Young Avengers Volume 2: Alternative Cultures Author: Visit Amazon's Kieron Gillen Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0785167099 | Format: EPUB
Young Avengers Volume 2: Alternative Cultures Description
About the Author
An award-winning critic and journalist, Kieron Gillen has written for organizations such as PC Gamer, The Guardian, Rock Paper Shotgun and Wired before turning his attention to comics. His previous writing credits include the critically lauded Phonogram, Thor, S.W.O.R.D. and Generation Hope. He has relaunched two longstanding Marvel series in Uncanny X-Men and Journey into Mystery.
- Series: Young Avengers (Book 2)
- Paperback: 112 pages
- Publisher: Marvel; First Edition edition (February 4, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0785167099
- ISBN-13: 978-0785167099
- Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 6.7 x 0.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Well, I guess this is a lesson in "be careful what you wish for." After the graphic novel collecting the Young Avengers storyline called The Children's Crusade, I said I hoped the powers-that-be at Marvel would lighten up on a bit of the Legacy aspect of the core characters and just let them have adventures that didn't hinge on who their parents/mentors were. The previous collection (Style/Substance) and this one have given me that ... and I find that I'm just not enjoying the story being told. There's something about the pacing that just feels off. In an industry where a monthly comic can be cancelled with no notice, where creative teams are dropped halfway through the multi-arc vision they have for a title, it seems to me that Kieron Gillen threw too much into the pot for this set of issues, and then forgot to stir. Instead of a direct follow-up to the cliffhanger of the previous storyline (as the back cover copy says, "The Young Avengers can't go home again or their parents will kill them. Literally."), we get a meandering story that introduces not one but two more potential Master Villains to the story (one at the very beginning, a wraith-like creature wearing the costume of former team member Patriot, and one at the end, the reveal of which I will not spoil here) on top of the two already established (The Mother Parasite and Kid Loki, who, let's face it, isn't fooling any readers with his "but I'm a good-guy now, sorta" facade). It feels a bit too much for a series only in the second half of the first year of a run ... not to mention a series that is trying to balance the personal history of characters who come from disparate backgrounds. The only original Young Avengers left on the team are Wiccan and Hulking; even Kate Bishop/Hawkeye was a later addition.
Young Avengers Volume 2 is more of the same from the first volume, which is a great thing as the first volume (album?) was so good. The YA have been chased away from Earth by Mother, and are pursuing Patriot (who’s not really Patriot) who’s leading them on a merry chase between dimensions after taking their friend. I pointed it out in my review of the first volume but I love that the story of this series is basically teens fighting with parents and then running away from home, a fairly universal and humdrum story, but blown up – or Marvel-ised – here because the teens are superheroes.
The art team of Jamie McKelvie, Mike Norton and Matthew Wilson, the band to Kieron Gillen’s vocals, continue their amazing work in this book and even step aside for the one issue drawn by Kate Brown. Multiverse travel is represented as characters crashing through one panel, cascading down like shards of glass featuring the characters, before re-emerging whole in the panel at the bottom of the page. This sequence continues the way they treated panels in the first volume where they were literally cages for the characters. Things get even more meta when Mother begins eating the dialogue boxes during her sections of the comic! And the title cards are awesome, alternately presented as report cards, menus, passports, and whatever’s relevant to that issue.
Gillen represents young people perfectly in this comic, superpowers or no. Prodigy (the mutant who absorbed everyone’s powers, then in the fallout of AVX, lost that power but retained all the knowledge) is working in a call centre, the quintessential 21st century young person’s job, while Gillen uses social media formats like Tumblr to represent and summarise the YA’s escapades.
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