Reviews for "Young Avengers" 1, 2, Civil War (Complete series) and Black Summer (1-2)

I'm going to try to keep the spoilers minimal, but since I'm covering later issues you can obviously deduce some of what happens in the earlier ones.

My girlfriend bought Young Avengers for the Runaways cross-over so I got to read them for free, mooch that I am.  The story starts out with a new team of teens that each ape one of the Avengers.  By the second book they've established their own identity, and by the cross-over they're a solid team.  On the whole, I think the stories are good but not great.  The series has apparently been cancelled, I'd keep reading it if it hadn't been, but I'm not sure I'd buy it if I couldn't just mooch of my girlfriend's copies.

Part of my problem is that Runaways has covered this ground before, in fact some of the parallelism between the two series is erie.  That said, this parallelism is mocked during the cross-over, so points for that.  I quite like the art of the first two books.  I found the cross-over a bit too stylized and I think the character design of the Young Avengers particularly suffered.  I do like their character design once they've established their own identity, so that is a real loss.  Still, it was a great cross-over, lots of good battles against rather tough baddies.  That's an advantage of ensemble books I suppose, you can have chunks of the team go down when they're a bit outmatched.  [That said, the Runaways were basically charicatures of themselves, and thus fairly out of character.  Although perhaps less out of character than default for Civil War.  There's actually a funny line that notes some of the main Avengers were acting OOC.]

I think my main problem with runaways is that a solid ensemble book with some characters I rather like (Cassie and Billy notably although Eli has definite potential) isn't enough to sell me on a series.  I tend to either need a good political angle or a hook, (like Runaway's children of super-villains thing).   Also, Young Avengers has ton of tie-ins with the Marvel universe, and I just don't get most of those references.   That said, while I'm kinda bleh on Tommy, a later character, I don't think the series has an outstanding flaws.  Also, the comic has done a particularly good job of handling the Other.  For a detailed study on that ground, check out a guest column on Girls Read Comics by Todd Harper. While he's more taken by the series than I am, I don't think he oversells it at all, so if you're interested he'd be a valuable second perspective.

I haven't actually directly read many Civil War books and according to the Evil Avatar review of the last comic in the cross-over I still haven't.  I actually do want to read more of the cross-over at some point so I can do a proper critique of that series.  That said, the whole registration fight doesn't really resonate
with me.  Hell at this point I'd be happy if we effectively registered our military contractors in Iraq, let alone free-lance vigilantees.  Now if you want a real superhero civil war, read Black Summer.

Black Summer is an indie comic by Warren Ellis based roughly off our universe except with seven tech-based superheroes called the Seven Guns.  The core setup of the series is a massive spoiler but it's revealed nigh immediately so I'm just going to go with it.  For a single image summary of the setup check out the cover for the preview issue (warning, violent imagery and the NSA may not approve).
  In short, one of the superheros has killed President Bush in the lead-up to the to the 2006 election.  The preview issue / issue #0 is pretty dang short, but augmented by concept art and a good essay by Ellis.  The second issue is normal length and deals with the consequences, the military coming down on the rest of the superheroes hard and what they decide to do about it.  As the Evil Avatar review says "This is the ‘Superman rounds up all of the world’s nuclear weapons’ story cranked up to eleven."

This gets to a real Civil War story.  What happens when people, particularly people with a lot of power like super-heroes, decide that the government has gone rogue.  The guy that assassinates Bush in this series doesn't suspend the elections, but I'd still consider him to be way over the line.  But that's okay, he's not the protaganist, he's just the first shot.  The rest of the team have far fewer choices and don't have an easy way, short of surrender, to de-escalate from an outright war.   By the end of Issue 2 they've made an initial choice, I'm quite curious where it will go next.

This isn't just a thinker's series, there's a lot of action and some neat tech powers.  The artwork is middling but assists the storytelling rather than getting in the way, which is key.  If you like political allegory in your comics and aren't holding out for the trade paperback, I'm not sure how you could not be reading this.

[Update: Added note that in the cross-over the Runaways were definitely out of character.  Less of a problem if you're reading YA for its own sake, but it is if you're a Runaways like I've advised you to be.]