Young Avengers #2

[icon_uk]

Where we find out more about Teddy's mother, what his middle name is, and Billy's rather flattering taste in loungewear.



It turns out that the weird creepy version of Teddy's adoptive mother that Billy brought back at the end of the first issue isn't his adoptive mother at all. Whaetever she/it is, seems to think it's Teddy's mother, but acts like... well, think... Stepford Wife with localised but absolute power levels of molecular manipulation. She's already Stepford'd Billy's parents into a creepily good natured puppets (like the Other-Father in "Coraline", if that reference means anything to you, if it doesn't, go read the book or watch the movie... but I digress)

Managing to run, well, fly, like hell away from the Cosmic Mom Monster, who has apparently taken control of everyone in the neighbourhood, Billy and Teddy head towards the best qualified people they know for dealing with such things...



Whew, well, that's a relief isn't it...





Love the nine-panel prison layout... and can you guess the unlikely identity of his eventual rescuer



And what happens next? Well, that's for YOU to find out, suffice it to say, that, apart from Loki, as a pagan deity, NOT being impressed by Billy's codename, we end up at the last place that the God Kid of Mischief would want to be... OKLAHOMA!!!

 

Comments

[salinea]

Loved the issue. Better paced than the first, and Gillen's in great form.

[lultam]

I agree, I was a tad worried after reading the first issue. Not that it was bad or anything, just that it wasn't as good as I'd hyped it up to be in my head.

This was a stronger issue IMO, could be to do with Kid Loki getting a lot of screen time this issue as well though!

[q99]

-I agree, I was a tad worried after reading the first issue. Not that it was bad or anything, just that it wasn't as good as I'd hyped it up to be in my head. -

Seconded. I was, "Oh no, how long are we going to have to deal with the badmom before they realize...?"

Aaand they deal with it in the second issue ^^

[auggie18]

Yeah, right there with you. I'm glad the book is finding its legs a bit more, but I think the hype didn't do the first issue a lot of good.


I expect the whole thing will read better in trade anyway.

[icon_uk]

I agree, thought it doesn't have Noh-Varr in his underwear dancing to 1960's girl-groups the way issue 1 did. :(

[silverhammerman]

Surprised you didn't include the recap page, it's a treat.
Great book so far, my only problem is that I'm finding it to be quite a fast read and I wish it were more dense.

[icon_uk]

It is, but it would still count towards my four pages, and I wanted the sequence above.

[maxisanacorn]

Has this been confirmed as being on the main earth an on an alternate world like people were speculating due to Miss America and Loki's world hopping.

[icon_uk]

Nothing to say it's NOT on the main Earth so far.

[shadowpsykie]

so far it LOOKS like the main earth (the current uncanny avengers team is complete and wearing the right costumes.

[urkonn]

The recap page does mention earth 212, bot sure why.

[mrstatham]

Earth 212 is Miss America's homeworld, or at least one that she's travelled to.

[filkertom]

Heh. No leather corset, no skintights, and that's still one of the hottest pics of Wanda I've ever seen.

[glprime]

Agreed.

[turtlefu]

This issue was a huge improvement. The pacing was so much better. I still have a couple of issues though
1) the dialogue is still trying way too hard to be cute. Gillen's dialogue in Journey was effortless, but the diner scene with Loki was tough.
2) that breaking out sequence. ARGH. Now, I LOVED it when comics broke the fourth wall like that... in the nineties. But it's not the nineties anymore, and I barely gave Grant a pass when he did it in Seven Soldiers Zatanna. This type of stuff is just trying WAY too hard

I like the idea of a universe parasite, I like the idea of Billy not being some all-powerful god (it's a very teenager dilemma to learn that, no, sometimes you can't fix every problem), there are some minor quibbles with art (namely being that McKelvie has style and flair but no feel for kinetics, which makes him a poor choice for action scenes), but I love how he gave Billy and Teddy not only distinct body types and faces, but also a different sense of style.

[urkonn]

I liked this issue more than the first too. it felt less jumbled, though it still jumped a little too fast from moment to moment. Waking up > realizing the mom isn't who she is > going to the avengers > back to the mom > trapped > saved by Loki > catching Loki and off to Asgard.
On the one hand it's nice that the plot moves along and we don't have to wait too long for things to happen, but on the other hand it makes it all feel empty, shallow, not resonating with the feelings.

Also... Billy can fly by himself. Why is Teddy holding him? Is it a control thing? A navigating thing?
"Billy, you're going the wrong way, Oklahoma is that way."
"Are you sure? Maybe we should stop and ask."
"Just let me hold you, it would be easier that way."

[icon_uk]

Well, it could be to save on magical resources, and Billy's magic isn't quite working at it's best at the moment. Normally he could have warped them to their destination instantly, no? Or else maybe Teddy can just fly faster and for longer than Billy is able to.

[theflames]

Yeah... Billy, as a person with super powers and responsibility. Is an idiot.

Though this is a good read so far... Also, Billy reasoning for sending Teddy's mum back to where he took here from was WEAK. She had yet to really give away that she wasn't anything but what she thought she was (his mother), the only difference being that she wasn't happy with their relationship since she thought they were to young, and Billy's parents 'agreed'.

Then BAM, he's like screw you, you're going back to your universe. Which is SOOO odd.

I think they should have had her reveal her falseness in a more obvious way, WE KNEW she wasn't all good, since we'd seen it from the last issue, but he didn't know that... so he worked off a near trigger assumption...

[urkonn]

I think the point was that Teddy realized she wasn't his mom, as a son he would know. Also she touched Billy's hair. Nobody messes with the do!

[theflames]

Yeah he seemed to be wigging out really fast as well... but then of course she wasn't *his* mum, since she was pulled from an alternate world, she was, if Billy got it right, another Teddy's mum, and the explanation of her differences could've just been due to the fact that she was from another world, with different paths.

Wait... did Billy go back in time and save Teddy's mum, or did he get her from another universe?

[bruinsfan]

Both, actually. He found an alternate Mrs. Altman at a point in time just before the Super Skrull attacked and yanked her out of that timeline and into his own.

[icon_uk]

At some level he knew he had goofed in bringing her (whatever she was) back the way he did, and seeing his own parents acting completely contrary to their natures was also a fairly big clue that Teddy's mom was not what she appeared to be. Sending her back was a reflex, and a good one I'd have said, had it worked.

[batman]

There's actually a lot of cues that something is very wrong: she knows about Teddy sneaking out and being a superhero when the only people who know that are Billy and Teddy and neither are talking about it, she is far too familiar with Billy, she crosses a lot of boundaries with regards to parenting Billy that his parents should have picked up on and reacted to and Billy feels quite ill. Given that all this literally started with her arrival, it's not a hard leap for him to make.

[theflames]

But those could've all been triggers of her *just* being an alternative version of Teddy's mum and knowing those things because it was like that on her Earth? I mean yeah, he was obviously right in doing so, but his thought path for how he figured out looks like it's based on all the wrong reasons.

[batman]

Billy is prone to doing that though. He has a a knack for making snap judgments about things that are correct. I'm not surprised he was able to do that, given the whole thing with Wanda,

[theflames]

Fair enough I guess then... but now it just makes me wonder what the backlash will be when he's wrong about one those snap judgements.

[icon_uk]

One of my favourite powers ever was used by Avatar of the Futurians, who summarised it as "I can make completely accurate decisions based on incomplete data. In short, I'm a VERY good guesser."

What a terrific plot-advancing power! :)

[rainspirit]

Holy shit, I want that as my preferred superpower!

[icon_uk]

It's right behind omni-linguistics on my list... well, that and flying... and teleportation (Though I'd want the power to manifest like the Aperture gun in Portal if I wanted it to, because that would be cool)

[pallas_athena]

Billy wigged out because he realised HIS parents had been somehow controlled too. His father reading the paper when he usually gets the news online, and both of them flaccidly agreeing with everything the UnMother said (including her absolute denial of Billy and Teddy's relationship, when previously they'd been supportive.)

[theflames]

The art is real strong too... the face's are a little... distracting, 'samey', but the bodies have such great form!

[janegray]

One question: where is Tommy?

[rbenchley]

Tommy is supposed to show up in issue 6. Gillen wanted to limit the initial number of characters and settled on Billy, Teddy and Kate from the original team and Noh-Varr, Miss America and Loki for the new members.

[janegray]

Oh, thank goodness. I was worried he had been retconned or something.

[morwen]

Issue 1 explains that Tommy had found the atmosphere at the Kaplan's house... stifling, and was temporarily away.

[janegray]

Thanks :)

[md84]

Am I the only one who finds it a tad ominous that Teddy and Billy owe Loki a favor?

[ablackraptor]

Funnily enough, that reminds me of the fact that Loki still owes Spidey a favour. I'm kinda hoping this will come into play to sort out Spidey's Status Quo

[urkonn]

Really? For what? Sounds interesting.

[ablackraptor]

I never read the issue where it happened, but the SD post to it is here:->http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/3066115.html
Doesn't show the scans of him actually telling him he owes him a favour, but it mentions it.

[mrstatham]

Yeah, this. It's one of those things Quesada and Co managed to quietly and conveniently ignore when it came to needing to save Aunt May.

[morwen]

I'd go with "forget".

I bet they were kicking themselves when that was pointed out.

[mrstatham]

I don't know - Loki owed Spidey the favour as part of a storyline that JMS wrote. JMS wrote One More Day. You do the math - I think it was deliberately forgotten because they needed the nonsense of the 'deal with the devil' to reset Spidey to a degree, because I'm sure JMS would remember something that he himself laid down.

[morwen]

You'd think, but balls get dropped.

And I don't think they needed that "deal with the devil". In fact, wasn't that point the basis of much of the criticism of it: that it was subsequently whitewashed? They set up the new status quo - started writing stories based in it - and then tried to figure out how to get from here to there. The mechanics of it were, certainly, spectacularly ill-judged but not actually important to Brand New Day. Certainly the initial impression of the story I got from teasers were very different to the arc as published.

[mrstatham]

You'd think so, but they then basically insisted on continuing to deal with the notion of the deal with the devil by actively showing how Mephisto was involved - from what I recall - during the One Moment In Time story. So it wasn't so much white-washed as somehow, Quesada felt the need to do one story that got into the specifics, and then no-one's touched it since. So it was certainly there in the background during Brand New Day, especially given they had the mystery of what Mary Jane actually knew despite the new status quo.

[bruinsfan]

I'm a bit put out by how easily all the Avengers got mind-whammied, and apparently remotely without the new Mrs. Altman even having to know which ones the boys were running to for help (though it'd be easy enough to guess that's the general group they'd turn to). Within the last couple of months Wanda fought off the Red Skrull using Xavier-level telepathy on her, and Cap put up a long and difficult struggle against it before going under. And if it's some sort of magical spell instead, neither Thor nor Wanda are particularly vulnerable to that sort of thing.

[endis_ni]

What this? An outfit for the Scarlet Witch that actually looks pretty good? Consider me pleasantly surprised!

[blackruzsa]

I did love this issue--the art and the interactions were all solid and I felt the old love for YA coming back.

I just...
Billy's hair.

That is the only thing that bothers me.