Well, I’ve been sending out e-mails to library staff trying to drum up support for our winter reading club blog, and I realized the only decent thing to do if I want to put my money where my mouth is, would be to lend some support to the library’s other blog: Wanderer on the Web. So here we go.
Look, it’s true—I’ll be thirty years old in 2008, but I never outgrew comic books. In fact, in all truth, I actually appreciate them more as an adult, though I’m a good deal more discriminating than I was when I was a kid. You can only read so many stories about superpowered people in spandex before you start to feel like, “Show me something different, already.”
Fortunately, as I’ve grown up, Western comic books, themselves, have grown up right along with me—almost to the point where they’re not meant for kids at all anymore (but that’s a topic for another day). Still, straight-forward superheroics don’t in general ring my bell the way they used to.
That being said, I try to keep up with the general goings-on within the major superhero universes, and the library’s graphic novel collection has been a great resource for me in that respect. Case in point, a few weeks ago I was downstairs in the technical processing room and saw Young Avengers: Sidekicks and Young Avengers: Family Matters just waiting to enter circulation, so I placed my holds and later checked them out.
This is a strange series in some ways. It’s the brain child of a television writer lured in by Marvel Comics owing to his day job on the writing staff of “The O.C.”. The characters are all originals—though patterned off of existing characters. Sort of teenage versions of the Marvel flagship characters, Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, and Thor. Something like this would fit right in at DC Comics where teen sidekicks have been the norm ever since the debut of Robin, Boy Wonder, back in 1940, but Marvel have typically eschewed that route.
To be sure, none of these characters is actually a bona fide sidekick, and to be doubly sure, an aspect of the series hook is that the big name heroes from which the protagonists draw their inspiration actually don’t seem to want them.
Alan Heinberg’s dialogue is very snarky and youth friendly—though the initial issues sort of straddled the fine line of cliché in that respect—and the narrative embraces tried-and-true themes of isolation, rebellion, being different and misunderstood…so it’s pretty much what you would expect from a concept intended for a teenage audience.
Heinberg’s writing style proved to be a good fit to this Young Avengers property, and yet, it is difficult to unequivocally commend this to the younger audience owing to inextricable tie-ins to pre-existing continuity, some of which reach back well into the 1980s. Actually, make that the 1960s, since modern readers are unlikely to know very much about Captain Marvel, the specter of whom lingers over at least part of the second volume, Family Matters.
If I’m not mistaken, these two trade paperbacks contain together the entirety of the Young Avengers series, and I’m not sure if it was discontinued because it wasn’t catching on, or if Heinberg’s other commitments simply made it impossible for him to keep to a regular schedule. I think this series probably deserved a wider readership, but at the moment, Young Avengers stands as something of a minor blip upon the Marvel Universe. An interesting experiment at expanding the brand, but ultimately, it left behind little of consequence.
Still, worth a look.
