Robert Kirkman's Youngblood #100 Cover Reveals a Hidden Talent
TL;DR: Robert Kirkman — the writer behind The Walking Dead and Invincible — has penciled a variant cover for Youngblood #100, the milestone centennial issue of Rob Liefeld's Image Comics series. The issue drops June 10, 2026, and features variant covers by multiple Image Comics co-founders. Here's why this matters beyond a single piece of cover art.
Did anyone actually know Robert Kirkman could draw?
Most fans know him as the writer who built two of the most successful comic book franchises of the 21st century. But Kirkman apparently kept a pencil sharpened this whole time — and Youngblood #100 is where that quietly became public knowledge.
The upcoming centennial issue of Rob Liefeld's superhero series, scheduled for June 10, 2026, includes a variant cover (Cover K) penciled by Kirkman himself. It's not a co-writer credit or a foreword. The man actually drew the thing. For a figure so thoroughly associated with scripts and story structure, that's a genuine surprise — and it says something interesting about the culture Liefeld built around this particular milestone.
What Youngblood #100 actually is, and why the numbering matters
Let's get the facts straight first, because the "100th issue" framing is more complicated than it sounds.
According to Bleeding Cool's deep-dive on the numbering math, Liefeld's team uses legacy numbering that counts every non-crossover, non-preview issue across publishers to reach the century mark. It's a method some fans will accept and others will debate — but that's comics for you.
Here's what's confirmed about the issue itself:
- Release date: June 10, 2026 (originally solicited for May 20, 2026)
- Cover price: $4.99 for 32 pages
- Written, drawn, and main cover by: Rob Liefeld
- Story: The Youngblood team unites for a final assault on their most dangerous enemy while forming unexpected alliances
- Variant covers include: Todd McFarlane (Cover G, with Liefeld), Robert Kirkman (Cover K, with Liefeld), Whilce Portacio, Jim Valentino, Marc Silvestri, and Donny Cates with Liefeld
- Publisher: Image Comics
The full details — including solicitation copy and cover gallery — are listed on the Image Comics official release page. What's striking is that almost every cover contributor here is either an Image co-founder or someone whose career is inseparable from the Image story. This isn't just a variant cover drop. It's closer to a reunion.
The Image Comics reunion angle nobody's talking about loudly enough
Youngblood launched in 1992 as one of the founding titles of Image Comics, and it was — genuinely — a historic debut. The Hollywood Reporter noted it was the first title outside Marvel or DC to debut at number one and sell over a million copies. That's not revisionist nostalgia. That actually happened.
Liefeld returned to the character after a significant hiatus in 2025, and has confirmed plans to continue. The decision to build issue #100 around his original collaborators and peers at Image is clearly intentional — a way of closing a loop that started more than three decades ago.
What's interesting about Kirkman's inclusion specifically is that he wasn't one of the original Image co-founders. He came later, built his own empire within the company (The Walking Dead launched at Image in 2003, Invincible slightly earlier in the same year), and became arguably the most commercially successful creator the publisher has produced in the post-founding era. His presence on the cover roster signals that Liefeld was thinking about the full arc of Image's history, not just its founding moment.
Movie OTT tracks the streaming adaptations of comics properties like these closely — and both Walking Dead and Invincible have become major OTT franchises, which adds another dimension to Kirkman's profile here. He's not just a comics guy anymore. He's a streaming-era showrunner and IP architect who happens to still draw.
What Rob Liefeld actually said about putting this together
The Hollywood Reporter published the full account of how the variant cover roster came together, and Liefeld's own words tell the story better than a summary can.
"I rarely ask anybody for anything. I hate getting turned down. I'm as sheepish as anyone else," Liefeld told THR, explaining his reluctance to reach out to fellow artists. The dynamic shifted when Kirkman found out Liefeld had approached the Image co-founders for covers. According to Liefeld, "Robert is like, 'What about me?'" — which is how the penciled variant ended up happening.
The other moment worth noting: when Marc Silvestri (Image CEO and co-founder) delivered his variant, Liefeld's reaction was visceral. He texted Silvestri directly: "I cannot draw these characters. This is humiliating." High praise, delivered in the most Liefeld way possible. Silvestri's cover was apparently so strong that it made Liefeld question his own continued presence as the book's artist. That's either genuine humility or the kind of competitive self-deprecation that only people at the very top of their field can afford. Hard to say which.
How this lands for Indian comics and streaming fans
India's comics readership is smaller than its American counterpart, but the audience tracking Image properties has grown substantially — largely driven by the success of Invincible on Prime Video India and the long tail of The Walking Dead franchise across multiple platforms.
For Indian audiences curious about where to catch the adaptations connected to Kirkman's work, here's the current picture as tracked by Movie OTT's streaming availability tool:
- Invincible (Seasons 1–3): Available on Prime Video India
- The Walking Dead (all seasons): Available on Disney+ Hotstar in India
- The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live (the Lincoln/Gurira miniseries): Disney+ Hotstar
- Dead City (the Maggie/Negan spinoff): Check Disney+ Hotstar for current availability
The Youngblood comic itself isn't adapted for screens yet — though given the current appetite for superhero IP, it's not an outrageous thing to imagine. Liefeld has previously discussed adaptation interest in the property, and the 100-issue milestone gives any potential studio conversation a clean narrative hook.
For now, Indian readers interested in the physical comic can order through international shipping from Westfield Comics, which has the Cover G variant (Liefeld and McFarlane) listed among the available editions.
Kirkman's path from Walking Dead scripts to penciling covers
Robert Kirkman co-created The Walking Dead with artist Tony Moore in 2003 at Image Comics. The series ran for 193 issues before Kirkman ended it — deliberately, on his own terms — in 2019. The television adaptation on AMC ran for 11 seasons and became one of the highest-rated cable shows in American history.
Invincible, his other major creation (with Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley), launched the same year and has since become a prestige animated series on Prime Video, currently in its third season. Kirkman also launched his own production company, Skybound Entertainment, which has expanded into video games, podcasts, and live events.
Rob Liefeld, for his part, is one of the most recognizable — and at times polarizing — figures in American comics history. He co-founded Image in 1992 alongside Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, and Whilce Portacio. Youngblood was his flagship. Deadpool and Cable (both created while Liefeld was at Marvel's X-Force) are arguably his most culturally visible characters today, given the Ryan Reynolds film franchise.
The thing nobody mentions enough is that Kirkman and Liefeld represent two very different generations of Image's story — the founders and the inheritors — and this cover collaboration is a quiet acknowledgment of that continuity.
What comes next for Youngblood and the Image milestone circuit
Liefeld has confirmed he's continuing his run on Youngblood beyond issue #100. With the book's return in 2025 and this milestone issue arriving June 10, 2026, the series appears to be in active, sustained publication for the first time in years.
Whether a screen adaptation follows remains unconfirmed. But with Kirkman's involvement — even in the specific, limited form of a penciled variant cover — the project gets a visibility boost in exactly the circles where adaptation conversations happen. Kirkman's name on anything gets read differently in 2026 than it did in 2003.
For streaming availability updates on Kirkman-connected properties across India, the US, the UK, and Spain, Movie OTT has the current picture across all major platforms. The Youngblood #100 variant covers are available for pre-order now ahead of the June 10 release date.
