Young Avengers | Sidekicks | Volume 1
This is actually a newish book (compared to the average age of the books reviewed on Splash Panel). Yes it’s a traditional superhero book from Marvel but honestly that’s not such a bad thing, mainly due to the creative team involved. When this was originally announced something like a year and a half ago, I was one of the skeptics. I heard the hyperbole that Joe Quesada threw my way. It’s not something I’ve never heard before:
“This is the best thing that we’ve ever published, blah blah blah”
He didn’t actually use those words but something along those lines.
Have I every read or bought a single Avengers book? I’ve only ever bought an Avengers storyline once before, the excellent Avengers Forever, but that was exclusively because I love the work of Carlos Pacheco (forget the fact that the story was actually pretty good fun as well). I’m honestly not interested in the characters, not interested in the idea, and the fact that they’re called Avengers always rubbed be the wrong way, I’m obviously missing something here, what the hell are they actually avenging? The people that have been done wrong? I dunno whatever. No the main draw for me again was the artist, Jim Cheung.
I know it sounds strange but I usually never buy a GN based on the artist. I’ll have to make sure that the artist and the writer are both of a certain pedigree and buy accordingly. I don’t follow characters, I follow creators. Even after reading the story and thourghly enjoying it Jim Cheung is still the star of the show. His artwork never misses a beat. It’s crisp it’s clean and it’s actually miles greater than his stuff at Crossgen, and leagues infront of his stuff at Marvel before then. He’s seriously come into his own and his character designs are actually very well thought out.
The story is set after some Avengers ‘Event’ where the mansion is destroyed (honestly I have no idea what happened, I’m reading this for the first time as well). To fill in that void 4 youths, looking or dressed like mini-Avengers come onto the scene and effectively screw things up, after all they are pretty young. Jessica Jones (from Alias, she played a private eye in that series, which I’ll be reviewing in the future) is asked by her current employer JJJameson to go out and find out who the hell they are. Seems Captain America and Iron Man have the same idea so they enlist her help as well. These ‘Young Avengers’ are not who we think they are, nor is it simple how they came about to be.
You might not have heard of Allan Heinberg, he’s one of the writers for the O.C and Sex In the City. So for his first story in the land of sequential storytelling he provides us with Young Avengers. Is Young Avengers thought provoking? Not really no. I don’t think it’s meant to be thought provoking but one thing I will say is that it was very gripping from one chapter to the next. I can imagine how long a month must have felt to people reading this on a monthly basis as the issue endings always made you want to turn that page right now.
Another one of Allan’s strengths was his dialogue. Each character’s voice comes across very clearly. It’s a difficult thing to do on a team book, giving each character enough lines and dialogue to give them a rounded opinion of them, however he achieves it in the 6 issues that are collected in this opening storyline. He does falter in certain areas, notably one of the love interests just comes out of nowhere.
What I found great was that each issue built on the momentum of the issue that came before it. I kept wanting to finish this book and see where this was all going. In addition to that there were a couple of moments that even in my lack of Marvel-zombie nature was able to see how nice and neatly he was combining things.