abstract
| - The New Men debuted during the Extreme Prejudice imprint wide crossover. Following the end of the crossover story they were given their an eponymous 5-issue mini-series. This was a commonly used technique within Image, not just by Liefeld's Extreme Studios, but by most of the co-founders and their imprints. Many notable and top-selling Image titles including The Savage Dragon, Cyberforce and Gen¹³ started in this manner. The 1994 mini-series was written by Eric Stephenson with art by character designer Jeff Matsuda. Matsuda, Stephenson and Liefeld were also credited as 'co-plotters'. New Men was then granted an ongoing series. Matsuda did not take up the art duties and most of the first 20 issues were pencilled by Todd Nauck. Both mini-series and ongoing series kept a much better schedule than a number of Extreme Comics titles, notably the imprint's 'premiere' title Youngblood. This could be attributed to the minimal role that Rob Liefeld played in the production of the series. Like all of the Extreme titles, a number of issues were taken up by the various imprint-wide crossover storylines, such as Extreme Sacrifice and Babewatch, and the characters, though not the series, were an integral part of the Extreme Destroyer crossover. The series was put on hiatus with issue 20 for the Extreme Destroyer story and was replaced by a 4 issue mini-series, New Force, which starred the same characters and began their revamp. Nauck and Stephenston were again responsible for this. The series resumed after this mini-series via Liefeld's Maximum Comics and received a further revamp, both in plot and style, by Stephenson with Sprouse and Gordon. Until this point reviews and reaction had been mostly lukewarm, but this revamp improved it somewhat. With issue 22 the series was renamed Adventures Of the New Men but despite improved reaction the title fizzled out, possibly due to the problems Liefeld was having with Image Comics and the subsequent problems following his resignation. The Title was not one of the books revived by Awesome Comics and seems to have been lost to obscurity.
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