.
