These days, many readers are mostly aware of Rob Liefeld due to his creation of the immensely popular character of Deadpool, and rightfully so. But having worked in the industry for decades, there are countless other heroes and villains he’s touched in that time span.
One of his more infamous works happened to be that of Extreme Comics, which included the likes of Brigade and Bloodstrike. With this week’s surprise announcement revealing that this universe will soon be arriving on the silver screen, it only makes sense that a comic book revival be in the cards as well.
Liefeld recently sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss the soon to be relaunched books and had the following to say:
“I have a new Brigade series ready to go that I’ve been waiting to launch with Bloodstrike, and then we have an Extreme anthology coming out. I’m not going to flood the market. We’ll do selective stories, selective arcs, and then at the end of the year, we’ll be collecting the material. I love collections. We’re going to collect the original stories for the first time, as well. Very little of the ’90s stories have been collected. Bloodstrike No. 1 was a book that I laid out, we had young talent at the time — it gave me a chance to control the storytelling — and we’re going to recolor and reissue that so that people can have an affordable version of that. Re-Gex No. 1, I did with [Marvel TV head] Jeph Loeb, we’re doing a new edition of that. But, yes. There’ll also be new adventures. We’ll do a couple of story arcs. We’ve got a lot of the Extreme talent working on new material, some of them are already back at work on it. Marat Mychaels, who was the original artist on Brigade, is working on it again.
“And again, the fans love this stuff. On my desk right now, I have a bunch of books from ’92 and ’93, and I looked at the layouts of this stuff, I looked at the visuals, and I’m telling you, we at Image Comics and Extreme Studios, we pushed the boundaries of storytelling. We had big, bold, colorful characters, and we had interesting conflicts. I just think, especially aesthetically, there’s a visual direction we gave great care to. That’s fun. That’s fun. I do feel like everything old and new again. I loved Twin Peaks, and I keep thinking about that little guy. ‘That gum you like is back in style.’”
Whether these characters resonate with the public at large just as Deadpool has remains to be seen, but given today’s pop culture climate, now is the perfect time to see if properties developed outside of the Big Two can catch on.
