Book Review: Runaways, Volume 2 HC and Dark Avengers: Assemble

We finally got back over to the fabulous library in Westport, CT, weekend before last for the annual book sale.  While Sally and the girls spent their time wandering amongst the rest of the bargain hunters, I headed upstairs, intent on pillaging Westport’s awesomely well-stocked graphic novels section.  I took home nearly a dozen GNs, including the two books I’m reviewing this week: Volume 2 of Marvel’s Runaways hardcover series (collecting issues #13 to #25) and the Dark Avengers: Assemble hardcover (collecting issues #1 to #6).

Although writer Brian K. Vaughn is better-known for his long-running Vertigo series Y: The Last Man, Runaways was always a personal favorite of mine.  The series’ premise is a kind of teenaged coming-of-age/rebellion story: a bunch of teens whose parents are friends discover together that their parents are collectively a bunch of super-villains.  They slowly come to realize that the adults they’ve spent their entire lives respecting are in fact bad people, and indeed, that adults of all stripes are generally people who’ve compromised their ideals in one way or another—who’ve generally given in to “evil” somehow—regardless of their overall intentions or motivations.  The series’ first story arc of 18 issues deals with the ramifications of this initial discovery and its inherent rebellion against the authority of the kids’ evil parents, so that by the second hardcover volume, we’re left with a bunch of lost and scared kids living under the unforgiving maxim that ALL adults are evil.  Or at least fundamentally self-interested.

Volume 2 of the Runaways is in many ways similar to the second season of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  In Buffy’s first year, we spend the entire season setting up the premise and dealing with the first of what proves to be a goodly number of threats to The Entire World.  The second season, then, is a little better because the premise is established, and we can just do characterization—and the trials and tribulations of being a romantically active teenage girl.  In this second volume of Runaways, we’re also dealing with a mature idea and finally getting into the meat and potatoes of what it means to be a teen trying to live on your own in a tough city like Los Angeles.  And like Buffy-scribe Joss Whedon, Vaughn takes his idea in a bunch of clever and unexpected directions that in retrospect seem obvious given the characters and the story’s over-arching thematic elements.  Which perhaps explains why Vaughn has since worked some with Whedon, and indeed, why Whedon himself took over the scripting duties at Runaways when Vaughn himself left the series to work on the TV show Lost. 

Runaways’ art, by Adrian Alphona, adds to the story main through style.  It’s good stuff, but it’s in a style that’s well outside the typical heroic comicbook fare—and for good reason.  In business terms, Runaways was originally greenlit by Marvel as a means to appeal to the Manga crowd.  At that point, Marvel didn’t yet have a successful movie studio, and its appeal was limited to either the mainstream name recognition of its established brand-name characters—like Spider-Man—or to the long-term interest of overgrown fanboys in their 30s who’d had a subscription to either the X-Men or Iron Man since the company’s heyday back in the 1970s and 80s.  And unfortunately, the latter is a diminishing resource since fanboys grow up and move into new interests, especially in tough economic times.  So then, the company needed a fresh way to appeal to the kids.  And that was, at least in part, Runaways.  It’s an open question whether or not Runaways succeeded in its primary goal, but the point became moot with the massive success of Marvel’s independently produced Iron Man film and its subsequent acquisition by Disney.  And regardless of the series’ place in the long term history of the industry, Runaways remains an excellent idea that was well executed by a pair of masters at the tops of their games.

So if Runaways was a move to recruit new fans, then Dark Avengers: Assemble is something totally different—a move to extract even more revenue from the industry’s core demographic, the overgrown fanboys.  Which is ironic in a way but not at all unentertaining.  It’s ironic because Dark Avengers was written by Marvel uber-scribe Brian Michael Bendis, a guy who made his name writing witty banter-based indies but now turns out volume after volume of the flagship company’s flagship products, each more action-based than the last. 

Well, we’ve come a long way since Who Killed Retro Girl?

But like I said, though I picked up Dark Avengers: Assemble because I was hoping for some of that old-time Bendis repartee, I enjoyed the book despite finding the actual dialogue ultimately uninspiring.  I’ve not kept up with recent events in the Marvel Universe, but the story here was still pretty easy to follow.  In the aftermath of an abortive invasion by a legion of alien Skrulls, S.H.I.E.L.D. grand-poobah and one-time Secretary of Defense Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) is fired by the President and replaced by the national political flavor of the month, Norman Osborn, the man who was once the super-villain The Green Goblin.  Which is brilliant plotting—at least from a business and marketing standpoint.  Because look: the story is intricate.  It involves several layers of Marvel B- and C-Listers, a fact that ultimately plays to the hardcore fanboys.  However, all of the major characters are either characters from classic mythology—like Ares, the Greek god of War and Morgan Le Fey, the arch-villain from the King Arthur mythos—or they’ve been in successful movies in the past five years—like both Stark and Osborne.  All of which means that even casual fans will understand and be able to follow the series’ central plot point, that the U.S. government is on the verge of being taken over by super-villains. 

Instant accessibility in a fundamentally hardcore title?  Brilliant!

The art in Dark Avengers: Assemble is about what you’d expect.  It’s done by Mike Deodato, whom I know primarily from his previous work on The Amazing Spider-Man, and it’s in the arch-superhero style.  All of the men are super-ripped weightlifter types, and all of the women are ultra-hot Barbies dressed in a super-tight bustier, corset, or deep-dipping V-fronted lingerie top ala Jennifer Lopez from the Oscars a few years ago.  And if that’s not enough, they also wear the kind of ass-hiking swimsuit bottoms that leave their butt-cheeks hanging out.  Not that that’s a bad thing.  It’s just a stylistic choice that I personally get tired of after awhile.

Anyway, I don’t know that I would recommend that you go out and actually buy either Runaways or Dark Avengers, but that’s mainly because comics are just so damned expensive these days.  For my money, I prefer novels because there’s more story per dollar spent.  With that said, both these books are easily worth your time, especially if you’re hankering for a superhero fix and can find them at your local library.  There may also be some online sources, but I’m not as familiar with those.  Still, Marvel at least used to have a pretty advanced online comic reader.  And surely somebody’s got an iPhone app for that, right?