Rating: WARTY!
This was my first venture into Marvel's Runaways, a comic book series in which a band of mostly young teens, but including an 11-year-old, learns after seeing them literally sacrifice a girl, that their parents constitute an evil organization they call 'The Pride'. The series was created by Brian Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, but Joss Whedon has also had some involvement in it, leading some to wonder if this might be Marvel's next big venture - into movies or into a TV series, adding another foundation stone in their burgeoning super hero empire.
I decided that if this was indeed somewhere Marvel was going, I should try to get a leg up on the whole thing since I knew squat about these guys other than the vaguest notion of what they were about. This chance came from my beloved local library when I saw a whole bunch of these on the shelf. I had two immediate problems. One was that of what appeared to be two separate series, and not a one of them had a volume number on the cover or on the credits page, so I had no idea which one came first. I had to look it up online, only to discover my second problem, which was that volume one wasn't on the shelf! I did get vols 2 & 3 though.
Why are graphic novel creators so devoted to keeping people in the dark about where they are? This is one reason I detest series! I know these graphic novels are already aggregations of single issue comics, but could they not put something on the cover to indicate cardinality?! I had to go online to find out which ones to start with, and even then I couldn't figure out who's on first, or whether I was looking at two sets that were really separate or whether they were merely different print runs of the same stories (it turned out to be the latter). I finally picked volumes two and three of the small format paperbacks and a volume of the large format because it was written by Whedon. I have no idea what order that one was in.
That said, I blitzed the two small ones and found them to be quite entertaining despite a few issues here and there (which were no worse than any other comic book). Yes, issues in the issues! The parents of these kids were chosen by aliens to usher in the end of humanity. The reward they were promised was that six of them would live through the genocide of their fellow humans and become immortals. I'm sorry but I see no incentive there! We're supposed to believe that these evil parents were cool with the idea that they would have one child each thereby creating the six survivors? Either they're stupid or far from evil. The aliens told them that only the most devoted of their servants would be the ones who were saved, so there was no reason to believe they would accept substitutes or care about children or their servants' wishes!
Their parents are an assorted group of aliens, time-travelers, scientists, telepaths, and wizards, and what happens is that the kids, who have surprisingly been unaware of how evil their parents are, spy on them and are shocked by their behavior, so they...run away! They try adopting super hero names but it doesn't work. The youngest makes her own thrown-together costume, but none of them really are interested in the traditional super hero path, which made this very appealing to me, especially since I'm working on a super hero novel myself right now. The characters are also mostly female and of diverse ethnic backgrounds, so this is another feather in its cap as far as I'm concerned.
Talking of diversity, Karolina Dean is the alien and she knows she's literally alien. Like superman, her power comes from the sun, but unlike the foundational DC hero, her power fades at night. This was another thing I liked. I've never understood how Superman managed to be as super at night as he was during the day, but perhaps he worked like a capacitor?! Molly Hayes is the daughter of the mutant telepaths, but she's more like Superman in that she has super strength and invulnerability. Nico Minoru, like Harry Potter, is the daughter of wizardly parents and can do magic, although in the two volumes I read, she did very little of it. She's also the de facto leader if there can be said to be one.
Chase Stein is the son of the scientists and has no super power, but he did steal his dad's 'fistigons' which are gloves which seem confined to emitting fireballs and extruding metal claws rather like Wolverine. Alex Wilder is the son of gangland capos, and is described as having a precocious and forward-looking intellect, although he never came off as being particularly smart to me. Gertrude Yorkes (there's that out-of-style name again, but maybe it's because she) is the daughter of the time-travelers. She has an empathic link with a velociraptor nicknamed Old Lace. She goes therefore, by Arsenic. Once again we see the velociraptor way over-sized as it was in the Jurassic Park movies, but since this one is genetically engineered, perhaps there is a reason for that.
This series was written in the mid-'oughts, yet all of these teens seemed unusually familiar with - and addicted to - anachronisms. This brought me out of suspension of reality quite often because it didn't feel like things these teens would say or reference. I mean, how many teens, even US teens, would even know about a 1939 play adapted into a 1944 Cary Grant movie titled Arsenic and Old Lace, as opposed to how many older comic book writers?! They did explain the Beatles references by mentioning that one of the kids had an album, a present from a parent, but this doesn't explain how all the other kids would be familiar enough with them that they never questioned the references.
Those gripes aside, I did like the off-the-beaten-path route this story took, its basic premise of rebellious teens, its cast, and the overall story. This one was focused on the kids establishing themselves in a 'base of operations' and their move towards helping people in a rather forlorn, misguided, and half-hearted effort to right their parents' wrongs, but there as very little super hero activity here. it was mostly focused on the interactions between the teens, but even so, it was very readable and interesting, so I recommend it.
