Pick of the Week

October 8, 2003 – Runaways #7

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Story by Brian K. Vaughan
Art by Adrian Alphona
Inks by Craig Yeung
Colors by Brian Reber
Letters by Randy Gentille

Published by Marvel Comics | $2.50

I guess this is what they call a sleeper book. While Vaughan is generating most of his heat on the sublime Y: The Last Man, he’s quietly crafting another gem in Runaways. While it doesn’t carry the weight of his Vertigo book, Runaways is one of the most fun refreshing reads out there.

The basic premise isn’t all that unusual, but I don’t think it’s been done before. There are a bunch of rich kids in Los Angeles who find out that all their parents are a group of supervillains called The Pride. Hilarity ensues. Actually, what follows is a lot of confusion about how to handle the situation. At this point in the story, all the parents know that the kids know and they’re out to stop them. One way is to blame one of their children for a murder they committed, as well as a kidnapping, and put him on all the local news channels, prompting a statewide manhunt. That’s tough love.

The book is light fare, but Vaughan writes teens well and keeps the many characters separate. The parents are a little hokey in their supervillainy, but it feels almost right that they are. They could nearly be described as dastardly, and I think that’s how they are written. It’s also no mean feat at this time to create several new superheroes to roam the Marvel Universe, but I think Vaughan’s done an admirable job, and I actually care what happens to them, and very much want to know how they are going to get out of this pickle.

This book has a tendency to drop cultural references and jokes, and while it normally annoys me as pandering, I let it go in this book, since it feels fairly authentic. That’s another point for Vaughan.

Finally, it must be noted that Vaughan doesn’t abandon his tricks bag from Y in this series. Every single issue ends with a cliffhanger or unexpected turn of events. And somehow, just like in Y, it doesn’t feel cheap or gimmicky. It feels like good serial writing.

The art is very line and shape oriented, and is fairly stylistic, rather than realistic in it’s portrayal of the events. What Alphona seems to handle best is differentiating between all the characters, and really being quite good at drawing racial and hereditary differences between the characters. Very often artists have a hard time drawing characters of color and making them look any different than regular white people who are colored differently. Runaways does a very nice job with diversity. The panels are large and clean and the action is well depicted.

This book feels very much like what it felt like to be reading Thunderbolts all those years ago. There was a sense of fun, and a sense that this was something different, and for a good while, we had no idea where it was going. Those were good times, and they are here again in a way.

Josh Flanagan
Hates Pop Culture References
josh@ifanboy.com

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