By Brian K Vaughan, Adrian Alphona & Craig Yeung (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-1705-6
I’m warming at last to this series about a gang of Los Angeles kids who discover their parents are a cabal of murdering super-villains bent on World Domination. At the close of the previous volume the kids lost one of their own but actually ended their parent’s plans, freeing the city from years of unconscious servitude and sending the villainous Pride to jail.
This book (collecting volume 2, issues #1-6 of the Marvel comic-book series) takes up the saga a few months later. The kids are back on the streets again having escaped from various Social Services institutions, preferring their own company to a life in “The System.” Their other reason for staying together is more worthy.
When The Pride ran LA, other villains, monsters and super-freaks kept clear. Since their incarceration the city has been plagued by the kind of scum that make New York such a weird, wild place. As the kids are unwittingly responsible for the super-criminal invasion of their turf, it’s up to them to end it…
There’s also a new recruit whose dad is one of the worst menaces of the Marvel universe, a killer time-travel sub-plot and a lot of very impressive guest-stars in this story which solidly carves a place for the kids in the greater company continuity plus a sense of undercurrent that (for me, at least) has been missing from the previous, rather superficial volumes.
Witty and well-scripted, there’s a lot worth looking at here, but I still prefer to read a full sized edition rather than these pokey little digest books. I should have bought the UK edition. Perhaps I will when – not if – I want to read it again
© 2005 Marvel Characters Inc. All Rights Reserved.