Titans series for DC Comics to be co-written with Marv Wolfman. According to Liefeld, he and managing editor Dick Giordano failed to reach an agreement on the project, and Liefeld merged his Teen Titans ideas with his previous, creator-owned Youngblood property. According to Liefeld, "Shaft was intended to be Speedy. Vogue was a new Harlequin design, Combat was a Kh'undian warrior circa the Legion of Super-Heroes, ditto for Photon and Die Hard was a S.T.A.R. Labs android. I forgot who Chapel was supposed to be, but I'm sure it would have rocked". Given the failed deal with DC and Liefeld's increasingly strained relationship with Marvel Comics over his X-Force royalties, he joined other Marvel artists to form Image Comics in order to publish Youngblood in their own series. Original runs Youngblood #1 was an anthology consisting of two separate stories published in flip book format: each half of the book had its own front cover and contained one story, rotated upside-down from the other half. One story featured the organisation's "Home Team", for domestic missions, consisting of Shaft, Badrock (originally named Bedrock), Chapel, Die Hard, Photon and Vogue. The other story featured the "Away Team", for international missions, consisting of Sentinel, Brahma, Combat, Cougar, Psi-Fire and Riptide. A sneak preview of the series appeared in The Malibu Sun #1 (February 1992), published by Image through Malibu Comics, which provided administrative, production, distribution, and marketing support for Image's early publications. On March 13, two separate 5½" x 8½″ black-and-white ashcan editions of Youngblood began to surface, each featuring one of two separate stories from Youngblood #1. Edition "A" featured the 13-page lead story, while Edition "B" featured the other side of the flip book, along with four extra pages of art that would not be included in the premier issue. According to Image Comics spokesperson John Beck, the print run on edition "A" was 1,000 copies, and edition "B" was limited to 500 copies. Youngblood #1 (April 1992) was the first Image Comics publication. At the time of its release, it was the highest selling independent comic book published, despite receiving poor reviews from critics for unclear storytelling due to both Liefeld's art and the book's flip format, which some readers found confusing; poor anatomy; incorrect perspective; non-existent backgrounds; poor dialogue; and the late shipping of the book, a problem that continued with subsequent issues. In an interview in Hero Illustrated