[EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, this was apparently an April Fool’s joke. We hope you enjoyed the idea as much as we did.]
No, apparently this isn’t an April Fool’s Joke. Rob Liefeld, the comic book artist whose expressive, jagged artwork made a big splash in the industry with his work on New Mutants and X-Force, and whose steadfast refusal to conform to anatomy (or draw hands and feet) eventually made him a frequent punchline throughout the internets, announced at Wonder Con that he will be retiring from the industry once his current commitments are finished, and that his next project will be the feature film version of his comic book Youngblood, which took the superhero team iconography of The Avengers and fused it with an Entourage-like focus on the protagonists’ celebrity. That’s what Youngblood was about when it first came out, anyway. The series has been rebooted more often than Payless Shoes supply room. Geekscape had the perplexing story, straight from Rob Liefeld’s mouth.
Rob Liefeld supposedly stated, ‘Comics are growing stale. I’ve grown beyond them on so many levels. I’m ready to move onto the next phase of my life. I will be taking over the directing duties on the Youngblood film. I will own directing just as much as I own being an artist.’
Oh man, if that didn’t sound like something Rob Liefeld would actually say I would never have posted this on April 1st, but we’ve double-checked with the folks at Geekscape and they swear up and down that this really happened at Wonder Con. Yikes.
On the upside, when last we heard about a Youngblood movie it was going to be directed by Brett Ratner. So maybe this is good news after all…
Crave Online will be back with more Youngblood news, maybe. If this turns out to be bunk we’re totally going to kick Geekscape‘s collective asses.
