Young Avengers by Gillen & McKelvie: The Complete Collection
By Kieron Gillen and Jamie
McKelvie
Marvel, 2020

There is a moment, three pages into Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Young Avengers, that serves as a kind of mission statement for everything that follows. Kate Bishop, the teenage superhero known as Hawkeye, wakes up in someone else’s bed. While her erstwhile partner from the night before, the interdimensional Kree hybrid Marvel Boy, emerges from the shower and starts dancing to an old Ronettes record, Kate gazes out the window onto a vista of the planet earth below, and gives us her thoughts in the form of caption boxes: “I lie in the strange bed and watch this beautiful alien boy dance to the music my parents loved, and think…this is everything I ever hoped for. At which point the Skrulls attack.” It’s a clever, stylish, deliberately sexy opening that tells you everything you need to know about this iteration of the comic franchise, now somewhat belatedly available in a Complete Collection paperback: these aren’t your dad’s Avengers.

Some history is in order. In 2005, Marvel Comics was in the midst of a concerted, and seemingly quixotic, effort to turn the Avengers into the company-wide flagship franchise they seemingly always ought to have been. While the main Avengers team was temporarily disassembled in preparation for a reboot, a spinoff team of youthful counterparts was assembled to filled to void, effectively a New Teen Titans to Marvel’s ersatz Justice League: along with utterly compelling breakout star Kate Bishop (assuming the Hawkeye moniker while original item Clint Barton was dead for the moment) there was Patriot, grandson of the original African American recipient of Captain America’s super soldier serum; Stature, daughter of Ant-Man with the same power set; a teenage version of the android Vision; and Hulkling and Wiccan, a shape-changing alien prince and spell-casting reality warper who also, quite incidentally, happened to be gay and dating. Under the pen of TV writer Allan Heinberg (late of The OC, Gilmore Girls, and Grey’s Anatomy), the series addictively captured soap opera dynamics of the classic Wolfman/Perez New Teen Titans or Chris Claremont’s New Mutants. And what’s more, it did the almost impossible: created a modern, diverse cast in a way that felt entirely natural rather than desperate or pandering. Fans couldn’t wait for more.

And they waited. And waited. And by the time the Heinberg era finally sputtered out after a full decade of delays and declining returns, the entire endeavor seemed to have lost most of its youthful luster. Enter Gillen and McKelvie, a writer/artist duo coming off a string of fan favorite series both together and apart, and tasked with a mission to reconceptualize the Young Avengers for a new era. And from that opening sequence, it’s clear that their version of the team will be a beast of a very different nature. In place of the groping, starry-eyed kids of Heinberg’s series, Gillen gives us a gang of self-consciously knowledgable teenagers working mightily to live and act like full-fledged grownups. So it’s appropriate enough that the team is brought back together by a menace that threatens to lurch them back into childhood, as the adults of the world become seemingly possessed by a weird and malevolent paranormal entity.

It’s a simple enough plot with perhaps too easy a metaphor, but it comes with two saving graces. The first is McKelvie’s stunning artwork, with its bold, clearly-delineated lines and impeccable instinct for visual storytelling. The second is Gillen’s flair for complex, twisting narratives that let each issue add layers of complexity and complication to the ones before. What begins as a simple kids-vs.-parents conflict becomes a romp through multiple dimensions, prodded along by the the Norse trickster god Loki (presently de-aged to adolescence, and himself the protagonist of an all-time classic run by Gillen to which this is something of a post-script). Looming over everything is the enigmatic Tic-Tock Man. Who he is remains a mystery until the end (and perhaps even afterward), but what he really represents is the passage of time hovering on the periphery of every moment in these teenage lives.

And, indeed, the threat of adulthood is the real villain here, as each of the characters bungles into mistaken attempts to be as sophisticated and emotional as the grownups they imagine they ought to be. Wiccan and Hulkling, thrown for a loop by the wildcard addition of new (and appealing) teammate prodigy, split up and try to move past their youthful romance. Marvel Boy keeps an aloof distance from Hawkeye while he chases after hipster credibility. The only members who seem to have their heads firmly on their shoulders are the women of the group, especially new team leader Ms. America Chavez, a cool, experienced interdimensional traveler who joins Hawkeye in rolling her eyes at the self-destructive antics of her male compatriots. She alone has figured out what the rest of the team has yet to discover: no one was ever cool who had to work for it.

Gillen is a formalist at heart, fascinated to the point of obsession with the rules and conventions of the comic book form, and some of the series’ most impressive moments occur when he and McKelvie let themselves run wild breaking and exposing the rules of comic storytelling. Each issue includes one set-piece double page spread showcasing McKelvie’s artwork in some unexpected, eye-catching form: at one point, Wiccan and Loki scale up and down empty panel borders, snaking their way to the next page turn. At another, the story breaks for a multi-colored social network diagram of every teen superhero friendship in the Marvel Universe. It would all come off a little twee if it weren’t so gorgeous, and if it weren’t balanced out by the convincingly charming dialogue and emotive visual expressions that the creators bring to each of these characters.

It’s an oddly endearing mixture, this obsession with cool and concern with teenage emotion, and it ends the way every teen drama should: at a dance. For once, each of the heroes is able to put down their armor, forget about their image, and for a brief moment just be kids again. They finally get it, and so do we. Everyone grows up so fast.

—Zach Rabiroff is a writer on prose and comics whose work has appeared in Open Letters Review and Xavierfiles.com. His column about Marvel Comics can currently be found at Comicsbookcase.com.