Young Avengers #1, Gillen

[bethbethbeth]

Kieron Gillen as a comics writer is a bit hit or miss for me. Despite liking him a great deal as his real world self (blog entries, podcast interviews, Q&A's at ComicCon), I love some of his comics writing (the Kid!Loki run of Journey Into Mystery, for example), but am left fairly cold by some of his other work (I tried with the current run of Iron Man, but...it ended up kind of boring me and I abandoned it).

However!

A few months ago, I read the main series of Allan Heinberg's 2005 Young Avengers and fell in love with these [mostly] super-powered teenagers who stepped in to fill the hero void left by the adult Avengers in the wake of Marvel's "Disassembled" storyline.

When a new run of Young Avengers was announced - to be written by Gillen - I was cautiously optimistic.

It's...good.

Not perfect, but I really enjoyed the first issue, although I have to admit, the final - creepy - image at the end of the issue was a little depressing. :(

The new run brings together a slightly different group of kids than in the original series (actually, I suppose they're technically adults now, since most of them are 18):

Kate Bishop (who I adore in Matt Fraction's Hawkeye) still has no superpowers, still possesses phenomenal aim, and is a complete badass. The issue starts with Kate waking up from...okay, from a one night stand with a guy whose name she doesn't quite remember, and yet there's no "slut shaming" within the story itself (I actually hate that phrase, so I'm not sure why I just used it). She's just...a young woman who had a great night of sex with an incredibly hot guy and now is trying to figure out what to do next.

"Next" isn't such an easy decision to make. She can't just leave because, as she discovers, they're in outer space! And the guy is one of her soon-to-be-teammates: Noh-Varr (an alien, but one who's really, really into close harmony girl groups from the sixties *g*)

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Then there's Teddy Altman (Hulkling) and Billy Kaplan (Wiccan). Teddy has an alien background, Billy has a super-powered human background, they're both super adorable, and they're in love.

Just look at them:



See? So adorable.

*

I loved both the first two story lines, but surprisingly enough I was not as enamored with Kid!Loki, despite loving him in Gillen's Journey into Mystery - and not-as-surprising, I also didn't immediately fall for America Chavez (Miss America) who's a brand new character to me (I didn't read her first 2011 appearance in Vengeance and I thought she wasn't really fleshed out here by Gillen)

Despite not being instantly taken by 1/3 of the current Young Avengers line-up, I'm really happy with the start of this run, and I'm definitely planning to continue reading it.

Have you folks read issue one? What do you think of it?

Comments

[mad_maudlin]

I kind of get the impression that Gillen had to choose between the full Teddy/Billy talk and more panels for America, and chose the boys. Which makes sense--it's important for us to understand that Billy's heart is in the right place when he does ridiculous things like raise the dead in his bedroom (because OH BILLY NO) whereas I'm not sure America really needed to be in this issue at all, except to establish her as part of the ensemble (and give Loki something to do besides...whatever he was doing with the talking breakfast sausage).

Are you on Tumblr at all? Because when the preview pages of Kate and Noh-Varr were released, I saw a lot of wanky comments, including some fabulous "I'm not slut-shaming but KATE WOULD NEVER EVER HAVE SEX SHE IS A GOOD PERSON YOU BASTARD." So I think it's good that Gillen flagged that, especially with her canonical backstory as a rape survivor.

[deleonjh]

I sincerely hope the rape origin story will never be mentioned ever again in the history of the universe. Why couldn't Kate have just been some awesome chick who wanted to fight crime?