Runaways (v. 11): Homeschooling

Collects: Runaways v. 3 #11-4, What If the Runaways Became the Young Avengers? backups in five What If? stories (2009)

Released: March 2010 (Marvel)

Format: 136 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785140399

What is this?: The Runaways’ house is hit by a UFO, and Chase is reunited with his dead uncle.

The culprits: Kathryn Immonen (writer) and Sara Pichelli (artist) for the Runaways; C.B. Cebulski (writer) and Patrick Spaziante (penciler) for What If?

So my review of Runaways: Homeschooling was supposed to be written a few weeks ago, but writing the book took up a lot of time, and then my wife suggested we go to Harrisburg, Pa., to see Stephen Strasburg, the #1 draft pick in last year’s baseball draft, pitch for the AA Harrisburg Senators. That didn’t work out so well; rain delayed the game for two hours, and then Strasburg pitched only 2 1/3 innings before another rain delay forced him from the game. Big disappointment, and we didn’t get home until 5 in the morning.

So, as an awkward segue: Is Homeschooling, the latest volume about the team of unwilling teen superheroes, a disappointment as well?

On one hand, it would be hard to be a big a disappointment as Terry Moore and Humberto Ramos’s Dead Wrong, which left such a sour taste in my mouth that I skipped the next volume, Rock Zombies. (Thinly veiled Howard Stern with mind-control powers? Dear God no.) Writer Kathryn Immonen and artist Sara Pichelli definitely put together something better than Dead Wrong here. On the other hand, it’s definitely not up to Brian K. Vaughn’s run, but no one could expect that anyway.

Immonen seems to be able to get the characters right but not, particularly, the larger picture. The dialogue sounds right, as does the team’s floundering in a crisis situation. Molly seems to be a particular favorite for the writer, or maybe she’s just fun to write; she gets the best lines and the clearest moral sense. In particular, the dialogue between Chase and Molly about their transportation, the new Leap Frog, brought a smile to my face as well.

However, the plot takes weird turns. I don’t believe that Karolina’s grief over her lost girlfriend would cause her to a) want a prom or b) throw herself at a guy; I also don’t believe in Nico’s semi-random hookup. And the character death in the book was completely random — a unmanned drone accidentally dropping on a house will seem random no matter how well it’s set up, and this isn’t all that well set up. I’m also not sure I followed some of Nico’s spells, despite not having any trouble in previous books. (“Mood ring”? What did that do?)

On the other hand, Immonen introduces Chase’s uncle, Hunter. He’s a high-tech genius like Chase’s father, although intriguingly successful without being overtly supervilainous. And reintroducing family — especially family that Chase thinks is dead — brings up interesting character areas: do the Runaways trust Hunter because he’s family, or do they distrust him because he’s an adult? Does this alleviate any of Chase’s guilt? Is Hunter evil like Chase’s dad or relatively good-hearted like Chase? How is he still alive? Is he really Hunter, or is he an imposter, as Chase suggests at the beginning? Not all of these have to be answered, but some of them should. None are, not even partially. Instead, we get Hunter showing us how incompetent the kids are — even the tech-savvy Victor.

But like I said, it’s at least intriguing, and combined with Immonen’s command of the dialogue and characters, intriguing enough to cover for the odd twists of the plot. (Mostly.) But the story ends with a triple cliffhanger — just before the series was cancelled. The last issue came out fall 2009, and here we are in May 2010 … I understand Immonen probably had ideas of how to continue the story, but I don’t think she (or anyone else) will. Which makes Homeschooling, for plot purposes, useless.

I’m not a big fan of Pichelli’s artwork. This is personal preference, in part; the more overtly manga-influenced artists usually aren’t my cup of tea, especially when the characters seem to be embarrassed or dirty-nosed in nearly every panel. (Or perhaps careless with rouge.) In a practical sense, Pichelli seems to have made a conscious decision to make the teenagers have little personal space between them, especially Nico and Karolina. I can’t decide whether that’s a good idea; I suppose it mainly hinges on whether Karolina’s acting on her attraction to Nico. The storytelling #13 seem a bit muddled as well; from the destruction of the house and Nico’s “Abraham Lincoln” spell and the secret chambers, I had trouble telling exactly what was going on and where everything was supposed to be happening. Still, I have to reiterate: my opinion on Pichelli’s are is, even more than usual, personal preference.

What If the Runaways Became the Young Avengers? ran as a backup in several What If? issues released around the end of 2008, and I have to admit that C.B. Cebulski and Patrick Spaziante’s story doesn’t read like it had been broken up into five uneasy pieces for another “What If?” event. It also isn’t all that interesting, though; it’s mainly interesting if you had a hankering to see what Molly would look like a teenager. (Why is she a teenager? I don’t know.)

Like when Joss Whedon or Moore took over Runaways, I had high hopes for an Immonen run. There wasn’t a run, though, and this single volume isn’t really worth a look.

Rating: (1.5 of 5)

The Loners: The Secret Lives of Superheroes

Collects: Loners #1-6 (2007-8)

Released: February 2008 (Marvel)

Format: 144 pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 078512215X

When I bought The Loners: The Secret Lives of Superheroes, I had high hopes. Even halfway through, I thought, This could still work. But in the end, it all fell apart. Or maybe never came together. Either way, I wish there were more positives here.

The characters in The Loners (originally named "Excelsior") were brought together in the pages of Runaways, where they were the counterpoint to the Runaways: a group of young people with powers who had given up superheroing and were trying to get other young people to do the same. There are many ways you can go with this idea; trying to actively evangelize to different young heroes would have been my choice. (A "prison ministry" sort of thing might have been hilarious in the right hands.) Writer C.B. Cebulski went with the "superheroing as an addiction," and I can't deny that's a valid option. As shown in Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's perhaps a difficult one, but it could be done.

Or perhaps not; Cebulski doesn't succeed at all. Since addiction is an internal conflict, most of the group's fights are internal as well. Without an external threat, though, it makes the characters all look weak. Any temptation at all makes them fall off the normalcy wagon, except for Phil Urich (the heroic Green Goblin) and Mickey Musashi (Turbo), who are the leaders. (Neither has any powers without his equipment, and Phil's were destroyed during Onslaught.) Admittedly, there are a few fights with goons connected to a Fujikawa lab, but whenever that's going to get interesting, it's shuffled off stage.

I do like the characters. Most of them were assembled by Brian K. Vaughan, but that's all right. Phil, Mickey, Julie Power (Lightspeed of Power Pack), Chris Powell (Darkhawk), and Johnny Gallo (Ricochet) are B-list teen heroes from the Marvel stable, at least a decade removed from their heydays. Rick Jones, Marvel's ultimate sidekick and the group's putative sponsor and mentor, is nowhere to be seen, but Cebulski adds Mattie Franklin, the third Spider-Woman, which is a nice addition: when last seen, she had been drugged and abused by a bunch of punks, which should have colored her impression of the appropriateness of superheroics for teens. The mutant formerly known at Penance and a new Red Ronin are also dropped in, but they don't make much of an impression.

Despite knowing he had only six issues to work with, Cebulski resolutely refuses to wrap up any of his dangling plotlines, and with the series' relatively low sales, it's unlikely he'll get a chance. There's a couple of deals made with the Fujikawa goons that aren't revealed, and there's no indication what the lab's purpose was in the first place. Julie Powers's unregistered status and hinted at homosexuality are mere titillations, and the new characters are sort of vomited onto the page and are clarified only with great reluctance. Ricochet's motivation — guilt over not helping a friend on the mission that took his life — is brought up and dropped in the same issue. Mattie's mission within the group is resolved, but only if you know enough about the Marvel Universe to remember the last name of a hero in an ensemble book based on a forgotten Spider-Man crossover and canceled after 12 issues (Slingers).

The point the plot twists on — Phil's unresolved romantic feelings — aren't even hinted at, not even in the issue he narrates, until #5, when it springs fully grown from his imaginary goblin mask. Cebulski's mainly at fault here; I think he's aiming at a specific, new manifestation of Phil's Goblin madness, but it's impossible to tell, and Phil doesn't regain enough lucidity to let us know.

Artist Karl Moline can't escape blame completely, but there's only so much one person can do, and I suspect he might have been as surprised as the rest of us at Phil's change (especially after Phil had feelings for Penance — er, Hollow). I do like Moline's work, though, especially working with former Generation X character Penance. He manages to get a sense of Bachalo's cartoony style while grounding the rest of the characters in more realism. He does a good job with both conversation and action scenes, although I do have a complaint about the slight tarting up of Julie Power. (It just doesn't seem right to do that to a member of Power Pack.) Cover artist Jason Pearson gets on my nerves, however; his thick-lipped, mascara'd, and flat nosed (just Ricochet in his mask, on that one) style offends my aesthetic sensibilities, and I have no idea why he based the covers on posters from John Hughes movies (a connection I never would have gotten without Wikipedia).

There won't be a The Loners, v. 2. I might have wished for it to wrap up these plotlines, but I wouldn't have bought it anyway.

Rating: (1 of 5)