Young Allies, v. 1

Collects: Young Allies #1-6, Firestar (v. 2) #1, and the Gravity story from Age of Heroes #2 (2010-1)

Released: February 2011 (Marvel)

Format: 192 pages / color / $24.99 / ISBN: 9780785148685

What is this?: A bunch of young heroes loosely collaborate to battle the Bastards of Evil.

The culprits: Writer Sean McKeever and artists David Baldeón and Emma Rios

I was tempted, given my recent glowing review of Nomad, to give Young Allies a 4-of-5 rating and call it a day. After all, it has the same writer (Sean McKeever), the same artist (David Baldeón), and features one of the same characters (the eponymous Nomad). But unfortunately, Young Allies is not the unqualified success that Nomad was.

Young Allies is not quite a team book; as McKeever points out in his afterword, which serves as an epitaph for the series, the book was supposed to be an ensemble piece. A non-team, if you will. It was a way, according to McKeever, to set this book apart from other books. But ensemble books have to work hard to establish their own character, and in a book with Firestar, Nomad, Araña, Gravity, and a new Toro, there aren’t enough strong characters or interesting interactions to give the book a strong identity. Team-up books and books with rotating casts are hard sells these days without a strong brand identity. Even back when comics sold hundreds of thousands of copies per issue, the Defenders (the original non-team) survived on its strong central characters, endearing yet slightly creepy weirdness, and inertia. Young Allies has none of that. Maybe McKeever could have made it work; I would have liked to have seen him try. But none of these characters gave the series the oomph it needed.

The name didn’t help. The heroes aren’t officially ever called the “Young Allies,” but McKeever works hard in #5 to get the name to stick: Captain America compares the youngsters to the Young Allies he knew in World War II, and Nomad mentions founding a Young Allies team on her homeworld. And there is a bit of sense to it; the book does have a Toro and a (former) Bucky, just like the original Young Allies. But then you wonder what the rest of the group has to do with a team name that last had an ongoing series in 1946. Araña, who becomes Spider-Girl by the end of the book, is present because she’s friends with Nomad, but Firestar and Gravity … they have nothing to do with the Young Allies concept or even Toro, Nomad, or Spider-Girl. They’re in their own plotline, and it almost feels like they’re in their own book.

That’s the problem with Young Allies, I think. In Nomad, McKeever showed he had a handle on teenagers and high school, and in Gravity, he did a good job with a newbie college hero. But if Buffy the Vampire Slayer taught us anything, it’s that the problems (and metaphors) of high school aren’t the same as the problems (and metaphors) of college. Nomad and Araña, high schoolers both, feel like the central characters of the book. Certainly Nomad is the pivot the Young Allies name is supposed to turn on. But the problems and feel of this book is more collegiate, more Peter Parker in college than Peter Parker in high school. It doesn’t have that structure, that feeling of constriction that high school has. All the kids have freedom, which would play to Gravity and Firestar’s setup rather than the high schoolers’. But Firestar’s too wrapped up in her own problems of identity and recovering from cancer to add much to the ensemble, and Gravity’s sudden infatuation with Firestar (and his deep-seated desire for heroism) keep him from being very interesting.

I had trouble figuring out Gravity’s status quo at the beginning of the book. I’ve read his previous appearances in his own mini, Beyond!, and Fantastic Four: The New Fantastic Four. Still, I couldn’t figure out why he was in Wisconsin again at the beginning of the story (because McKeever, I suppose) or what his relationship status with Lauren, the girlfriend who meant so much to him in Gravity and Beyond!, was. Nor was I clear about when Araña and Nomad became crimefighting partners, although that was less important. The disappointing thing is that there are summaries of Gravity’s, Nomad’s, and Araña’s histories included in the book; unfortunately, they are at the end, where they aren’t obviously useful. If you want readers to know about the characters they’re going to be reading about, background information needs to be up front. The Firestar one-shot does a good job of setting up her status quo, though — so well the character background at the beginning of the issue is almost redundant. Almost. It’s still appreciated, although issue numbers would have been nice in all of the character summaries.

So, to sum up: McKeever has given us a book with an unclear and not quite compelling hook, with characters who aren’t quite strong enough to support a book. What does he do well, then?

The villains — the Bastards of Evil. Even beyond the name, they stand out. Second-generation supervillains with a different sensibility than their parents, the Bastards are easily the highlights of the book, and I wouldn’t mind seeing these characters (or the concept) brought back in some other seires. The bastards are just as prone to grandiose grandstanding as their forebears, but they are Internet savvy and have daddy issues. The Bastards are teens, and McKeever gives them the casual cruelty of teens — stereotypically so, at times. Their attitude toward technology and the world set them far enough apart from the rest of Marvel’s villains to give them a feeling of uniqueness and makes them a good foil for the Young Allies.

I praised David Baldeón’s work in Nomad, and it’s much the same here. The feel is a little different, though; for some reason, his art works better in a high-school book than with the freedom the characters in Young Allies possess. Perhaps it’s because the similarity of his facial types emphasized the conformity of high school in Nomad. Perhaps it’s because his characters have a restrained sexuality, which works well with high school students but not so well with Emma Frost — or college students, really. (My God — I can’t believe I’m complaining about a lack of cheesecake. This is a very sad day for me.) Still, he’s an excellent artist, able to handle conversation and action easily. I wasn’t blown away by his designs for the Bastards, but since he’s working from their parents’ design, I wasn’t expecting to be. I was disappointed that he contributed none of the covers, which were each in a very different style than his interiors. I really didn’t like Emma Rios’s art for the Firestar one-shot, but that might be my prejudice against manga-influenced art. Or it could be the faces — no matter how strong an artist’s storytelling chops are, looking at weird faces on every page eventually wears away the pleasure centers of my brain. It’s a problem with Frank Quitely for me, and Angelica’s widely set, dead eyes are the problem here.

I want to like Young Allies, but after setting aside the Bastards of Evil, I’m left with a feeling of absence, sensing a lack rather than a presence. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Perhaps the book is missing a heart, something that will take its not unpleasing parts and make them into a satisfying whole. Whatever the reason, though, Young Allies falls short.

Rating: (2 of 5)

Nomad: Girl without a World

Collects: Nomad #1-4 and a story from Captain America #600 (2009-10)

Released: March 2010 (Marvel)

Format: pages / color / $14.99 / ISBN: 9780785144199

What is this?: Captain America’s sidekick from the Heroes Reborn universe tries to fit into the normal Marvel Universe

The culprits: Writer Sean McKeever and artist David Baldeon

I’ve discussed Marvel’s lack of success with series starring newer characters and the relentless use of the same old concepts by Marvel and DC. Sometimes, however, reusing old ideas can win a deserving new character a series (or miniseries) that otherwise wouldn’t be published.

Take, for instance, Nomad: Girl without a World. “Superhero’s sidekick from a parallel world” is not a concept that sets fans’ hearts afire. It’s a workable idea, but any time you have parallel worlds or alternate universes or possible futures, readers drift away.

The character of Bucky (Rikki Barnes) from the Heroes Reborn universe isn’t one fans were clamoring to see more of. But given the popularity of Captain America around the time of the original’s “death,” writer Sean McKeever was given a chance to tell what happens when an alternate version of Captain America’s sidekick tries to fit into an entirely different world, one where “her” Cap has died and been replaced.

Bucky, who becomes Nomad early in Girl without a World, is not a McKeever creation. (You can tell because she has nothing to do with Wisconsin.) Instead, she is a Rob Liefeld and Jeph Loeb character, created for a maligned mid-‘90s event. She is the definition of a throw-away character; no one would have complained if she had never been seen again. But McKeever does the responsible thing and recycles the character here and in Young Allies. And he manages to tell an interesting story, one that is well constructed and enjoyable. I actually cared about Rikki by the end of Nomad. I want to know what happened to her next — although given the quick cancellation of Young Allies, I may be alone in that desire.

McKeever tells a simple story — one I could imagine seeing in Spider-Girl, or given the throwback villains, Nova (v. 1). Something strange is happening in Rikki’s school, as students from different social strata band together to impose their version of order on the school in the name of a school presidential candidate. Rikki investigates and finds far more than she bargained for.

McKeever does a good job isolating Rikki throughout the book. Her only friend in this world is John Barnes, the counterpart of her brother from the Heroes Reborn world. When she reaches out to make friends in the superhero community she is either rebuffed, as Black Widow does when Rikki tries to talk to the new Cap, or she can't seem to capitalize on her meetings with friendlier heroes, like Patriot and Falcon. Like most teenagers, she feels separate from everyone else, and her alternate-world origins give her a better reason than most; when she is separated from John, she feels completely alone. Her mysterious benefactor, who gives her the Nomad costume, and the mental manipulations of Nomad’s villain makes her think the adult world she’s trying to fit into is making all her decisions for her. The conflict between Nomad’s teen world and the adult she finds herself fighting her way into makes a good parallel to the student activism and teen suffrage subplots in the background.

Needles to say, I think McKeever does a great job with teenage heroes, and I think it’s a shame Young Allies was cancelled so quickly.

Nomad is not without its faults, of course. Flagsmasher shows up as a random villain, and even the footnote listing his recent appearances seems to say he’s a bit overused — he’s fought the Runaways, the Liberteens (in Avengers: The Initiative), and Araña. (Issue numbers would have been nice.) I doubt if any of those used Flagsmasher as anything but a throwaway villain; they could have fought anyone. A more serious complaint is that the death at the end of the story feels gratuitous; it’s a death meant to give the story an emotional punch it didn’t need or to get the character of Rikki out of a plot-related bind. Still, these are small complaints.

I enjoyed David Baldeón’s artwork. Really, it’s everything I could ask for from an artist. The teen characters aren’t oversexualized — or sexualized at all, really. Characters are easily distinguishable, despite the similar, almost uniform, facial shape his characters have. Action scenes are dynamic and easy to follow. There’s nothing bizarre to distract the eye or mind from the story. Baldeón’s pencils aren’t flashy, but I love them.

For some reason, Marvel published the Nomad TPB at an odd size. It’s not the standard trade paperback size, and it’s not as small as a digest book. Nomad is similar to those teen titles that Marvel reprinted as digests in the early 21st century (Runaways, Araña, Spider-Girl, etc.), but for some reason, Marvel chose to reprint Nomad at 8¾ x 5¾ inches. Had Marvel abandoned the digest size by the time it published Nomad in March 2010? The last non-Marvel Adventures digest I can find is Thor and the Warriors Four, which was published in October 2010; two Runaways volumes were also published as digests between Nomad’s publication in March 2010 and Warriors Four. So if digests were on their way out, why not choose to print Nomad at full trade paperback size (10 1/8 x 6½ inches)? The smaller size might be cheaper, but it surely ensured Nomad was more easily lost in the shuffle. (Nomad was already out of print by the end of 2011.)

McKeever’s grasp of what it’s like to be a teen is excellent, and the story is simple but satisfying. Baldeón’s art is perfect for the story. It’s a great book, if you can find it.

Rating: 5 of 5

The Quarter Bin: Nomad: Girl without a World

Trade paperbacks and — God forbid — hardbacks are a big risk; dropping $14.99 to $34.99 on material you’re not sure about can lead to buyer’s remorse and bitter, bitter recriminations. Why didn’t someone warn you that Captain America and the Falcon, v. 1: Two Americas was so bad? A sample would have warned you, but you had to order the whole thing.

Well, I’m not made of money either. So I’m trying out that sampling approach in The Quarter Bin. Recent comics that have lower promotional prices, are Free Comic Book Day giveaways, or I have found in that holy of holies, the Quarter Bin, get a quick review and a recommendation on whether it might be worthwhile to pick up the trade. So, without further ado, we have …

The Issue: Nomad: Girl without a World #1 (November 2009, Marvel)

The Culprits: Written by Sean McKeever, art by David Baldeon

The Hook: Rikki Barnes, Captain America’s sidekick from the Heroes Reborn universe, tries to adjust to high school life on a new planet in Marvel’s New York.

Collected in: Nomad: Girl without a World

Strengths: McKeever writes a simple, grounded story of heroics from an unpowered teenage hero with something to prove. The story charmingly starts with high school weirdness, then quickly dives into something much darker. Baldeon’s art is clear, attractive, and without any annoying tics; his Rikki looks like a high-school student instead of a pneumatic acrobat — helpfully played by the Black Widow. Nice cliffhanger.

Weaknesses: Potentially confusing backstory for the title character doesn’t really fit with high-school supervillain drama. The scene with Rikki and the Black Widow doesn’t quite work — the Black Widow’s desire to keep Rikki from the new Captain America feels strange. Rob Liefeld artwork on the title page. Gratuitous ass shot of the Black Widow.

Mitigation: Backstory is kept in the background, for the most part. Could be a payoff for the scene between Black Widow and Rikki later in the series. The Liefeld artwork is for just one page, and it makes Baldeon’s work look even better. Ass shot is only one panel.

Judgment: I’m definitely interested in this one. Make no mistake, Rikki’s background is a problem, but McKeever mentions it as little as possible while making sure readers know he still remembers it. Rikki is more down to earth than other Marvel heroes; she has no powers, only training, and it shows in her adventures, keeping her both a lovable underdog but not incapable of winning a fight. I’m eager to know what’s behind the sinister class elections — I’m betting on a junior varsity Hate Monger, but that’s just a guess. And the cliffhanger, in which it’s hinted Rikki might have an ally, is nice as well.

Hardcover, TPB, or Nothing? There’s no hardcover of this one, so that makes it easy: I’ll have to read the TPB.