Runaways: Teenage Wasteland

 

By Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona & Takeshi Miyazawa (Marvel Comics)
ISBN: 0-7851-1415-7

With the second collected edition (issues #7-12 — see the archives for previous tome) this title more readily shuffles into what’s left of the traditional Marvel Universe.

By way of recap: Six young kids who have nothing in common except that their parents hang out together are suddenly bosom buddies once they discover that those same adults are, in fact, a team of super-villains intent on world conquest. As all parents can’t be trusted anyway, the kids have no problem banding together to use the powers they didn’t know they had to bring them to justice. The evil adults have manipulative fingers in every pie, however. As the De Facto owners of the city of Los Angeles its takes little more than a phone call to perfectly frame the Runaways for kidnapping each other and for a particularly grisly murder.

As the kids find themselves a cool abandoned hide-out they rescue another boy with evil parents, only to fall foul of a timeless monster, and then do the classic Marvel Hero Dance, as super-heroes Cloak and Dagger first hunt (recruited by a cop in the pay of those ol’ evil parents to catch them), and then team up with them to stop said villains. Naturally, the parents brain-wipe the heroes as they go for reinforcements, otherwise the angst, soul searching, burgeoning hormones and infidelities, both real and imagined would promptly come to a premature close.

The teen market this is cynically aimed at doesn’t do solutions, it’s all about maintaining a constant level of social, sexual and physical tension, not to say jeopardy. This isn’t for you (possibly) or me (definitely), it’s for the same audiences that watch Neighbours, OC, Smallville and Hollyoaks, chockfull of whiny, precocious brats taking the puberty equals alienation theme to unequalled levels. The trick is simply to keep on going until you’re cancelled.

This isn’t to say that the series is without merit. Although the art is still too bland and nondescript for my tastes and the characters and plots seem pedestrian to me, maybe some of this is genuinely fresh to younger readers. Vaughan’s scripting is good, with some of the best dialogue I’ve seen outside of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV show, not comic, cartoon or movie) and there actually is potential for improvement. It just needs to escape its own ghetto and say something original.

© 2003 Marvel Characters Inc. All Rights Reserved.