Image Comics

Youngblood – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

Updated Apr 12, 2025! The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting guide and reading order for Youngblood in omnibus, hardcover, trade paperback, and digital comics. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics. Last updated April 2025 with titles scheduled for release through August 2025.

Youngblood was the first ongoing Image Comic, which kicked off Rob Liefeld’s multi-decade journey to recapture the lightning in a bottle of his transformation of New Mutants into X-Force.

Many comic fans love to make light of Rob Liefeld’s artwork – especially the way he draws teeth (so many!) and feet (if they even appear on panel). However, Liefeld’s true strength has always been as much as an “Idea Guy” as an artist. His ideas, built upon the bedrock of Claremont and Simonson, are what turned New Mutants into a title facing impending cancellation into one of Marvel’s hottest comics and made X-Force (1991) #1 one of the top-selling comics of all time.

While some of those ideas were unique to the Marvel Universe, some of the characters and designs had been simmering in Liefeld’s brain and on his sketchpads for nearly a decade. You can see many recognizable designs in Youngblood, not only for Marvel characters like Cable, Deadpool, & Sabretooth, but also for DC characters from Liefeld’s fizzled pitches there before forming Image Comics.

As ideas go, Youngblood was a great one – even ahead of its time. It combined elements of Captain America -style super-soldiers, a government-sanctioned team like 80s Avengers or 90s X-Factor, and the concept of superheroes as major media stars. (Ironically, Liefeld’s own X-Force would later run with this idea as it transformed into X-Statix). Even within that mash-up there were many other plots – including Russian spies and heroes indebted to hellish characters.

Altogether, Youngblood had all of the ingredients to be the Avengers of the Image Universe to Jim Lee’s WildCATs as the X-Men.

The unfortunate thing about Rob Liefeld being an “Idea Guy” is that his ideas don’t often come paired with follow-through when he is self-publishing. If he has a chief legacy in comics beyond the creation of Cable and Deadpool, it’s that his own series very rarely reach a conclusion. This was evident from the start with Youngblood, which took nearly three years to release just 10 issues.

In fact, every Youngblood ongoing series ends teasing a next issue or story before disappearing into sudden cancellation. This is true of the original Image series, the Maximum Press and Arcade comics years, and all three of the subsequent Image Comics revivals of the 00s and 10s!

If there is a positive side to the many failed iterations of Youngblood, it’s Liefeld’s stubborn dedication to his pet project. He always recruits high-calibre talent to write Youngblood, which peaked with Alan Moore briefly driving the franchise at the turn of the century. While this has generated some bona-fide hits with books like Prophet and Glory, he can never seem to allow Youngblood to move on without tinkering with it himself.

And, even as the franchise changes creators with each iteration, Liefeld has ensured that Youngblood’s continuity (such as it is) has never been fully rebooted. Every subsequent series launches as some form of a continuation of what came before (and went unresolved), often progressing in real time alongside the real world rather than using a sliding time scale. That means the 25th Anniversary reincarnation in 2017 really was set decades after the book’s debut!

Unfortunately, the ability to continue Youngblood’s story is now out of Rob Liefeld’s hands. The rights to the team are administered by Terrific Production LLC, a production company with little to no inclination to produce any actual comic books.

There may never be a complete and completely-satisfying Youngblood comic series. Yet, the roughly 100 issues that have been published since 1992 are packed with a tantalizing mix of character designs and plot threads. Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood may not have always told the best stories, but it had some great ideas.

Marvel’s Angela – Definitive Collecting Guide & Reading Order

It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!

June 7, 2022 by krisis

DIE is a brilliant comic book about role-playing from Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, and Clayton Cowles.

DIE is also a brilliant storytelling role-playing game (RPG) from Kieron Gillen and Rowan, Rook and Decard.

This takes some explaining.

The thing you need to know right now is that if you want a deluxe physical copy of the RPG you have only three more days to Kickstart it, and if you want a deluxe physical copy of the entire comic run you can pre-order it right now (including pre-ordering from your local comic shop – yes, it’s already time to pre-order November hardcovers).

Okay, now on to the explaining!

DIE is one of the most-fascinating indie comic books of the past few years, both in concept and execution. The comic has already come and gone – it ran for 20 self-contained issues from December 2018 to September 2021 in four tight 5-issue arcs with no fluff.

(Mild first-issue spoilers lie ahead.)

The story started something like Stranger Things: 25th Anniversary Reunion.

A group of friends used to play role-playing games together in high school, but it ended with their sudden, inexplicable disappearance – and just-as-sudden reappearance years later, minus one member of their party and with a bevy of physical and psychological scars.

Where were they? They’ve never uttered a word about it to each other or anyone else and went on with their lives. Some of them were successful, some started families, while others could never shake their trauma and subsequent guilt.

On the anniversary of their disappearance they receive an unsettling reminder of their shared experience and they cannot help but be sucked back into something they know is much more serious and deadly than any game.

There are plenty of “real world people are transported into fantasy” stories out there, but DIE had a special, undeniable magic to it.

Central to that were the real world characters – five wounded adults, some of whom had spent their lives trying to be completely different than their game characters while others chased after becoming more like their fictional selves. They each had relatable stories about loss, addiction, identity, and disability, and those themes were amplified by the fantastical world around them.

As the story progressed, it became clear that this was a fantasy story with a very specific structure. In fact, the structure was so well-formed we could refer to it as a set of rules.

That’s because Kieron Gillen, in all of his wild genius, not only scripted a 20-issue comic story, but also the complete ruleset of the role-playing game the characters were playing in the story. [Read more…] about It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!

New For Patrons: Guide to Todd McFarlane’s Spawn

October 29, 2019 by krisis

Today’s new guide for Patrons of Crushing Krisis is my first guide for a creator-owned comic – created as a celebration of breaking the 100-Patrons mark!

Todd McFarlane’s Spawn – The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide
[Note: This guide is now available to all readers of Crushing Krisis thanks to the ongoing support of Patrons!]

With Spawn now crowned as the ruling Guiness World Record holder as the longest-running creator-owned superhero of all-time (and with him coming in at 3rd place out of 10 options in the April poll), he seemed like the natural place to begin my guide coverage of creator-owned comics.

As with many of my guides, researching Spawn’s publishing history held many surprises for me. [Read more…] about New For Patrons: Guide to Todd McFarlane’s Spawn

Spawn by Todd McFarlane – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order

Updated Apr 18, 2025! The definitive issue-by-issue collecting guide and trade reading order for Spawn by Todd McFarlane in comic books and omnibus, hardcover, and trade paperback collections. Find every issue and appearance! Part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics Guide to Collecting Indie & Licensed Comics. Last updated April 2025 with titles scheduled for release through December 2025.

In 1992, Image Comics broke onto the American comic book market with a series of smash hit launches from six formerly famous Marvel artists.

Of those Image launch books (and with almost 30 years of hindsight), Todd McFarlane’s Spawn would go on to be the most commercially successful, enduring, and influential – as well as one of the highest profile black characters in the history of comics.

Part of Spawn’s longevity is the fact that the character comes with a unique mythology that doesn’t feel like a retread of any other existing comics character.

Al Simmons is a CIA operative who dies in the field and makes a deal with the devil so he can see his wife again. The deal leaves him with gaps in his memory and transforms him the newest unwitting pawn in the centuries-long battle between Heaven and Hell – and both sides have long since stopped playing by their own rules.

In addition to the tragic romance and epic religious plot threads, Spawn also squared off against street-level dirtbags and gang members, allowing McFarlane to draw more of the gritty version of New York’s streets and alleys from his run on Spider-Man. The early part of this run also included a timer counting down Spawn’s remaining “necroplasmic energy,” offering fans the tantalizing idea that the comic’s run was limited by how much power he used.

Over time, McFarlane considerably widened the scope of the series as it helped him launch a multimedia empire, including the founding of his still-successful high-end toy line.

Spawn is an impressively self-contained comic series. Though it has had many spinoffs, they are inessential to the core reading order that starts with issue #1 and continues past the record-breaking issue #301 – making it the longest-running creator-owned superhero comic. In that period, there is only a single one-shot – “Resurrection” – which must be integrated into the reading order to get the full story.

The popularity of McFarlane’s flagship title re-ignited with the press around his 300th issue in 2019. That set the Toddfather to plotting how he could expand the universe of his now record-setting, longest-running indie title. Those plans came to fruition in 2021 with the addition of three new ongoing titles to the line – King Spawn, Gunslinger Spawn, and a team-up book called The Scorched. Then, in 2022, McFarlane extended all of the major reprint lines past issue #125 for the first time – and they’ve continued to sprint forward, even as the line has expanded even further to include more ongoing books and mini-series.