Rob Liefeld’s Brigade Gets Topical With a Snyder Cut Joke and More

Rob Liefeld’s Brigade #1, which was originally funded via a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in 2013, will make its debut later this week at New York Comic Con ahead of a larger rollout in the comics direct market later in 2019. The issue has been rewritten, recolored, and updated several times since the original draft, and will not feel like a 2013 comic. For one thing, ComicBook.com has a look at some of the pages from the NYCC debut issue, in which Liefeld’s character Bloodwulf spews out a rapid-fire burst of very 2019 pop-culture references that would not have been possible when the book was first being written.

In-story, there are references to the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League (Bloodwulf is for it), the Sony/Marvel kerfuffle (he’s against it), and the Game of Thrones finale (he wasn’t crazy about the execution). You can check the pages out below.

“The content of this book is something I’m very proud of,” Liefeld recently posted to the Kickstarter page. “Through all the calamitous changes and occurrences that plagued this book’s production, [from] missing colorists that required an entire re-coloring of my work, to change ups mid-stream to having to remove entire characters that I no longer have access to, while adding new ones that will surprise you, I feel I got it right at last.”

Liefeld’s reference to “characters I no longer have access to” is almost certainly a reference to characters from Youngblood, one of the comics he is best known for and one that Liefeld has always had a guiding hand in over the course of a number of interpretations. Recently, Liefeld revealed that after two failed attempts to bring the property to the screen, he finds himself unable to use the property, and another publisher has designs on it without his involvement.

Originally published in 1992, Brigade was kind of the X-Force to Youngblood‘s New Mutants. The title was violent, ambitious, and unmistakably Liefeldian. It had cosmic scope and a litany of characters including guests from other Image books including Youngblood, Shadowhawk, Glory, and Supreme. Liefeld’s last revival of the series was in 2010, in which it was largely just an update of the origin story. Not long after that, Liefeld turned to Kickstarter, but the challenges he lists above combined with demands on Liefeld’s time for work-for-hire projects at DC and Marvel coalesced to delay the title’s release until now.

Fans can get their hands on the very first new Brigade issue at New York Comic Con later this week.