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By Sean McQuaid

Come to me you all ye who are info-junkies, ‘cause have I got a treat for you! Well, some- thing at least moderately interesting, anyway. To comic book info junkies, that is. Oh, just ignore my babbling and skip down to the next paragraph.

This week, we take a gander at some comic book source books: y’know, handbooks, info books, reference guides, that sorta thing. The increasingly complex comics industry has been turning out these self-referential guides ever since the original Marvel Universe hand- book way back in the early 80’s, and although the big two (Marvel’s Marvel Universe and DC’s Who's Who) are currently on hiatus, there’s no shortage of small reference guides from smaller companies like Image.

One such info book is the recently re- leased second installment of Youngblood Battlezone (Image Comics, $4.15). This EXtreme Studios production (adorned with an absolutely grotesque Yaep/Panosian cover) isa guidetothe Youngblood and Team Youngblood super-teams and their related characters (al- most all of whom are Rob Liefeld creations, the major exception being Chap Yaep’s character Dutch).

Included are past and present Youngblood members Badrock, Brahma, Chapel, Combat, Cougar, Die Hard, Dutch, Knight Sabre, Link, Masada, Photon, Psi-Fire, Riptide, Sentinel, Shaft, Troll and Vogue, plus a variety of their friends and foes. Each character gets a page or two of illustration and info. The writing is often clumsy, and there are more typos and foul-ups than the average info series (further fueling my longstanding hypothesis that EXtreme Studios would ben- efit greatly from tighter editing). It’s a textu- ally inferior sourcebook, neither as artfully composed and comprehensive as Who’s Who, nor as exhaustive as the tiresome Marvel Uni- verse.

Asan info book, this comic would make

By Trent Drake In keeping with the Halloween spirit, I’m reviewing a whole bunch of comics. Some of ‘em have horror undercurrents, and some of ‘em are just plain horrible...

Wetworks

Art and Story by Whilce Portacio

Image Comics

When I saw the advance hype for this mag, I thought it would be horrible. You see, the title refers to close quarters espionage missions where the operative’s hands may get wet with

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a good set of trading cards. Clip away some of the extraneous text (much of which is vague and/or pointless filler), and you’re left with sketchy pictures of who these folks are and what makes them tick. It’s enough to give you a very basic impression of each character, but little or nothing beyond that (although in some cases this is understandable since the charac- ters have never been fleshed out in the comics). The histories are, with few exceptions, dis- jointed and often sparse. Even more vague are the ‘‘abilities’’ descriptions. Examples: Dutch’s entry rambles on about his cyborg

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thing’sa glorified poster book-- soifyou’re not willing to blow around five bucks (after taxes) on purty pictures, save your shekels. Moreover, unless you’ve got a hankering for Image-style art (ridiculously overdone and warped phy- siques with contrived dynamism and lotsa tiny lines) most of this stuff isn’t for you. I won’t bother telling you about all the bad pics (suffice it to say they are legion), but there are a few goodies: Chap Yaep’s Dutch is rather striking thougk somewhat overdone, Chris Sprouse does a creditable job of Masada and Riptide, and Photon and Vogue are nicely rendered by

Cyherforce Universe

abilities without ever telling you precisely what they are; Die Hard is said to possess a “specially crafted shield’’; but we never find out what’s special about it; and many charac- ters’ abilities are described glowingly without ever going into precise detail as to what they are, especially in the areas of strength and combat skill. Most of the pages are 80-90% illustration.

If we’re gonna calla spade a spade, this

blood. Oh happy day. Nightmarish images of Youngblood getting worse ran through my mind. Instead, it turns out to be a weird but fun story with pretty decent artwork.

And a twisted story it is! Yet another Team 7 is launched ona suicide mission... only they don’t know it. Sent into a mountain stronghold in the Balkans to retrieve a bio- weapon from terrorists, they discover that the terrorists are actually vampires and the bio- weapon is a ‘bio-metalloid compound satu- rated with nanotech wetware’, In other words,

liquid metal armour’ When Reaat7 Fealizes:

Marat Mychaels and Todd Nauck; however, the whole lot of them are pikers next to the legendary George Perez, who illustrates the Youngblood and Team Youngblood group shots-- an oasis of illustrative virtuosity in an aesthetic wasteland. Youngblood has never looked better.

So much for them. Our next subject is Cyberforce Universe, a sourcebook about the characters from Marc Silvestri’s ‘“Top Cow

that the army plans to sacrifice them to destroy the vampire enclave, they decide to wear the bio-armour and hope they survive. It turns out to be a symbiotic lifeform that renders them damn near invincible.

Now fugitives from the army they served so well, the betrayed Team 7 enters the employ of Waering. Waering tells them about the vampire’s plan to unleash a genetically-engi- neered plague at a rock concert. In order to save innocentlives, Team 7 crashes the concert

and wipes out a few more vampires. In the

process they discover some strange new pow-

Productions’’ division of Image Comics (spe- cifically the characters of Cyberforce and its companion title Codename: Stryke Force). The first issue features entries ranging from Ballistic to Ripclaw, with another installment due in January (according to the interior back cover).

All things considered, this book’s a bit better than its Youngblood counterpart. It’s roughly a 75-25 picture-info ratio herein, but since every character gets two pages anyway there’s a bit more textual substance than Youngblood Battlezone. It’s not as fluidly lit- erate nor as richly visual as the average Who's Who entry, but few source books are.

One thing this book has over both Who's Who and Youngblood Battlezone, though, is its technical diagrams. In fact, they’re the most detailed, professional-looking tech guides this side of the early Marvel Universe-- and no wonder, since Top Cow has recruited veteran Marvel tech-junkie Eliot Brown to design these diagrams (among them: the Stryke Force Sub- marine, the Cyberforce Compound, the Cybercycle, and the Cyberforce Jump Jet). Now, if they could just shanghai someone like Mark Waid to do their text...

As with Youngblood Battlezone thetext is sometimes vague or disjointed, but also like Youngblood this may be due at least in part to the variably convoluted or sketchy develop- ment of the characters to date. Regardless, it’s anotch ortwo above the EXtreme Studios stuff in terms of substance and correctness.

The abilties descriptions are usually a

tad more substantial than Youngblood

Battlezone, though still pretty sketchy in some cases; a nice touch, however, is the “‘power ratings key’’ applied to each character’s entry. It helps give you a ballpark idea of the range of each characters’ basic physical and mental abilities.

As for art, Cyberforce Universe boasts a fairly palatable assortment of illustrations: nothing remarkable, but not bad for Image.

ers the armour grants... and a weakness that gets two team members killed.

The weird but mildly original storyline is buoyed by the bizarre heroesand villains. On the side of the angels we have not only a group of superheroes encased in liquid metal but also a tribe of lycanthropes known as the Were- Nation. The bad guys are two groups of vampires, each with their own plans for Team 7. The tainted ones, led by Prince Drakken, wish to retake the world from the humans. These bestial, blood:suckers have. ruined the.’

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