Last week, Marvel Comics released Young Avengers #15, the concluding issue of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s teen superhero saga. Over the last year, the series built a passionate fanbase for its blend of emotional drama and sweeping action, for its innovative graphic and narrative devices, and for its inclusiveness (two of the characters are in a committed same-sex relationship, the team’s de facto leader is a Latina woman, and the story touches on parental abandonment, sexual identity, physical intimacy, and other issues). And though it’s been a great critical and commercial success, the creative team did their thing and made a quick getaway, leaving 15 issues of wonderment behind.
This Young Avengers series thrived on gleefully exploding traditional layout and storytelling techniques. It’s a heart-on-the-sleeve, action-packed and emotion-filled trip through the lives of teenage superheroes on the cusp of adulthood; kids who are giddy with potential and wracked with self-doubt; taking hesitant steps, tripping, stumbling, and soaring.
The protagonists are constantly contradicting themselves, and the book not only illustrates those struggles, it embodies them both structurally and narratively. It fits easily into a number of traditions, it’s edgy while being comfortingly familiar. It’s a comic for anyone who’s old enough to know what being young is like. It’s a soap opera, a teen movie, an afterschool special, a three minute pop song, a bolt of lightning, and like those fleeting instants of youth that seem to last forever, over far too soon.
It’s a finite 15-issue series, a big-time Marvel book featuring characters the general public has never heard of. It’s set in a specific timeframe, ending on New Year’s 2014, thus making it out of date and immortal at once. And it will age in the same way Lee/Diko’s Spider-Man issues have, in the way that the original New Warriors series did, in the way the music of The Shangri-Las and The Jackson 5 and The Smiths has. The technology, the terminology, the look and feel and style and voice is identifiably right now – and that makes it especially truthful, while ensuring that it’s inextricably linked to the moment that it first appeared.
But these details aren’t what the series is about. They’re trappings, pieces of a well-constructed world. These props and devices ground the work and give the modern reader extra elements to latch onto and relate to. The emotions and ideas of the story are universal: being young and impulsive and rash and glorious never goes out of style.
This book contains all the essential pieces of the teenage experience, of being young and dumb and brilliant. The ill-advised romantic entanglements, the self-doubt, the dimension-hopping, the self-doubt and overcompensation, the euphoria of losing yourself in a song, the battling intergalactic threats, the rush of simply being alive, the feeling of everything being the most important thing in the world.
Great pop is saturated with the essential vitality of being NOW at the moment of release, and becomes a time travel device to take you back to that very instant each time you revisit it. The best stories, songs, photographs, comics – they’re a gateway to a specific time and place and feeling.
And Gillen and McKelvie pulled off that trick of universal instantaneous emotion. They took a superhero comic and told a story about youth and growing up and having friends and falling in love and having your heart broken and dancing. The first issue hit the stands on January 23, 2013, and the final issue ends just a few hours after midnight on January 1, 2014. It’s a comic and a moment in time: a story that begins with two lovers waking up in space, and ends in the aftermath of an interdimensional afterparty.
Young Avengers #15 was released on January 8, 2013. The entire series is being compiled into three trade paperbacks – Vol. 1 is available now, Vol. 2 is released on February 4, and Vol. 3 follows on April 1. For more information about the conclusion of Young Avengers, see the interview I conducted with Kieron Gillen for MTV Geek.