Nothing was going to show up in the wake of the Spider-Man "Brand New Day" series that was going to make much of an impact—it's one of those time-filler weeks that operates the same way CBS does when it's up against a Super Bowl broadcast. Throw something on the fire, and don't even try to pretend that anybody is going to pay attention. Image Comics ignored the memo, deciding that now was the time to give the Youngblood another shot. Yes, that one. Pulling in a slumming Joe Casey and Derec Donavan, it's time once again to plumb the field of a super-hero book about selfish, cult of personality characters fighting under the behest of Time Warner with the support of Facebook and Youtube accounts. Whether the book is bad or good—and yes, it's pretty bad—isn't really that interesting of a subject. What is interesting is how frequently this idea of a for-profit and for-public-consumption idea of super-heroes keeps showing up.

When Peter Milligan and Michael Allred first revamped X-Force, it got the same kind of response any jarring revamp gets. (With the exception of the Maxim version of Thunderbolts, which no one bought or remembers.) What was most surprising was how long the complaints lasted—excluding Barry Allen fans, usually super-hero fanatics move on to the next "tragedy" with the speed that they are published. (Spoiler's dead—wait, Supergirl has spikes coming out of her? Batgirl's gone crazy! Wonder Woman is naked sometimes?) But the complaints of people in love with Cable and Domino continued, even as Milligan and Allred restarted the book under a different name. While the stories pursued the same basic fight/die dichotomy of any super-hero comic, the book stuck to the original corporate sponsored super-hero idea all the way to the end. Over and over, Milligan portrayed the characters at press conferences, signings, followed their exploits in licensing their own images and so on, throwing out a harmless bit of satire. A lot of these ideas had shown up before—Spider-Man on the set of his own movie, Keith Giffen's Justice League running their own resort and, of course, there's Booster Gold, whose entire career has been spotted with attempts to make a super-hero character working for profit publishable.

Milligan's version of this super-hero theme wasn't the original—it's certainly the one with the best art—but it's a plot device that he ran with longer than other similar attempts. John Arcudi flirted with it a bit in his almost completely ignored run on Doom Patrol, but by the conclusion of that series, he'd pretty much left the satirical waters. For some reason though, this concept doesn't stay dormant for long before it resurfaces. Sometimes it's merely one or two characters in Rising Stars and sometimes, it's Matt Fraction's recently cancelled The Order. But why does a concept that's never resulted in a premiere selling comic keep getting this much repetition? Why does it keep failing?

Super-comic fans buy, in droves, the books that Marvel & DC publish, and they buy ones that feature characters that never die (or never stay dead for long), that never lose the fights that matter, and that never worry about their popularity. While there's certainly some cosmetic personality difference between characters like Wolverine & Superman, there's no sign of selfishness along the top of the spandex tier. That's not a coincidence—it's by design. All of the best-selling super-heroes, and most of the low-selling ones, have that same trait—they fight for truth, or justice or any of the other platitudes listed in the Boy Scout motto. You'll never read about Superman worrying about his hair, or Wolverine agonizing about what the newspaper say about his attitude—and that's because the regular super-hero reader won't buy it. But when you look at any of the corporate super-hero team books—Youngblood, X-Statix, the Conglomerate or Arcudi's Doom Patrol—they're full of that sort of stuff. These are characters that live and die by their public opinion polls—they have agents, they sign off on their own action figures, they help cast their own movies. Even on the mildest level of that type of storytelling, it's a bluntly satirical take on what the average fan likes to buy—which is a book about a holier than thou man who wears tight spandex and always saves the day. The books fail to find an audience because it's looking for an audience that doesn't go to comic shops on a regular basis. Satire is, by any definition, supposed to be somewhat antagonistic—and too much satire in super-hero stories seems not to appeal to the sort of people who want to keep up with Hal Jordan's exploits, no matter how repetitious those exploits have become.

Joe Casey is a writer who knows the pain of not finding an audience. He shepherded WildCATS 3.0 into cancellation, suffered it again with The Intimates, and is currently handling another great book, Godland, which continues to be outsold by comics of far less quality and imagination. It's not surprising to see him show up on a book like Youngblood—Casey still isn't enough of a marquee writer to be turning down profile work, and although the Youngblood franchise has lost quite a bit of its luster, the book is still a recognizable enough name to hold a decent resume spot. Of course, Joe is again saddled, like he was in Wildcats, with a comic that was originally designed to be art-driven—after all, Rob Liefeld was never what anyone thought of as even a halfway decent writer. Why he's choosing to go down a road that's paved in failure isn't clear; theoretically, it could be that the idea of doing yet another team book about high-minded heroes solving problems was anathema to Casey, but he's certainly shoehorning himself into a hole that's going to be difficult to climb out of. While the first issue may not be enough for a prediction of cancellation, the history of this plot concept does. Then again, maybe Casey is tired of watching some of his best work being ignored, and is trying to burn through this contract as quickly as possible.

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