Runaways

Well, after leaving the Trade Books (including the big hardbound of Vol 1-3) of Runaways sitting around for a month or so with a busy life, I've finally taken the time to read them. I have to say, that they are as good as I've heard. Interesting characters and intereactions. The Pride themselves are a bit wooden (how many shadowy take over the world groups do we really need, anyway?), but the characters are pretty good.

That said, it in a way shows something that I'm not always terribly pleased with in comic books recently (and overall in our culture). There's the constant drive and desire to rip apart, to tear down. Most of all, the ongoing concept that "innocence" is to be discarded as something that is worthless.

Now, my beef is not so much in terms of the main characters themselves (though the book is a bit post-modern for my taste, it's not bad, but isn't in my top 10 list either). The place where it really struck me was when "Excelsior" showed up, and you have this "intervention group" of former teen heros. The appearance of Julie Power (Lightspeed) was more than a little bit grating. The author either had never read Power Pack, or more likely, despised it. In one page, he managed to piss all over the book, and try to bury it. The charm and fun of that book was the innocence. A wide eyed sense of adventure and looking at the world. New York may be a nasty place at times, but they survived it. Sure, they were siblings, and they had spats and problems.

Suddenly, the entire run of the book gets reduced to being nothing more than an excuse for the most together character of the four kids to have years of therapy. She's so badly out of character for what Julie was (or any of them really) it's not even funny. Yet, of course, you cannot have books about innocence, because that's not hip, or cool, or post-modern. Innocence is something that is to be driven from our world, mocked with a post ironic sneer, and discarded like yesterday's sushi.

I'm not saying that Julie shouldn't grow up, of course she should. Indeed, if you really know Power Pack, you know that she was growing up in a very certain direction. In one page, they destroyed that, and just piled offal on the memory of the book. At least she still retained a bit of book-geekiness in the end. That's something.