Avengers Academy, v. 4: Second Semester

Collects: Avengers Academy #21-8 (2012)

Released: November 2012 (Marvel)

Format: 176 pages / color / $19.99 / ISBN: 9780785152033

What is this?: The Avengers Academy takes on new students, and the new student body has to deal with the X-Men, a Dire Wraith, the Runaways, and former young Initiative members.

The culprits: Writer Christos Gage and artists Sean Chen, Tom Raney, Tom Grummett, and Karl Moline

The first three volumes of Avengers Academy focused on a tight group of six students whom the Avengers suspected might become supervillains because Norman Osborn tortured them. Occasionally an issue’s focus drifted toward the students’ teachers, most notably longtime Avenger Hank Pym, and that was OK too; readers cared about the teachers because of their relationships to these fresh, young characters.

In Avengers Academy, v. 4: Second Semester, the school founded by Hank Pym opened its doors to new students. In theory, introducing new characters to the cast is a good idea, especially after one of the original six students left during Fear Itself: Avengers Academy. However, writer Christos Gage has included every young Marvel character created in the last fifteen years who wasn’t claimed by another book.

Well, it seems that way. The new students include Juston Seyfert and his Sentinel, the new Thundra, Ricochet, Whiz Kid, Spider-Girl, Machine Teen, the old Penance, the new Power Man, Butterball, Rocket Racer, even Batwing from Untold Tales of Spider-Man. I’m not sure what character could show “bottom of the barrel” more comprehensively than Batwing, who appeared in four issues of Kurt Busiek’s Untold Tales series, which was set in early Silver Age continuity, and an issue of Avengers: Initiative. We never learn why these characters are at the Academy or anything about them; they exist to fill out the background art.

However, despite the apparent cast of thousands, Gage focuses on three new characters: Lightspeed (Julie Power of Power Pack), X-23 (the female clone of Wolverine), and the newest White Tiger, Ava Ayala (not the old White Tiger, Hector Ayala, or the not old, not new White Tiger, Angela del Toro). Gage has a solid role for Lightspeed (teacher’s assistant), and X-23 is at the Academy to further her socialization. White Tiger, on the other hand, seems to have arrived to hassle Reptil, an original Academy student, about not being active in the Hispanic community.

Ideally, new characters should find a place to nestle in the cast, establishing their own niche or insinuating themselves inside pre-existing relationships to shake things up. Lightspeed is a great addition to the cast, a former team player, and Gage uses her sexual identity to allow her to relate to one of the established students. X-23 doesn’t get much time to show who she is, but Gage allows her and Mettle to discuss what it’s like to be a killer, and she’s tossed unwillingly into a love triangle. White Tiger does get a lot of time on the page, but Gage is less successful with her; she has a tragic origin and a Hispanic identity, but she’s not much more than that — we don’t even learn how she got her mystic amulet from her niece, Angela del Toro.

The team-vs.-team fights don’t help matters. Marvel Comics have had a template embedded into their DNA since Stan Lee crapped out the first superheroes after the Fantastic Four: heroes meet, fight, and then team up vs. the villain. Unfortunately, there are no villains to fight. The students in Second Semester fight the Avengers, X-Men, and Runaways, and somehow they avoid fighting former Initiative recruits when they show up. But there are no villains for them to team up and fight. The brief battles with other heroes wind down with a discussion by calmer heads, but discussions about the reasonableness of the other side’s point of view is not why I read comics. The lack of villains makes the heroes’ squabbles seem inconsequential.

Second Semester has only one fight with a villain. The entire student body battles a Dire Wraith hybrid; with the Wraith’s mind control, it’s a good fight, but one issue with a villain (two, if you count an issue of barely restrained scheming) out of eight is not enough. Gage tries to get the reader interested in the schemes of the future versions of the Academy’s original six students, but I’m not buying it. The future students are trying to bring about their nefarious (or not nefarious) future for mysterious reasons, but I have no criteria to judge that future on. Admittedly, one of the future versions tries to get Avengers Academy students killed, but that’s because the Wraith killed a lot of students in his timeline.

Gage is more successful with character development and humor. The guest stars get most of the good lines, but fortunately, he hasn’t lost his touch with his old characters. Hazmat and Mettle’s relationship progresses along expected lines, but they are sweet together, and the characters’ reasonableness means stupid misunderstandings are stumbling blocks rather than relationship breakers. Striker makes a big revelation, and even though I can see what Gage is aiming at, I’m not convinced previous characterization backs it up. Finesse and Reptil’s relationship is explored in the future but not much in the present, and Finesse finally meets Magneto, the man whose methods she wanted Quicksilver to teach her.

Second Semester has a ridiculous four pencilers for eight issues: Sean Chen (#21-2), Tom Raney (#23), Tom Grummett (#24-6), and Karl Moline (#27-8). I enjoy Chen’s clear, clean art, but Grummett’s is excellent as well; he has to do the bulk of the close-ups on the background characters, and he manages to differentiate them. Moline’s art has a loose, exaggerated style that looks nothing like the others’, and its incongruity makes it look worse than it actually is.

Although I still like the characters, Second Semester has to be considered a step down in quality. The book has too many characters without enough to do, and the plot puts too little external pressure on the characters to make them react in interesting ways. I hope the title will rebound, but since the extra students aren’t going anywhere, I have my doubts.

Rating: (2 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)