Twenty-five years after their first issue was published, Image Comics co-founder and Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld has assembled a creative team to resurrect his creator-owned series Youngblood in 2017.
Videos by ComicBook.com
With a radically redesigned lineup, Liefeld’s superhero team, first published in 1992 and originally a million-copy seller in the heady days of the early ’90s comics market, look more like Michael Allred’s X-Force than Liefeld’s — but the veteran artist is confident that he’s got the right guy in Jim Towe…
…who, by the way, he found on Twitter.
The announcement came during a video interview with Nerdy Pop, which you can see below. Liefeld said that Towe had redesigned the team more or less as an artistic exercise, and had tagged Liefeld in a tweet to show off the art. Liefeld responded by reaching out to him and offering him a job to draw the characters. After Towe said that drawing the title would be his dream assignment.
“When people say ‘dream assignment,’ you hire them,” Liefeld said. “Because you’re going to get their best efforts.
You can check out the full video below.
Writing the book with Liefeld (and, really, taking point on the day-to-day from the sound of it) is Chad Bowers, who currently co-writes X-Men ’92 with Chris Sims and Deadpool with Sims and Liefeld.
The series will also reintroduce and reinvent Badrock, who will get a change in his power set in the first issue. Liefeld said that there will be an official solicitation shortly, once they have three issues in the can so that Image can solicit the book and avoid lateness.
It’s a truism in comics that nobody loves comic books more than Rob Liefeld — something else you can see on display in this interview — but what’s really unusual here is how self-depreciating he’s being. Liefeld is a controversial figure, but he’s often left in the position of defending himself and his art from attacks, especially online, so it might be a welcome surprise for some fans to see him cackling to himself when he says things like “I didn’t draw it — that’s why it’s good!”
ComicBook.com reached out to Liefeld, who provided us with some character designs from the upcoming series. You can check them out in the attached image gallery. Don’t be surprised if he and Towe share abit more on Twitter, as the creative team is all pretty excited about the announcement.
Expect more details on Youngblood 2017 as it draws closer. In the meantime, everyone from fans to the press are talking about how Rob Liefeld made a young artist’s dream come true, and Liefeld is praising the heck out of the art we haven’t seen yet.
