I Got Two Things Way Wrong About Young Avengers

A little more than a week ago, I did a Dirty Dozen post on Young Avengers. Since then, issue #13 has come out and totally blown up two of the twelve things I said about it. Luckily, they were both good things to have been wrong about.

First, there's this longish complaint about Ultimate Nullifier's characterization in the series:

I hate this book's treatment of Ultimate Nullifier. He was the best character in Vengeance, which is one of my favorite Joe Casey superhero comics ever. In that title, UN was a ballsy young warrior and a bit of a visionary, leading a team of idealistic teen heroes who operated under the radar, more interested in saving the universe than getting any glory or even recognition for their do-gooding. Here, he's demoted to the role of whiny ex-boyfriend, so upset at having been rejected that he becomes a petty supervillain helping Mother attempt to destroy the universe. He completely reverses his entire worldview and overturns all of his priorities because the girl he likes doesn't like him back. It's a total misfire, so I choose to believe Gillen's UN is a different characters entirely than Casey's, since that's how they read.

Turns out, they ARE different characters entirely. Ultimate Nullifier is one small part of a massive lie Loki has been telling for the entire series. I suppose I should've given Gillen & McKelvie more credit, but there were a bunch of ex-lovers of the Young Avengers who all showed up at once, and Nullifier was the only one I had any previous experience with, so I had no real reason not to accept the others at face value. And Nullifier is a new and minor enough character that making huge changes to him would certainly be within the normal bounds of the genre. Still, this is a book where Loki is the main-est character, so if someone seemed to be acting strangely, it would've been a safe bet on my part to guess it was some sort of deception. Anyway, very glad to know the real Nullifier is still untainted and awesome.

Secondly, we have this bold prediction:

Wiccan's probably not going to make it out alive. That's been apparent from the get-go, and has only grown more likely with each new chapter.

This was me assuming that Wiccan was going to have to sacrifice himself, or at least some part of himself, in order to access the amount of power he'd need to finally defeat Mother. Turns out, the real solution was more logical and probably even more foreseeable: love. Hulking accepting his love for Wiccan and fully letting go of his fears and doubts is what defeats the villain in the end. Cornier, but more fitting than another "meaningful" superhero death like I anticipated. Again, I was under-appreciating the thought and care Gillen & McKelvie put into this title.

Back when it was a relatively new series, I was slower to warm on Young Avengers than many others. And now, even as a totally converted fan, I still find myself expecting less of it than it actually delivers. Young Avengers #13 wasn't the best issue of the series, and on the whole it was a pretty unthrilling climax to the enormous mega-arc that it's taken all thirteen of these issues to tell. The good guys win, everyone's happy, the day is saved...it's hardly the most groundbreaking conclusion to this kind of story. Still, it surprised me in a couple nice ways, so here's a tip of the hat for that and a brief but sincere apology for my previous underestimation.

Dirty Dozen: Young Avengers

Dirty Dozen is a semi-regular feature with twelve disconnected thoughts on the first twelve issues of a current ongoing series*.

*I know that calling Young Avengers a "current ongoing series" is kinda-sorta a stretch considering it's going to end with issue #15, and the whole thing has basically been one long story. But I think it counts because its endpoint wasn't predetermined when the series began—the story dictated its own length to some extent, as opposed to this having always been planned and announced as "a fifteen-issue series."

1. Loki is the star, right? The story is centered on Wiccan and his relationship with Hulkling, yet Loki is still somehow the main character. He knows the most, he does the most, he's the funniest, the most likable, the least trustworthy, the best. I very much think of it as an ensemble cast, but he's the breakout character and also the anchor.

2. Love and sex are both handled very well. Hulking and Wiccan have a different kind of totally equal, two-way affection than Kate and Noh-Varr. They're both healthy relationships, sincere and therefore valid. But the two couples aren't looking for the same things, so what they offer one another differs, too.

3. Young Avengers does credits pages like nobody else.

4. All the endless hype Jamie McKelvie gets for his layouts/page designs is more than deserved. It's not just that he does something innovative almost every issue, he also keeps finding new ways to do it. The two-page spread of Noh-Varr fighting his way across a room with numbered movements creates an extremely different effect than the page showing more or less every teenaged superhero in the Marvel Universe connected through the world's most well-built social-media-based flow chart. McKelvie is a powerfully creative cat. That said, there is never any way of knowing how much credit goes to writer or artist, and Kieron Gillen's close collaborative partnership/friendship with McKelvie is well-documented, so the praise goes to both to some degree, I'm sure. When the thing that knocks me out is the actual physical structure of the page, though, I have to assume the artist gets a bigger nod. Also, of course, major kudos to Mike Norton, who inks and/or finishes McKelvie's art depending on the issue.

5. The mystery around Miss America Chavez's exact place in all of this needs to be cleared up posthaste.

6. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I quite like Gillen and McKelvie's approach of telling a single, finite, longform story in fifteen issues and then calling it quits. It's true that sometimes this has made individual issues seems slow or light, but ultimately this has been a rewarding narrative told well, and when it does hit its natural endpoint (which you can feel it getting rapidly closer to all the time) I much prefer to have the book end, even temporarily, than keep going just because the sales justify its continued existence. If you've told the story you set out to tell, then by all means, take a bow and get the hell off the stage.

7. The weird, itty-bitty subplot where Kate was worried that when she turned 21 she would count as an adult and therefore not be able to help fight Mother was sort of botched. It was only barely hinted at for a few issues, then suddenly Kate stated her fears out loud, had the rest of the team shoot them down in no uncertain terms, and blammo, the problem was resolved. I would've liked a bit more tension, or, even better, for this silly and inconsequential detail to have never been introduced in the first place. 

8. Young Avengers is classic and modern at once. There's a whole lot of social media, teen slang, pop culture references, etc. that make the comic feel very now. There's also an unthinkable, world-ending threat that a group of heroes band together to defeat, which creates a more old-school vibe. The book's prioritization of inventiveness and, more importantly, fun, feels like more of a throwback attitude, yet it can also be a powerfully dismal comic when it wants to be, grimming and gritting with the best of 'em. The mashing of retro and neo elements is one of the title's biggest draws.

9. I hate this book's treatment of Ultimate Nullifier. He was the best character in Vengeance, which is one of my favorite Joe Casey superhero comics ever. In that title, UN was a ballsy young warrior and a bit of a visionary, leading a team of idealistic teen heroes who operated under the radar, more interested in saving the universe than getting any glory or even recognition for their do-gooding. Here, he's demoted to the role of whiny ex-boyfriend, so upset at having been rejected that he becomes a petty supervillain helping Mother attempt to destroy the universe. He completely reverses his entire worldview and overturns all of his priorities because the girl he likes doesn't like him back. It's a total misfire, so I choose to believe Gillen's UN is a different characters entirely than Casey's, since that's how they read.

10. Wiccan's probably not going to make it out alive. That's been apparent from the get-go, and has only grown more likely with each new chapter. 

11. The idea that Prodigy not only retained all the skills and knowledge of a slew of other super-people, but also their sexual proclivities, intrigues me to no end. What about their tastes in food, entertainment, fashion, etc.? Does he find himself simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by basically everything he encounters? What about political views, prejudices, misconceptions, etc.? Even if he doesn't believe them all, does he KNOW what most of the rest of the Marvel U thinks about these topics? Trying to imagine what it's like in his head is the world's best thought experiment. Dear Marvel, please give the guy a mini-series, if not an ongoing, so this can explored!

12. No matter what happens in the final fifth, I will miss this volume of Young Avengers. It did stuff I liked reading, looking at, and thinking about.

Good, But Not Great: Hawkeye & Young Avengers

It's like when you hear a joke that only makes you smirk while everyone else is in stitches. Though you can understand conceptually what makes the joke funny, and even pull some personal amusement and pleasure from it, you still feel like you're not getting it in the same way as those people around you. This happens in any and every medium, and it can make you question your competence and intelligence, even if only for a moment, when your own feelings seem to be counter to those of popular opinion. Right now, for me, this is happening in comicbooks in a big way with Matt Fraction & David Aja's Hawkeye and, to a lesser extent (because it is only two issues old) Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie's Young Avengers.
     Let me be clear: I like both of the books in question. Like them a lot, even. Visually they have each had some pretty stunning moments, there's a good deal of tight and funny dialogue in them, and I'm into their respective casts. But I don't think of them as the highest in current superhero comicbookery, nor have I ever considered them deserving of that level of acclaim. Are they more solid and better-looking than the majority of titles available today? Definitely. They belong closer to the top of the list than the bottom, but I don't LOVE them.
     I might grow to love Young Avengers over time. It's still so new and has been good thus far, but it's also immensely decompressed and has a sizable cast, so not that much has gone down as of yet. The first issue got more than one perfect review online, but in my eyes it came across as a pretty standard debut: we got brief glimpses of the current lives and personalities of all the main characters, and it ended by introducing the threat of the opening arc. Not every first issue is smart enough to do this kind of common sense groundwork, so kudos to Gillen for starting at the beginning, but still, the result was too many threads established too briefly for any of them to fully capture my attention. The issue had ADD; the opening scene of Kate Bishop and Noh-Varr was the best and most fun, but it was never returned to, abandoned in favor of meeting the rest of the cast. Even in Young Avengers #2, which was considerably more focused, there was but a single throwaway line referencing the characters from the debut's first scene, so in more than 30 pages Gillen has yet to get back to the most interesting story he's introduced. Yes, this is how comicbooks get written nowadays more often than not, aiming for the trade rather than satisfying single issues. And that's fine, and I like the other threads of the book, so I'm happy to follow those instead of the one I really want for now. But my mind isn't ever going to be blown by a book that, in two full issues, can't completely wrap its arms around or explain ANY of its myriad plot points, especially if it flat out ignores some of them for the sake of developing others at a snail's pace. When this arc wraps and I do have all the answers, I may well be thoroughly wowed. What bugs me is that so many reviewers online are already wowed, and I can't place why. It feels to me like Young Avengers isn't even expecting to drop its readers' jaws yet, that Gillen & McKelvie are taking their time in the beginning so that the latter half of their story can really go nuts. Nevertheless, the overwhelming praise continues to pour in, and though there MUST be people online talking about the title's flaws, too, they are much harder to track down than those folks enthusiastically waving the Young Avengers banner.
     Hawkeye is a stickier wicket, because my problems with it vary from issue to issue. Very much not written with the collected volume in mind, this series does mostly one- or two-issue stories, and while some of them have been a load of fun, there have also been a few duds already. And though I credited it above to the initial and most regular artist David Aja, it has also been drawn by Javier Pulido (#4-5), and Steve Lieber & Jesse Hamm (#7), and where Aja kicks ass the others only punch it lightly. So it is a less stable, reliable title than I want it to be, and even though I have seen this fact acknowledged online in places, the majority of what I've read has had a higher opinion about each issue than I.
     I never really thought the villains with broken English who say "bro" at the end of every sentence were especially funny, so maybe I'm just not the target audience, because those guys show up in the debut. But the story around them in that first issue was a strong one, showing Hawkeye's toughness along with his genuine altruism. And Aja's art was stellar right away. So I stuck with it, and though they had some rough spots, issues #2 and #3 were both more good than bad by far (even when the "bro" guys returned). Nothing that melted my face in the stories, but consistently great artistic work, from Aja and colorist Matt Hollingsworth both, and some impeccable humor from Matt Fraction. It was off to a strong start.
     But the Javier Pulido-drawn "The Tape" story was of lower quality on all fronts. The plot didn't ever grab me and then resolved on a cheap fake-out kind of ending, Madame Masque has never impressed me as a villain, and Pulido is similar to Aja in some ways but far less polished and detailed. His characters' expressions are wilder, and their appearances more prone to shift or morph from panel to panel. As much as I had enjoyed the opening three issues, I never raved over them the way I saw others doing, and then during "The Tape" I could feel my interest waning rapidly. But the promise of Aja's return kept me around, only for Hawkeye #6 to be another "bro"-fest. An entertaining, beautiful one, absolutely, but this being their third issue, the gang of tracksuit-wearing thugs began to feel like one-note clowns.
     #7 was the Hurricane (Superstorm?) Sandy issue, and even though it was inarguably awesome for Fraction to donate the royalties, the stories themselves felt a little cheap and like they were pandering. I'm not sure that could have been avoided entirely in the telling of Sandy stories about superheroes, but that didn't make it any less grating. Also, again, the art was not as strong. It's good, clear, emotive stuff, and both artists fit nicely with their respective stories, but it's a dip for the series, which doesn't help the weaknesses of the narratives.
     And that brings us to Hawkeye #8, another one centered on the "bro" dudes that seems to be leading us into a longer arc centering on them. Damn, now that I think about it, those jerks are the main baddies in half of the issues so far. Maybe that's the only reason I don't like this book as much as other people.
     Whatever. I'm still reading it eight issues deep so I must be enjoying myself. I don't eagerly anticipate it every month but I do look forward to seeing what it'll deliver. And I never know exactly what to expect, which is a point in its favor for sure. As for Young Avengers, I think I'm committed to the full first arc already, no matter how long that ends up being, after only two chapters. So even if I'm not trumpeting it as the next big thing in superhero books, I am glad to be reading it and excited to see how it plays out.
     But I'd love to love these series with the same enthusiasm I seem to find around every corner of the Internet. I want to feel like I am in on the joke, but I just don't yet get what the big deal is.