Teen Heroes and the Civil War Part 3

[darkblade]

So last time we left the two groups of young people about to do battle with Marvel Boy and Xavin with a snapped neck which was stupid. I’m surprised it wasn’t pointed out last time but they expected us to feel any kind of surprise or tension when Marvel Boy snapped Xavin’s neck. He’s a Skrull, you know a shape shifter. A Snapped neck is like an inconvenience to them and they expect us to buy this was legitimate danger, and that Marvel Boy a war hardened Kree who has spent his life before coming to our universe fighting Skrull would be dumb enough to do that to one and stop thinking of it as a threat. My brain hurts.



Anyways, the Young Avengers and the Runaways fight him and get their asses kicked until Vision tries something.





If you listen carefully you can here Geoff Johns squeezing at the severed arm.

So yeah, that doesn’t really work. He continues kicking their collective asses.




Including a rather pathetic portrayal of Nico.




Fun fact I just checked my Runaways trades, those were all the directly offensive spells she used up to this point on screen (not counting her Mystic Arcana story but that sucked too). It boggles the mind that the ever most basic “magic missile”, “fireball” and “lightning bolt” never crossed her mind, ever. Mental note, should I ever have the honour of writing for Runaways, have Victor suggest getting Nico a D&D Players Handbook for spell ideas.

I even forgot to mention that her magic doesn’t work that way. When she reuses a spell word it does something random, not nothing. Between this and the author’s portrayal of Billy I think he just has it out for Spellcasters.

A bit later Marvel Boy gets picked up by the ship that drops him along with Xavin, Klarolina, Billy and Teddy (Bill and Ted...I just got that). Nothing unfortunate about all four LGBT characters getting kidnapped and the man doing so saying since ¾ of them are aliens they have no legal rights (even though two of them are American Citizens and didn’t know they were aliens until recently).




Yeah nothing unfortunate there at all. Then again I want you to stop and think for a second. Does Marvel have a single same sex pairing in which at least one partner is not a mutant or an alien? For the life of me I can’t think of any and it is kind of depressing.

Anyways back to the story.








You know what? Screw you Chase! This whole damn event would have been better if it was nothing but Molly and Speed playing around.




And the mandatory diagonal heroic group shot.

So the issue opens with them screwing up Wiccan’s powers.




Billy really has it rough, being taken out so he can’t be a deus exit machina in fights, not being allowed to touch his boyfriend on panel and having writers really screw up how his magic works.




I kind of have to admit, the interaction here isn’t all that bad. It’s nothing special but compares to the rest of the event it is really good. That said I don’t think reptiles mark their territory and Old Lace is female.

So Vision give Nico some Latin to use as a spell to break into the prison where their friends are being held, since this version of Nico is painfully incompetent.




Why couldn’t she just say “excavating monster”? She never said that one on panel and well the Runaways usually don’t want to destroy whole buildings like this so I doubt it ever came up off panel.

That is enough painful mistreatment of magic. Let’s go back to the mistreatment of LGBT aliens...and Billy. Damnit this book is magicist. This person should be writing Iron Man or Fantastic Four. Something super techy away from teenagers and magic which they frankly suck at. That’s the beauty of the superhero genre. It is every genre rolled into one you don’t have to write the parts of it you don’t like or just plain suck at.




Yeah nothing to say there. Really no one should be surprised that the shapeshifting skrull survived a broken neck and the characters should all feel ashamed for even thinking he might be seriously hurt.




Yeah I’m not going to start another killing and vigilante morality argument here, moving on.




You go Chase! You da man! You tell the super fast, super strong, super tough killing machine to leave Molly alone. Yeah that’ll work.

I only have two pages left so to sum this up. Vision fuses with Chase to save his ass right there and then...




Well that went surprisingly well.
So in the aftermath all is well and our teams are reunited and we get a second annoying title drop.




Wait a second? In that first panel there was that? No it couldn’t be.




I’m not quite sure. A little closer maybe.




It is! We have actual physical contact between Wiccan and Hulkling on panel! Hallelujah! It’s even more beautiful than I imagined.

So thats it for their official tie-in. The Runaways have no further ties to this event beyond the last two pages of Vaughn’s run where they get attacked by Iron Man and some Cape killers but well I have the Vaughn run in the Digest Trades and those are not scanner friendly and technically it was after the event so yeah.

The Young Avengers show up a few more times in the main book and I shall show you all that next time.


Edit: I reuploaded the pictures to my rarey used imageshack account. If this doesn't work I'll delete this page and wait a month for my photobucket bandwidth to come back.

Tags: event: civil war, group: young avengers, group: runaways, char: molly hayes, char: chase stein, char: nico minoru, char: xavin, char: Karolina dean, char victor manchu, char: old lace, char: vision/jonas, char: patriot/eli bradley, char: stature/cassie lang, char: speed/tommy shepherd, char: wiccan/billy kaplan, char: hulkling/teddy altman, char: hawkeye/kate bishop, char: captain america/steve rogers, char: marvel boy/captain marvel/noh-varr, creator: zeb wells, creator: stefano caselli,

Comments

[majingojira]

I gotta say it. Nico plot arc in this crossover is just utterly retarded. It's an obvious nerf to keep the Magic fix all in place, when there was already one that was far more effective.

That said, it's an average crossover overall.

Remember the shit-storm Xavins' apparent death caused on the previous SD?