You Might Give It the Slip, but Time Catches Up Eventually

Chase Stein being unable to successfully fight anyone is a truly hilarious character trait and I love it.

While I've begun picking up the current volume of Runaways as it comes out, I've also been backtracking to buy the tpbs of the earlier issues I missed. I picked up Volume 1 late last fall, but we're on Volume 2 today, which is largely about growing up. Either being afraid of it, disillusioned by the realities, or just unsure about it. Kris Anka draws a lot of characters looking nervous or uncomfortable, trying to avoid eye contact like it'll save them from unpleasant emotional issues.

Having reunited most of the team in those first six issues, and determined Molly's grandmother was a genetic engineer who created Molly's parents artificially, they're mostly living in the underground base that used to belong to their parents. But Molly still has school, Victor has no body, and Gert is - via the magic of time travel - back after being dead three years. So there are things to address. For one, someone has to be Molly's parents now.

 

Oh. Guess that takes care of that. Now all Molly has to deal with is whether or not she would like to avoid ever having to grow up by eating an enchanted cupcake her best friend received from the Enchantress in the 1960s. And most of the others keep implying that growing older is, in fact terrible, but also that they don't entirely take her seriously as long as she's so much younger than they are.

Against that backdrop, Karolina's girlfriend Julie Power (aka Lightspeed from Power Pack) shows up, only to be repeatedly brushed off or ignored by Karolina. Either Rowell didn't like those two being a couple, because she almost immediately puts Karolina and Nico together, or she didn't feel like keeping Julie as a regular cast member. I guess having a significant other who's actually a successful superhero (as Julie notes, the Runaways kind of suck at saving the day. Their casualty rate probably rivals the Suicide Squad's, if not the Great Lakes Avengers) would probably complicate the stories she wants to tell. When Julie eats the magic cupcake, she immediately starts calling Dr. Strange or Tony Stark, and that is. . . pretty much the opposite of how Karolina's crew runs. 

 

When they're talking, Anka usually drawing them in separate panels, so there's a sense of isolation. When they are in the same panel, they don't seem to be making eye contact. Usually because Karolina's look elsewhere, and more than once that elsewhere is Nico. Triona Farrell colors the backgrounds for those conversations a lot of cool blues. Which isn't unfriendly, exactly, but kind of melancholy. And when it shifts, it's to something red when Julie's starting to get frustrated with how her girlfriend won't share or discuss anything with her.

And in the middle of all that, a Doombot shows up intent on rescuing Victor and giving him a snazzy new robot body. Which Victor very much does not want. We find out why in the last issue in this trade, unless you read that Tom King Vision series, in which case you probably already know. I didn't read it, because all Tom King's stuff seems horribly depressing and/or complete shit, but the magic of the Internet meant I didn't have to. Anyway, Doombot's arrogance and extreme theatricality are a nice contrast to the main cast's constant snark and sarcasm (except Molly, who is enthusiasm personified most of the time.) Plus, this Doombot wears a nice green suit and his hood is part of a big coat (which he sorts of wears like a cape). He generally looks very snazzy and definitely classes up any room he enters. Unless he destroys it when he enters.

Somewhat in the background through all this is Gert's situation. For her, it's as if no time passed, but for everyone else, she's been dead three years. She's closer to Molly's age than Nico, Chase, or Karolina's, all of whom are legally adults now. So she's trying to figure out where she fits. Like everyone else, she has to adjust to a new situation, but unlike Chase or Nico who can have a concrete goal of finding employment, Gert isn't sure what she should do.

Rowell and Anka also take the time to address the fate of Clara, who I think the team picked up during a time-traveling adventure that was part of the frequently delayed Joss Whedon run that torpedoed the momentum of the book for years to come. And things actually turned out well for Clara! She gets a happy fate, which is nice. Again, I don't know if Rowell didn't want to write, or simply didn't have anything planned for her, but either way, this is a perfectly good way to handle it. Somebody should get to have nice parents.

 

I'm sure someone who understood fashion cold go in-depth about what Anka is telling us about each character with the clothes they wear. I am not that person. All I can tell you is there's an interesting variety. Enough that I actually notice, which is more than I usually bother to do with what characters wear. But the characters are mostly standing around talking, except sometimes they sit, so I gotta have something to look at. There's a couple of brief fight scenes, which mostly involve the team getting pummeled, and Anka does fine with those.

One thing that kept tripping me up is that a lot of the pages are set up to be read across the two facing pages, rather than reading down the left page, then the right. I don't know if that's Anka or Rowell, but they seem to favor it more than a lot of creators I've seen, and I ended up confused more than once because I'd start down the page, then have to stop and catch myself. I think the wider horizontal gutters were supposed to guide me, but it didn't work very well.