Runaways vs. Runaways: Comparing the Newest Run to the Original

I’ve talked about it here before, but I just want to say it outright: Runaways is easily one of my favorite comics of all-time. I might even go as far as to say it’s #1 on my list, if I put more meticulous thought into those sorts of things.

Although, in the interest of full accuracy, series creator Brian K. Vaughn’s run was the part I’m referring to when I speak that highly of it. Joss Whedon’s follow-up story is close enough in quality that I don’t mind much. Everything after Whedon is where it gets rough, which is why I was a little hesitant when Marvel announced they’d be bringing the series back in 2015 under a new writer, Noelle Stevenson. The main series was essentially batting .500 on writers.

And then they announced that the return would be a part of the Battleworlds* stories, and that most of the cast would be unrelated to the original group. Could it recapture that original Runaways charm when it was a bunch of newbies dealing with a Dr. Doom-led Sky High-like institution instead of kids on the lam from supervillain parents? Could the characters recapture the likability of Nico, Victor, and the rest of the group**?

*For those not in the know, this was part of Marvel’s Secret Wars even. Long story short, the Marvel multiverse went through a weird “cosmic reshuffling”-type of event, with the end result being the company gave writers free reign to make stories up using whatever alternate universe characters or settings they could imagine.

**It seems we won’t be getting any more of the original team, either, which is a shame. But even worse is how most of the cast is under-utilized at the moment. Right now, I believe it’s basically just Nico on A-Force in the larger Marvel Universe. Victor showing up as a glorified cameo in the first issue of Nick Spencer’s Ant-Man: Second Chance Man is one of the greatest disappointments I’ve had, and in what is otherwise a great story. Maybe the inevitable next Young Avengers reboot could take some of them on?

I initially didn’t think I’d read it, but good word of mouth and my curiosity led to me picking up the trade paperback. Noelle Stevenson absolutely nails the tone, and even with the new cast, setting, and entire universe, it feels like a natural extension of the original story. There were even times where I forgot as I was reading it that it wasn’t related to the previous Runaways stories. It’s easy to get caught up in Stevenson’s brisk, fun pacing and artist Sanford Greene’s inviting stylized look.

This feels like the platonic idea of the concept of a spiritual successor. Stevenson does a great job of recapturing the youthful energy and rebellious spirit of the original with a similarly memorable cast, all while pushing her premise in unique ways. In fact, it feels like in every way that Stevenson could zig the way the original did, she zagged. Whereas the original Runaways were united in their home life, these ones are bound together by the other major setting for young-adult-based fiction, school. Where the originals were tightly bound and close together, this one is immediately split, with members staying behind or splitting up. Where the original group had treachery below the surface, this one makes it obvious right away.

The best distinction, though, comes with the choice of antagonist. The new version eschews the original’s kids vs. parents aesthetic not just by setting the conflict in a school, but by then making Valeria von Doom, Dr. Doom’s supergenius six-year-old, the acting headmaster and foil to the team. The villains are all just like the heroes, going through their own growth parallel to the heroes.

There are some differences between the two, and in the end, the original is still the best. Stevenson resists the short-hand of making the new team correspond directly to the old team, which is admirable and makes for a more interesting lead, but also means that she needs to set up even more characters*, as well as the much-stranger alternate universe the story takes place in. None of the characters quite get the focus the original sextet (or their later add-ons), and although they are still just as fun to watch bounce off each other, it still doesn’t feel like enough. Most of this can be blamed on the constraints of the larger event it took place in; the new team got four issues to the original’s eighteen (before its renewal). The new series needs one whole issue of setting everything up before it can get to the shocking twist in the second that forces the team in motion, something the original series could pull right away since it was on a fundamentally more recognizable Earth.

*There is some short-hand involved in Stevenson’s characterizations: all of the characters are versions of existing Marvel characters. But given that the main cast is a dozen-strong, that’s definitely understandable.

And really, that’s probably the greatest tragedy of the new series. I know I complained earlier about how the original Runaways would probably never get another series, but this team’s universe literally doesn’t exist anymore. Their story wrapped up (on a “the adventure continues!” sort of note, so sort of open-ended), but it felt like an amazing appetizer to a meal that won’t ever be arriving. There’s a great imaginativeness at play here that I wish could have been explored more, and I hope that Marvel can one day find some way to bring it back (although I wouldn’t hold my breath on that). All the same, I’ll take the brief brilliance in Volume 4 here over the drawn-out-but-wildly-inconsistent (at best) volume 3.

Super Smash Marvel Brawl: What Would the Third Super Smash Marvel Game's Roster Look Like?

We’re halfway through with the Smash Marvel series, so we might as well finish it off. In case you need to get caught up, here’s the original, and here’s the sequel.

First, the context we’ll be dealing with. In real life, Super Smash Bros Brawl in early 2008, the same year that the first Iron Man movie was released kickstarting the Marvel Cinematic Universe. My suspicion is that this would have had a small impact on the roster, but a definite one. I imagine there would be some extra consideration given to characters expected to be movie leads in the near future, as a way to help build them up (it also helps we’re starting to go a little deeper into the Marvel character list; without this, it might be a little harder to differentiate who would get preference). It’s also worth noting that, with a seven-year gap between games, there was actually time for new characters to be created and popularized in between installments, unlike between the first two.

Also, Smash Bros Brawl was where Nintendo began introducing third party characters to their roster, starting with Sonic the Hedgehog and Snake. I really struggled what to do with this information. In the end, I decided to ignore it, because there’s just not a particularly satisfying direct comparison, and there are still so many Marvel characters to choose from.

If you’re interested, though, I had a few attempts at mirroring this move. My first thought was to copy it literally, with other comic companies’ characters appearing. However, while that would be somewhat manageable for the two slots we’d need here, we’d be pushing it come the next installment. We’d need four (or five, depending on how well I kept my “no cutting characters” rule) different comics companies represented, and while we could do this* (say, Batman from DC, Spawn from Image, X-O Manowar from Valiant Comics, Hellboy from Dark Horse Comics, and Scott Pilgrim from Oni Press, for one set), no configuration feels like it has the same impact as “Sonic, Pac-Man, and Megaman” does. If you truly wanted to get characters that most people would know and not small cameos for hardcore comics geeks, you’d be better off sticking with to just picking DC characters; Justice League vs the Avengers gets a lot closer to that “Sonic vs. Mario” feel I’m aiming for. But again, you’d eventually be giving five to six slots out of about fifty just to DC characters to guest-star in what is ostensibly a Marvel fighting game. At that point, it feels like you might as well just make a straight-up “Marvel vs. DC” fighting game. And I thought about letting Marvel borrow other characters from within Disney, but they weren’t purchased until 2009 (and Star Wars, the Disney franchise that could most readily lend characters to this concept, wasn’t purchased until 2012). If you’d like, though, feel free to use any of those scenarios as the basis to your roster if these explanations aren’t doing it for you. 

Anyway, Smash Bros Brawl had 39 different playable characters (although several were combined into single characters, there were 39 distinct movesets). Of the 18 new characters (5 characters were cut from Melee), we had a good-character-to-evil-character breakdown of approximately 15:3 (I’m counting Wolf, King Dedede, and Wario, although I feel like you could argue with the status of the last two as well as Meta Knight). The gender makeup (which I’ve roughly matched so far as well) was 14 to 3 to 1 (ROB is a robot, so I guess genderless? Plus the Pokemon, which could be either, although I suppose all of the new additions have gender ratios that skew male, so summing those odds up probably comes out below 3…this is more complicated than I hoped). And lastly, one franchise (Pokemon) added four characters, but three of them were combined into one, plus they lost two representatives from the last game… These breakdowns seem to get more complicated with each game. I’ll try to keep each franchise to two representatives max, since there are so many mitigating factors there, although maybe there is a franchise that can justify four new representatives.

What Does Runaways Do Better Than Young Avengers?

I’ve been going through the backlog of comics I’ve been meaning to read lately, and I’ve hit a wealth of good stories in the process. So far, they’ve all been pretty great, but some have definitely been better than others. So, in my never ending quest to pick apart the things I like and figure out why I like them, I’m going to try and do that with two of the stories I’ve been reading.

Runaways and Young Avengers are thankfully two of the easiest comics to compare. The pair share a lot of themes-a group of superpowered teenagers brought together to combat the ills of the older generations-and even crossed over a few times. And as a heads up here, when I talk about the Young Avengers, I’m talking about the original run, written by Allan Heinberg in 2005 (I’m still working through Kieron Gillen’s 2013 run, which I may write about later).

In either case, upon finishing the first volume of Young Avengers, I was left feeling…a little empty, I suppose. It was a fine run, don’t get me wrong. But seeing it crossed-over with Runaways had me hoping that it was as good as the latter series, while it was…not quite. I would actually say that it was about on par with the crossover issues, which I had always found to be a little weaker than the main Runaways stories. Which made me wonder: where did Runaways go right, that took it from “pretty good” to “one of my favorite things that I’ve read”?