Comics You Should Own – ‘Young Avengers’ #1-15

Awww … it’s a love story!

Young Avengers by Kieron Gillen (writer), Jamie McKelvie (artist, issues #1-5, 7-15), Mike Norton (artist, issues #1-5, 8-10; inker, issues #11-13), Kate Brown (artist, issue #6), Emma Vieceli (artist, issue #14), Christian Ward (artist, issue #14), Annie Wu (artist, issue #14), Becky Cloonan (artist, issue #15), Ming Doyle (artist, issue #15), Joe Quinones (artist, issue #15), Kris Anka (inker, issue #11), Stephen Thompson (inker, issues #12-13), Matthew Wilson (colorist, issues #1-5, 7-15), Lee Loughridge (colorist, issue #14), Jordie Bellaire (colorist, issues #14-15), Maris Wicks (colorist, issue #15), and Clayton Cowles (letterer).

Published by Marvel, 15 issues (#1-15), cover dated March 2013 – March 2014.

Very few SPOILERS ahead, and, as always, you can click on the scans to giganticize them!

In the long history of comics, many older people (usually men) have tried their hand at writing teenagers, from Bob Haney doing ludicrous hipster dialogue in Teen Titans to Claremont giving us the angst-ridden, Magnum-watching New Mutants right on through to Vaughn taking the “evil parent” trope to its logical extreme in Runaways. One of the best is this gem from 2013, which was also written by an older man. Kieron Gillen, however, is still able to make the teenage experience come alive, despite being in his late 30s when he wrote this, and this ability is part of why Young Avengers is so good. Gillen is writing a coming-of-age story, essentially, and while those can be dicey, the fact that he disguises it as a Superhero Epic™ means that he can deal with the emotional stuff while still, you know, punching things. So that’s fun!

Gillen is building off the Heinberg/Cheung Young Avengers series, but the cool thing about this run is that you don’t have to have read the earlier run, or even have a lot of knowledge about it. There are some nods to it, of course, but Gillen isn’t beholden to it any more than he’s beholden to his work with Loki on Journey into Mystery, which also informs this run a bit. One thing that good writers in a shared superhero universe can do is fit in things from other titles without making readers run to those other books to find out what’s going on, and that’s what happens in Young Avengers. Toward the end, there are a LOT of guest stars – cameos, really. You could try to figure out who all of them are, but you don’t need to. Gillen fits them into the book well, and you can just go with it. Easy-peasy!

Gillen, as I’ve noted before, was much better with characterization than plotting early in his career, which is where Young Avengers fits on the timeline. He was getting better at it – JiM is plotted very well – but in this book, he gives us, essentially, one plot that he manages to stretch out over 13 issues (the final two are a “jam session” story celebrating the New Year). In issue #1, Hulkling (such a dumb superhero name!) is out superheroing even though, we’re told, he promised not to. When Wiccan (better, but still not great!) confronts him, Teddy tells him how lucky he is because his life is so full that he doesn’t need to be a superhero, but Teddy wants to be and Billy ought to as well. (The fact that they’re named “Bill” and “Ted” had to be deliberate by Heinberg, right?) Billy decides to make it up to Teddy in the most love-struck, teenage, idiotic way possible – by snatching Teddy’s mother from another dimension the moment before she’s killed and bringing her to ours, so Teddy can bond. Unfortunately … he really snagged a pan-dimensional creature that sits in wait for situations like this and then jumps in and takes over, which this “Mother” proceeds to do. Thirteen issues later, there’s a big fight. The End!

Obviously, there’s more to it than that, but the plot is really that simple. Gillen feints a bit by having a big MacGuffin play a part – in issue #6, Tommy – Wiccan’s brother – has a bit of an adventure with David Alleyne – Prodigy – and gets disappeared. The team spends some time trying to figure out what happened to him, but it’s just a way to keep away from Mother, and in the end, Gillen brings Tommy back in just about the dumbest way possible (it appears that Gillen had these issues plotted out beforehand, so it’s not like he just forgot about Tommy and then thought, “Oh, crap, I need to bring him back!” – he really did simply want Tommy to be a MacGuffin and he just brought him back because he wasn’t needed in that role anymore). Gillen just isn’t that terribly interested in a big complicated plot. He wants to write about young people on the cusp of adulthood and how scary that can be, so he comes up with a plot that helps that along. He understands that teenagers are just like adults, except they do everything at full volume, so while they struggle with a lot of things that adults struggle with, having them out in the open turns it slightly into melodrama (not to say that what teens struggle with isn’t important, just that it’s often in primary colors, so it feels more melodramatic). As superhero comics with adults are generally melodramatic, all Gillen has to do is write a superhero story and put teens in it, and it’s relatively realistic.

The main characters end up being Hulkling and Wiccan, as the major plot revolves around them, and Gillen does good work with them. He shows how much they love each other, and then, in issue #4, Loki brings up to Teddy the idea that Billy might be warping reality to make Teddy love him … inadvertently, of course. Gillen likes Loki, of course, and of course Loki is sort of the douchebag behind a lot of what happens in this book (not all of it, just some of it), so of course he’s going to sow chaos where he can. He doesn’t say that Billy is purposefully making Teddy love him, just that Billy isn’t schooled in the use of his powers, so he might be doing it and not know he’s doing it. Despite the fact that I don’t love Young Loki (or Young Hot Loki, which he (and then, still later, she) becomes), Gillen writes Manipulative Loki very well, so it’s just kind of an off-handed remark that drives a dagger into Teddy’s heart. It festers, and Teddy becomes a bit consumed with it. At the end of issue #8, David Alleyne kisses Teddy when they’re trapped together in Mother’s dimension, but he explains by saying that if they’re going to die, he wanted to know what it was like to kiss Teddy. Teddy tells David what he thinks about Billy to convince David that they’re not a perfect couple, and David tells him that if they get out of there, he should get some space from Billy to clear his head. This is terrible advice, as you can probably guess, but Billy understands. Teddy heads off to Texas and meets a therapist … who happens to be Leah, Loki’s bête noire. That can’t be good.

Leah, of course, lures Teddy into her “therapy” group and then delivers him to Mother. We also discover that Loki put the idea of getting a mother for Teddy into Billy’s head in the first place, because of course he did. The Young Avengers launch a rescue mission and save the day, but not before Teddy and Billy finally get back together, thanks in part to Prodigy. Teddy still has doubts, but David lays it all out for him:

Gillen has always done this well – given words to thoughts that make sense and push definitions forward. When Teddy finds Billy and tells him it was all Loki, Billy says, “So you think he was lying about us?” and Teddy responds, reasonably, “I don’t care if he was lying. We’re not.” In the end, that’s what matters, and Gillen understands that, so Teddy and Billy do. It’s a nice moment that allows Billy to have the strength to defeat Mother. All’s well that ends well!

The Teddy-Billy romance is the major through-line of the series, but it’s not the only important one. As this is a coming-of-age story (cleverly disguised as a Superhero Epic™), Gillen has many options to show people coming of age (which mitigates the more obnoxious aspects of the coming-of-age story, as the “life lessons” are spread out among many characters, making them a bit more subtle). In many ways, becoming an adult can be terrifying, and Gillen externalizes that with Mother and her control over the adults in this book, which scares our heroes deeply, to the extent that in the final battle, Kate Bishop worries out loud that she won’t be any good in the fight because she’s about to turn 21, a fact Mother points out in issue #9 (although Noh-varr points out that he’s already 21, and so we get Gillen pulling out the hoary “you’re only as old as you feel” kind of thing, which might be a cliché but works in this context because of what the kids have been going through). Adulthood, to children, means conformity – you’re slotted into a place and that’s your place, so of course someone like Mother will be able to control you, because your notions about the world have become preconceived. This inflexibility is contrasted with, say, Teddy, who can literally change shape (obviously, adult Skrulls can do this too, but they’re not in the book, are they?), or Loki, who moves magically from a younger kid to a hot teen during the course of the book. These kids are still figuring things out, so they do dumb things, sure, but they’re also more open to change. An adult would probably know better than to conjure up an alternate dimension mother for Teddy. Well … in superhero comics, maybe not, but Gillen is implying that adults – at least the adults in his comic – are more level-headed than that. But the adults would also not be able to understand the pain Teddy is going through or the love Billy has for him that makes him attempt it. Billy and Teddy love recklessly, which makes them occasionally foolish but also makes them more intimate with each other. Similarly, an adult David would probably suppress his desire to kiss Teddy, but that would also mean he’s suppressing his bisexuality, and while kissing Teddy is a foolish thing, it opens him up to the possibility of intimacy. In another contrast to Billy and Teddy, the first people we see in the series are Kate and Noh-varr, who are just beginning a fling. As Kate begins to get close to Noh-varr, he is unsure how to react, and when his exes return, he’s conflicted. Young people still do foolish things, after all, and instead of talking to Kate about it, he hides his contact with them, allows them to dictate how he looks (he shaves his beard), and in the middle of the big fight, he chooses Oubliette, even though, as he puts it, she’s “psychotic and immoral.” Of course, she’s also a figment of Loki/Leah’s imagination, which means he gets neither Oubliette or Kate, but that’s the price of being young – sometimes things just don’t work out even if you make an emotional leap. Noh-varr wasn’t mature enough to have an adult conversation with Kate, and so he lost her. Such is life.

Another aspect of growing up that Gillen examines is rebellion, which is twinned with the realization that adults aren’t always right. Understanding that adults are just as flawed as you are when you’re a kid can be a traumatic event, but it’s a necessary step along the path to becoming your own person. Gillen literalizes this, of course, and makes the adults under the mind-control of a parasite, but the point is still that the adults, even paragons like Captain America and Scarlet Witch, not to mention their own parents, are wrong. It strains credulity a bit that the Avengers, who are familiar with villains, would be so corrupted, but if we look at it as a metaphor, it becomes believable, as they’re still adults, so they don’t “get” the kids today. What this means, of course, is that the Young Avengers have to find their own way, grow up, and change, all without guidance, which is the only true way to do it anyway. That Mother is manipulating things means that the affected adults aren’t truly “bad,” the kids rebelling against them aren’t “bad” either, and Gillen doesn’t push the teenage rebellion aspect of the book, but it’s still there. By framing it as a “good” rebellion against “good” parents who simply don’t understand their kids, Gillen can show that teenage rebellion, while frustrating to the parents, is a necessary part of a kid becoming an adult. Even if the rebellion is mild, it’s simply a signpost on the journey. The kids in this series have to come to the realization that their parents are flawed, which is easy when they’re mind-controlled, but it’s still something they need to come to terms with. Ultimately, that will help them. Teddy doesn’t need a mother as he ages – he needs to discover who he is and how he fits into the world. So do the others. Gillen does some nice subtle things with regard to the kid/adult divide, too. Loki appears as a kid (and then a hot teen), but of course he’s an adult, and therefore the least trustworthy one in the group. He does try, but it gets back to the calcification of age – it’s hard for him to break any mold because he’s been playing the part for so long. It’s interesting that the other two slightly untrustworthy young people in the book – not villains, of course, but not exactly steadfast people – are Noh-varr and David Alleyne. Noh-varr is already 21, while David has a “real” job in the grown-up world. Noh-varr grows a beard, a symbol of adulthood, but he shows that he’s still conflicted about himself when he shaves it simply because a pretty girl mocked him for it. He’s not ready to become a fully-fledged adult, but he’s unable to return to the world of kid-dom. David isn’t a bad dude, but he does try to manipulate events a little, which feels like a more grown-up thing to do. Gillen doesn’t push this hard, but it’s an interesting theme hovering around the edges of the book.

While the main plot is fairly standard, it still zips along nicely, with some good twists and turns (although the maxim “Don’t trust Loki” should always be in the back of a reader’s mind when they’re reading a comic in which Loki appears), but it definitely wouldn’t work as well without McKelvie. Prior to this, McKelvie had done very good character work but he hadn’t had to tackle a great big superhero story, and when you tackle a great big superhero story, your action work needs to be on point and it wasn’t clear if McKelvie could handle that. He had drawn some action, but as we know, for a lot of artists, fluid action is the hardest thing to master, and McKelvie hadn’t shown it yet on the “big screen,” so to speak. His character work remains brilliant, of course. On the first three pages of the series, Kate Bishop wakes up in Noh-varr’s bed and McKelvie easily transitions from her confusion and wariness, to her curiosity, to her dismissiveness of the thought that she should “be ashamed” by what she’s done, to her sheer joy at realizing she’s in space, to her pensiveness about getting “everything [she’s] ever hoped for.” Gillen does good work with the words, of course, but McKelvie shows Kate’s emotional spectrum so wonderfully. As we move through issue #1, we see that McKelvie has gotten better at the fluid action that a great big superhero tale requires – Teddy’s brief fight with some thugs shows a nice mastery of motion and blocking. When America Chavez gets in a short fight with Loki, we see more of this – a slight softening of McKelvie’s thin line, a use of motion lines that helps move the action along, and a better command of moveable body parts that need to do unusual things in fights. McKelvie’s use of slightly heavier inks adds weight to his lines, which adds bulk to his characters, which makes their actions feel more physical, so that the fights become more physical by extension. The weightier, more fluid lines give us fight scenes that not only move well, but feel more real. McKelvie also figured out large crowd scenes, so the fights can be crowded without being overstuffed, and that comes in handy at the end of the first arc and at the end of the series, when a lot of characters are fighting and McKelvie needs to choreograph the entire thing. There’s never any confusion about what’s going on, which is always a good skill for an artist to possess.

More than even the dynamism of the characters or the rendering of their expressions and body language, however, is the way McKelvie tells the story. This is a masterclass in page design, from the flashiest moments to the quieter moments. It begins on pages 4-5 of issue #1, right after Kate’s appreciation of sex with Noh-varr. Gillen writes on page 3: “This is everything I always hoped for.” [Beat] “At which point the Skrulls attack.” It’s funny, sure, but the page turn gives us a beautiful breakdown of the fight without getting into it too much. McKelvie uses a bunch of small panels to show moments of the fight and how much Kate is enjoying it, and because it’s not really all that germane to the plot (it does come back around in later issues, but this moment is just to introduce the idea of Skrulls), there’s no reason to linger too long. We know the two heroes are going to win, and Gillen and McKelvie know we know it. Why draw it out when you can simply punctuate the highlights? This is also the last time we see Kate and Noh-varr until issue #4, so we need to have a powerful impression of them so we remember what they’ve been doing when they show up again (although Noh-varr does help with that regard in the fourth issue), and a staccato fight scene makes that impression. In issue #3, when Billy, Teddy, and Loki fight Laufey, McKelvie uses scattered panels in much the same fashion, to show brief moments of the fight, but it’s different in that the main image is Laufey swinging a large blade at the three of them and embedding it in the ground when he misses. The “force” of the blow causes the rest of the panels on the page to fly apart, adding to the motion, violence, and tension of the fight. McKelvie ends up doing this a lot – skewing panels to show the force of the action, and it always works well. When Teddy, Billy, Loki, and America are captured and taken to MJ’s nightclub (man, Mary Jane owned a nightclub once), Kate and Noh-varr leap in, and McKelvie gives us this tour-de-force:

This is not only a terrific way to condense a lot of action into two pages, but McKelvie and Gillen have some fun with it, too, with the key to the side explaining all the action. It’s part of the idea of not taking this too, too seriously – yes, it’s a superhero comic and yes, serious things are happening, but Gillen (and McKelvie too, it seems) is firmly in the camp of “superheroes should be fun, damn it!”, and this is an example of that. Right after that page, we get these two pages, which again gives us a nice vision of what McKelvie and Gillen are doing with this Superhero Epic™:

In issue #5, we get Loki trying a spell to banish Mother, and so he’s in the center of a pentagram in the middle of the page while circling around him are the other characters, fighting their own individual battles but always linked to the circle. In issues #8 and #9, the panels come alive to attack the group (part of another aspect of the art to which I’ll return). In issue #12, Primal fires bullets directly at the reader, but each bullet is a panel showing various moments in the big fight in Central Park. A few pages later, the panel borders are electricity crackling between Mother and Billy as they struggle across the dimension, each on the far sides of the page, while between them the rest of the cast battles it out. In superhero comics, artists should not only be able to draw good action, obviously, but also present the material in interesting ways, as most readers have seen slugfests before. McKelvie comes up with many different ways to show these fights, and it makes them more interesting.

As Mother is an interdimensional creature, there’s also a metatextual element to Gillen’s story, which he doesn’t push too hard until the very end. McKelvie does the heavy lifting with the cross-dimensional stuff and the “We’re in a comic!” aspect late in the series, and he’s excellent at all of it. He chooses to show that the kids are crossing dimensions, but they’re also in a comic book, which prepares readers for Billy’s “demiurge” stage at the end of the book. Mother’s home dimension is a blank slate, and she intrudes on the Marvel Universe by creating empty comic book panels that need to be filled:

When the characters are able to break out of their prisons, they escape the confines of the panels, and therefore the page itself:

In issue #7, when the team needs to cross dimensions, it turns out that America can do just that. The way McKelvie depicts it is wonderful:

America breaks the panel in which the characters are confined, and the team tumbles downward across the gutter space, which McKelvie expands, into the next dimension. Note, too, how McKelvie draws the characters as they “shatter”: Teddy is concerned that Billy is still with them, Loki is blasé about the entire thing, Noh-varr is joyous about the experience. McKelvie not only comes up with a nice stylistic way to show what’s going on, he doesn’t forget the details, either, which makes the scene richer. In issue #8, they stumble into Mother’s home dimension, and McKelvie does a nifty thing with the “prison panels” in one scene, showing Teddy in various stages of existence:

As the team attempts to flee, McKelvie brings in more of a metatextual element, as the panels themselves attack the characters:

In issue #9, we get this superb page, as Mother throws the full force of the “comic book page” into stopping the team’s attack on her:

Gillen leans into the metatextuality of the book at the beginning of issue #10, and McKelvie matches him nicely:

When Loki becomes Hot Teen Loki, McKelvie does a nice job showing the many aspects of the Trickster God and how painful such a transformation must be without making it horrific – it’s Loki sorting through, almost, his aspects as he’s been presented in comic books, and finding one that works:

Of course, when Billy becomes the demiurge, he becomes, in essence, the writer of the comic book. Gillen’s clever, of course, but it’s McKelvie that makes it work, with four pages of grandeur that I’m certainly not going to show here, because it’s far too much fun to discover them as you’re reading, but it shows an artist in complete command of his craft, with the cojones and wherewithal to make it sing. It’s the climax of the book, and it wouldn’t work quite as well without someone of McKelvie’s talent drawing it.

The work of Matthew Wilson, McKelvie’s usual colorist, cannot be overlooked, either. Wilson is an excellent colorist, especially for someone as sharp as McKelvie, as with precise artists, a brighter colorist can make the work feel too crisp. Wilson softens McKelvie’s lines just enough to create a superb mix of clean, rough art, making it more realistic. Wilson uses shading very well, and his smudging techniques in the weird dimensions the group travels to help show why they don’t want to hang out there. He adds texture to McKelvie’s crisp lines, and the result is a marvelous-looking comic. McKelvie and Wilson make a great team, as I’ve noted before, and nothing in this book disproves that notion.

Gillen and McKelvie told the story they wanted to, and it’s a terrific superhero story despite the lack of a superb plot. The plot, as I noted above, is perfectly fine, but Gillen isn’t all that interested in it – he’s much keener on how the characters evolve and react to each other rather than how they stomp the bad guy. His plotting had gotten better (as I also noted above, Journey into Mystery has a good, intricate plot), but this was something a bit different. It might not have worked in the long run, but for a year, it did, very well. Gillen didn’t create these characters or even make them popular, but he did a terrific job showing how they relate to each other and their world and how scary a time late adolescence can be, when the demands of adulthood come creeping in and the fear of “becoming your parents” starts to dig into your brain. Gillen shows beautifully why growing up doesn’t need to be a death sentence. This is a fun, beautifully drawn superhero story, and it’s well worth a read. Marvel has wisely collected the entire thing in both hardcover and softcover (I linked to the softcover below, because, obviously, it’s cheaper), although the letters pages are actually quite nice to read, so maybe they’re in the collection as well? Either way, it’s a very cool comic!

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