Despite the Young Avengers being a fan-favorite title and team (especially amongst younger comics fans), they have had surprisingly few series to their name in the now 17 years since their creation, only two official volumes and one Avengers crossover series, each between 9 to 15 issues long, plus a handful of tie-ins to different late 2000s events. This scarcity has made each Young Avengers series feel like a small event in itself, and it’s all the more true for their Marvel NOW! revamp, as written by Kieron Gillen and drawn by Jamie McKelvie (plus Kate Brown guesting on issue #6, and various guest artists in the last two issues), with Matt Wilson on colors and Clayton Cowles on letters.
Teenage heroes can be hard to deal with over time in the Marvel universe, as the sliding timescale often causes them to stay young forever; if Tony Stark, Carol Danvers and the other adult heroes have to stay in their thirties forever and never retire, that means the next generation of heroes can never fully grow up and take their place. Teams like the New Mutants, or more contemporary to the Young Avengers, the Runaways, have sometimes had trouble growing up alongside their audience. But in Young Avengers Vol.2, the kids that used to be 14 to 16 years old teenagers are now reaching young adulthood, with all the questions and anxieties that being at that age entails. [Read more…] about Marvel Then! Young Avengers by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie
were first published in 1990 and 1991, the Avengers were in a bit of flux. Writer Roger Stern’s acclaimed five year long run on the book had come to an end a few years earlier. Just prior to the start of this volume, writer John Byrne had abruptly left his stewardship of both Avengers and Avengers West Coast, a stewardship which had culminated in putting the Avengers at the center of Marvel’s line-wide crossover “Acts of Vengeance” just before he left the books. On the other side of these collected issues, the creative run by writer Bob Harras and (chiefly) penciler Steve Epting looms, a run that will come to define “Avengers in the 90s,” for better and worse. With the benefit of hindsight, this chunk of issues feels very much like it’s simply filling the gap between the Byrne and Harras/Epting runs, merely killing time despite the fact that Larry Hama – whose entire work on the Avengers is collected in this volume – had every intention of staying on the title for a good long while (more on that below). Yet for that, at least some of the stories collected herein are not without their charms, even if few of them rise to the level of all time Avengers greats.