Underrated Comics: Runaways

Hey everybody! So as you all know, last week was not a very healthy week for me. Anything involving doctors and needles and I’m not going to have a very good time.

This is my hell.

So what was I doing while I was recovering? Reading my old comics and trying to find fanfiction for some of my favorite series.

I can feel the judgement eyes from here. Hear me out okay?

One of the series I was re-reading was the first comic series I ever bought a trade for. Published by Marvel Comics, having three volumes before going into an indefinite hiatus-turned-cancellation, and having so many female role models I’m sad people haven’t heard much about it, Runaways was my favorite team book from Marvel. Actually, it’s probably my favorite team period. I fell in love with the characters, and I could relate to all of them in some way having been a teenager when I discovered them the first time. I always felt like the story wasn’t ready to be done when it was canceled, and I figured I would see if fanfiction could help fill some of the Runaways void for me.

The face of all my guilty pleasures.

And then I realized how little there was of it. 166? Really? I know comics don’t have the most fanfiction dedicated to it, but I was expecting more than that! Young Avengers, who they’ve had crossovers with, at least hit 200.

So after I figured I’d at least look in my copy of the Marvel Encyclopedia. Sure, it’s not the 2014 edition, but the series ended the month before my version was released in 2009. They were a well established series by at least 2004. They played a part in Civil War and Secret Invasion for crying out loud! There had to be something on them right?

Right?

Not a freaking thing. I even checked under every one of their real names and code names from the first volume. Not a word on them. The closest we get is part of Ricochet’s article, mentioning that he joined a group of former teenage superheroes in L.A. trying to dissuade other teenagers from being costumed heroes. The teenagers who were their first mission to save from it, but never even got close to beating? The Runaways! Where is the Runaways love?

I tracked down the newest edition, and they don’t even have their own article. They’re just mentioned in three others, with only one of them being an article on one of the members. Squirrel Girl gets her own article, but only Nico gets one from the Runaways. Sure, Squirrel Girl is awesome and I love her, but you can’t even give the Runaways their own eighth of a page? Molly Hayes beat the crap out of Wolverine and they beat Ultron for cripes sake!

Pictured: One of Marvels' most powerful villains. Not Pictured: The teenage team that beat him.

So we’re going to change this here and now. More people need to know who the Runaways are, and exactly why they are awesome. Only three of the characters ever made it to other books, and the fact that barely anyone’s read the series they came from is a crime against a great series. So here’s my spoiler-free plot synopsis, character rundown, and top reasons why you should give the series a try. If you couldn’t find it in the first trade of the first volume, I’m not going to give it away here, although there might be some clues.

Runaways: Read This Comic!

Okay, basic concept time. Remember your teenage years? Yeah, that awkward, not-quite-a-kid, not-nearly-grown-up phase of life you’re really hoping you can forget about? You know how, unless you were blessed with a near-impossible perfect home life, at one point or another you thought your parents or guardians were evil? I mean, those moments aren’t the most proud memories of our lives, but I’m willing to bet it happened during the course of puberty.

Now imagine you were right, and your parents were supervillians trying to destroy the world. Welcome to the Runaways, you’re going to fit right in here.

These guys are called The Pride, and they’re the parents of 6 pre-to-upper teens. They essentially controlled the crime and supervillian scene in Los Angeles for multiple years, finally giving an explanation as to why Marvel never really had stories or events happening on the West Coast. Once a year they sacrifice a young girl and feed her soul to the old deities they have a deal with so they can destroy the world and let their kids inherit the new one.

Their kids happen to witness one of the sacrifices, and understandably freak out. They run away from home, and now are on a mission to fix all the bad things their parents have done. And they have several decades of bad karma to undo. Along the way, they learn just exactly who they came from, added more teenagers join their ranks, and even formed a healthy respect and general working relationship with the Young Avengers and a just as woefully underrated superhero duo, Cloak and Dagger. The series went on hiatus and was summarily canceled in 2009, with three of the members going off into other series.

Alright, now that you get a general idea of what the story's about, we can get onto the characters. Starting with the original 6 Runaways in no particular order:

Alex Wilder

Alex is a tactical genius and the original leader of the team. While not the oldest and having no superpowers or other gifts, he takes after his parents in his cunning and is the one who keeps the coolest head in a tough situation. Unless it involves Nico’s love life. Then he’s a bit less level-headed. When the team was using codenames briefly, he was the only one not to choose one.

Gertrude Yorkes

Gert is the 15 year old child of time-travelers who got stuck in the 1980s when their time machine malfunctioned. While they were able to repair it for a few more trips to get Gertrude’s “inheritance”, none of the team could figure out how to fix it again after it broke the final time. Oh, and her inheritance is a dinosaur. She shares an empathic link to the reptile, which was genetically altered and developed to obey her mental commands or those she trusts. She’s the most snarky and sarcastic of the group, and has the easiest time distancing herself from her parents and believing they could really be evil. She started the original trend of having code-names, even if they were dropped by the end of the first volume. She called herself Arsenic, and she named her dinosaur Old Lace.

Karolina Dean

The daughter of movie stars, Karolina grew up with tabloids claiming her parents were aliens. For once, those stories were right. Her parents were fugitives from their home planet, became actors in Hollywood for some undisclosed reason, and made sure nothing off-world would disturb the Pride’s little slice of happiness in L.A. When her medical bracelet is removed, Karolina has the same powers of her parents, which include energy beams powered by the sun, quite psychedelic and photosynthetic skin, and the ability to fly. When they choose code-names, she goes with Lucy in the Sky.

Chase Stein

Chase was the dumb jock kid of extremely intelligent parents. The Steins were engineering geniuses, and created some of the most powerful weapons on the face of the Earth. Unfortunately for them, their idea of security for keeping these high tech and extremely destructive weapons away from their delinquent son was to assume he would always stay away from their workshed because he’d think it was boring. The sad thing is, if he hadn’t seen the sacrifice that night with the others then they would probably have been right. Chase is the man with the wheels and the oldest of the team, going with the codename Talkback when they were actually using them.

Molly Hayes

The youngest, being only 11 when the entire mess got started, Molly was the only daughter of two mutants with mental manipulation abilities. Her powers were a lot less mental. Molly is extremely strong, being able to lift almost everything and take a lot of damage. However since she’s so young, this tends to get her very sleepy. Her drowsy spells after using her abilities get shorter and shorter over time, so Molly will probably grow out of this eventually. She’s the most naive of the group, and is essentially everyone’s little sister. She’s the only one of the Runaways to ever make a costume for herself, but only wears it once. Chase tried to give her the codename Bruiser, but she prefers Princess Powerful herself.

Nico Minoru

The Minorus dabbled in the dark arts, and their arcane powers were passed along to Nico. When her mother tried to strike Nico with the Staff of One, it absorbed into her body and she gained ownership of the powerful magic tool. However it comes with a drawback tied to its name. She can only use a certain spell once. Also, to get it out of her body, she has to bleed. Sometimes this isn’t as much of a problem, but when your staff absorbs back into your body every few uses, getting it to come back out can be a pain. She’s close friends with Karolina, and is the same age as her and Alex. Her codename was Sister Grimm, but was the first to get tired with it.

More teens joined them as time went on, but these are the ones that stuck around for more than one storyline.

Victor Mancha

Victor’s parental identity is a spoiler, but lets just say Victor is the son of one of Earth’s greatest villains and would have taken very closely after his father. That is if Gert from the future hadn’t gone back in time to tell herself and her old friends to find him with her final breaths. Right now we don't know if that future will come true, but the timeline has definitely changed since he joined the group. His powers include magnetism and electricity manipulation.

Xavin

Xavin is a Super-Skrull trainee that has mastered all four powers of the Fantastic Four, just not at the same time. Karolina’s parents arranged for her to marry the shapechanger in order to settle a truce but didn’t exactly tell her of the deal. When on Earth, Xavin often lets his form change species and genders whenever she’s alone with the Runaways but eventually settles on the one Karolina finds most attractive as the default.

Klara Prast

A child-bride and Swiss immigrant from 1907, Klara is the same age as Molly and was taught that her powers were satanic and needed to be hidden at all times. She has manipulation over plant growth, especially roses, and is taking to modern culture just about as well as you could expect. She sort of looks like classic depictions of Red Riding Hood, but it may or may not be intentional.

So that's the team. I’ve given you all enough information to get you interested, but if you’re still on the fence, here are my top three reasons why I think you should give this series a shot.

3. It’s A Great Original Concept Done Well

Children making up for the sins of the parents isn’t exactly new, but I don’t think we’ve ever had an entire team formed on the basis on it. There are a lot of reactions and reasonable conclusions the team draws when they find out their heritage, and trying to compromise all of these viewpoints with a little under two decade’s worth of life experiences is pretty realistic. Even in just the first volume, you get to play around with the idea of older counterparts who have been there before, a potential member turning out to be evil, and the ever-so-popular traitor storyline in ways that completely make sense for teenagers in a stressful situations. In fact, this entire series is probably one of the most accurate depictions of teenagers in comic books. I’ve reacted in the same way of every single one of the original six team members on multiple occasions, and would catch myself in high school all the time switching between how the characters thought about the world. It’s really impressive if you think about it.

2. It’s a Superhero Team That Doesn’t Play To Tropes.

It’s a team that doesn’t have codenames outside of a few issues in the first volume, no special uniforms or costumes, no battle cry, and no desire to try to be something they’re not. The closest thing to a battle cry they’ve ever had was “Try not to die”. They have no illusions about what they’re doing, and know that they could be seriously injured or killed every time they get into a major fight. But they keep fighting because it’s what they feel they should do to make up for their parents mistakes. They’re not trying to be famous or join a well known team, or buckle to older superheroes if it compromises their mission. They’re just trying to do what’s right because they want to, even when chances come for them to return to normal lives. I think that’s more heroic than even some of the Avenger’s motives.

1. MOLLY-FREAKING-HAYES!

If you thought dealing with teens and puberty was scary before...

I might have glanced over this a little earlier, but I’ll say it again. SHE BEAT UP WOLVERINE. She’s the youngest, she’s the strongest team member, and she’s probably one of the strongest mutants left on the planet after the whole House of M storyline. She rides on Old Lace’s back like it’s a pony! She saves a group of child runaways from an evil wizard completely solo! When Molly’s powers were starting to show themselves, everyone thought it was another one of the “special changes” that happens to girls at that age. Well she was getting older all right, and strong enough to take on the Marvel Universe’s biggest bruisers. Punisher?

Check.

Wolverine?

One and Done.

The Hulk? Hasn’t been shown yet, but I’d pay to see that matchup any day of the week. She was only ranked behind three other superheroines in Marvel’s Toughest Female Characters rankings in 2008, losing out only to Rogue, Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk.

Oh, and apparently in the future she’s a full fledged member of the X-Men.

Seriously, seeing her with Deadpool is enough to give my fangirl heart palpitations.

So if you’re looking for a self-contained series to check out, Runaways is available from Marvel in multiple styles of print and bound trades. Victor Mancha went on to be in Avengers A.I., and both Nico and Chase are part of the cast of Avengers Arena if you want to find out what happened to at least some of the characters after cancellation. I haven’t checked out what Victor has been up to, but Chase and Nico were the entire reason I picked up the trades of Avengers Arena.  Mostly to find out if they live.

When members of your favorite team get put into something that's a direct homage to BATTLE ROYALE, you have a right to be as worried as you want.

This comic series I’ve found is seriously underrated by the fans, and virtually unknown to the general population. I think it would make a great movie or TV show as well, and I’d do anything to see how the story was supposed to end. Maybe Joss Whedon could help? It’s not like he hasn’t done work with the series before.

If you’re interested, check it out! Help me make the Runaways a little more well known, and hopefully we’ll get more of the characters soon. You never know what will be the next big hit for Marvel’s multimedia universe, and a female dominated team could do really well and fill a need. And hopefully next time I mention the team, I won't get a comic book shop full of blank looks.

Feel free to leave a comment or email me at activelynerdy@gmail.com with any recommendations, questions, comments, or feel free to leave a comment below!