So What Is Going On With Youngblood and Andrew Rev?
(Sources will be cited at the end of the article)
I’ve mentioned Andrew Rev in passing a couple times. It has been mainly in how he bought Elementals from Bill Willingham when he bought Comico in the early 1990s. Andrew Rev disappeared from the face of the Earth after the collapse of the 90s collapse of the comic book industry. Word has it that every time someone inquired about buying Elementals from him, he immediately would ask an exorbitant amount for the property and negotiations would collapse.
Andrew Rev resurfaces…
Lo and behold, Rev resurfaced this year at San Diego Comic-Con with a new company, Terrific Production LLC. It was quickly revealed that Rev had purchased Youngblood from Liefeld’s business partner Scott Rosenberg. He was proceeding with plans to publish Youngblood. Rob Liefeld quickly announced that he would not be involved with the project, primarily because of the way he was treated by Rev.
In the meantime, Rev’s Twitter feed has become a combination of solicitations for artists, writers, and staff, occasional name dropping, and exaggerated hype about upcoming projects. The tweets also are sometimes hard to comprehend given a lack of punctuation, grammar and capitalization. It’s very hard to determine the direction the company is taking. The established properties that Rev has access to are Youngblood and Elementals. Apparently, there are plans to put both in a shared universe. However, several tweets seem to outline plans that simply can’t happen.
Where it leads us…
It seems, and this is merely speculation, that Andrew Rev is drumming up publicity for a property that he bought assuming that it would be easy to get certain creators to come along. He has apparently approached creators unaware of exclusivity deals that they have with publishers. He has also apparently insulted some creators by promising that their work on Youngblood will make them a star in the industry. However, those creators are already pretty well-known. Andrew Rev is definitely a pitchman. It seems that he’s one whose track record is based on being unaware of the timing of his publishing decisions. So far, all we have are his Twitter promises. These are promises that come without a single published comic since 1995.