Fantastic Fangirls: Comics and Culture

At last weekend’s HeroesCon in Charlotte, North Carolina, Caroline and Jennifer attended the panel on Avengers Academy, a new title about Avengers-in-training from writer Christos Gage and penciller Mike McKone. Gage and McKone, as well as editor Bill Rosemann, made up the panel, and they did an exceptionally good job of selling the comic to the (sadly small group of) attendees. Now that the first issue has been released, Caroline and Jennifer thought it might be nice to sit down and discuss their reactions, as well as their reactions to last week’s other big new teen superhero book, Sean McKeever and David Baldeon’s Young Allies.

Jennifer: I knew I was going to love Avengers Academy. I love Christos Gage’s writing, I love Mike McKone’s art, I love the Avengers, and I love teenage superheroes, particularly in a school setting. The book would have had to have been exceptionally terrible — and uncharacteristically terrible, considering the creative team — for me to dislike it. But even with all of my high expectations, Avengers Academy still managed to be a pleasant surprise.

The first pleasant surprise, which was one I observed from the character-introduction ads released months ago, was the diversity of the team’s members. Gender-wise, the team is split 50/50, and at least two of the team members (Hazmat and Reptil) are explicitly non-white, being Japanese-American and Mexican-American, respectively. (Finesse and Striker, whose real names have not been revealed, are of unknown descent, which is why I say “at least.”) In a comics world where the focus on the oldest, most established characters often results in a whitewashed, male-centric universe, it’s always nice to see new teams that more accurately represent the world as it exists today.

The second pleasant surprise, for me, was the use of something resembling actual educational psychology in a book about a school. The big twist (spoiler alert!) at the end of the first issue is that these students, rather than being the students with the most promise as heroes, are actually the students who have been tortured the most and have the most destructive powers, and are therefore those the Avengers fear might switch to the side of villainy. When the students find out the truth, they’re understandably upset, but the Avengers’ justification for hiding their motivations rings true. Studies have shown that tracking — sticking students into different classes according to their level of achievement — can be harmful to students by giving the lower-tracked students a feeling of futility, preventing them from succeeding by creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of expected failure. Unfortunately, tracking is sometimes pedagogically necessary, and even if you call one reading group “bluejays” and another “cardinals,” the students figure out which is higher and which is lower. I’ve attended enough educational psychology and sociology classes to have heard all sides of this debate, and it was a real treat to see that debate play out in a conversation between the Avengers who are acting as teachers in this book. Oftentimes schools in comics are only used as an excuse for all the teen characters to be living in one place (as I’ve seen time and again with the X-Men), with little thought given to how those students might actually learn. The presence of this nugget of educational psychology gives me hope for Avengers Academy as a book where a school might actually resemble a school.

Caroline: I think I must be the yang to your yin on this, because I’ve traditionally avoided teen superhero books. First off, I’m wary of “high school” stories in general. There are some shows and movies about high school that are among my favorite things ever (Freaks and Geeks, Friday Night Lights, Election, Juno). But as a genre, high school drama seems to present, as a universal experience, a bunch of cliches that don’t reflect my own experiences at all. So I’m wary.

Besides that, I’ve got a particular set of issues with teen superhero teams. First of all, I’m worried that the characters will be completely indistinguishable from every other set of teen heroes. Second, I know the track record for “new” characters isn’t great, so the chance is pretty high of getting invested in the adventures of characters I’ll never see again. And finally, stories about teenagers usually need adult authority — more often than not, unreasonable adult authority — to struggle against. Frequently, adult superheroes get written into those roles and sometimes it makes sense (Professor Xavier is a jerk, that’s just what he does). But other times, in order to root for the New/Young/No-Really-New-This-Time X-Men, you have to see the X-Men you’re supposed to be rooting for in every other book acting unreasonable or mean or incompetent. Not my thing!

That’s why the most interesting statement I heard at the Avengers Academy panel was that the book was going to be as much about the faculty — Hank Pym, Quicksilver, Tigra, Speedball, and Justice — as it is about the students. It’s not that I don’t want to read about students but — partly because I like stories where everybody’s motivations are reasonable, partly because I’ve been a teacher — I’m at least as interested in that side of the equation. When I heard the names of the faculty listed off at the panel, I couldn’t help asking if it was intentional that most of the Avengers involved had distinctly troubled past careers. The reaction from the panelists suggested that it definitely was intentional and they were happy that readers had picked up on that. The first issue really bears that out; the faculty characters are very aware that they did go, or easily could have gone, wrong, which drives their commitment to teaching.

All of that ties in well to the revelation you discussed, that rather than being a school for exceptionally gifted teens, it’s an intervention for ‘at-risk’ ones. I hadn’t thought about the comparison to educational psychology, and the ‘tracking’ metaphor is a really interesting one. I don’t think this is quite the same situation, though, because it’s not as though they are just keeping information to themselves. The faculty is actually giving the kids false information about why they’re at the school. I think it stands in for the many kinds of lies that parents tell kids with the best of intentions. I’m personally of the belief that there’s no such thing as a good lie — though that’s easier to believe than to practice — and yet I don’t see this as an instance of adult heroes being diminished to make the kids look better. Because it is a well-meaning lie, and it kind of crushed me to hear it coming from Justice, who clearly earns the schoolgirl crush that Maddy — our first-issue narrator — has on him.

Speaking of Maddy, let’s talk about those original characters a bit. I thought it was a good choice to start with her, because she definitely seems to be the most naive, and thus, I think, a good stand-in for the reader being exposed to this for the first time. What did you think of Maddy? Did any of the other newbies stand out to you?

Jennifer: First of all, Maddy’s crush on Justice was one of my favorite parts of the book — really, what right-thinking person doesn’t have a crush on Justice? She felt very real to me, and was a great POV character for the first bit. I especially liked how she came from a low-income background that’s obviously going to shape her behavior.

I don’t think I have a favorite yet, of the young characters, but I really liked the characterization of all three women. I like that Hazmat gets to have a more traditionally “ugly”/male-coded power, and that she’s abrasive (for good reason), and I really liked how Finesse was basically a superpowered version of TV’s Temperance “Bones” Brennan — brilliant in every way, but with no social skills to speak of, like a female Reed Richards. I’ll be interested to see how that characterization bears out. The male heroes are a little less distinct for me right now, but I’m intrigued by Striker’s arrogance and Reptil’s eagerness (and I loved his appearance in an earlier Avengers: Initiative issue), and I’m really interested in the gentle giant-type characterization of poor Mettle. Some of the things Gage and the others shared at the panel about the future of his character sounded particularly intriguing, and I’m interested to see how that bears out.

I’d love to talk a bit about how this book intersects with the other book we’re discussing, Young Allies. I’m especially impressed by the way the two books together feature three different Hispanic characters with three different cultural backgrounds — Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, and Colombian. But I know you had some different thoughts about Young Allies and its tone.

Caroline: I should say, because I haven’t been clear yet, that I really enjoyed Avengers Academy, and I thought Young Allies was a great book as well. They seem to be vying to be the next Runaways, as far as being these kind of offbeat stories about younger characters. But Young Allies did throw me for a bit of a loop, as far as how it met my expectations. I knew this book spun out of the Nomad minieseries and the Firestar one-shot by Sean McKeever. Maybe because all the preview art has been so briight, and because I associate McKeever with a “sweet” kind of story — well, I wasn’t expecting child slavery on page one, casual references to murdering homeless people, and a debate about the ethics of superheroes carrying out summary execution.

To be fair, this is all about my expectations, and not about the book itself. The book is clearly rated “T+,” which means it’s not for younger readers. The Firestar one-shot deals with the heroine’s cancer recovery, and the Nomad miniseries had some dark content in its own right: the heroine is homeless, she’s investigating undercover hate groups, her brother ends up dead. This didn’t put me off Nomad — honestly, it’s the book that got me interested in teen heroes again. Maybe it was just the sheer volume of bad stuff in Young Allies that got to me. It’s not that I don’t read books with “dark” themes — I like Scalped; I like Preacher — i just hadn’t expected this to be one.

Jennifer: I can understand your hesitation about some of the content, but I don’t think it fazed me too much — and I’m actually less interested in dark themes than you are. I found the philosophical discussions really interesting, and I think the characters’ optimism and drive helped to balance out some of the darkness (as did Baldeon’s art), and made me want to see them succeed, despite the odds stacked against them. I also like that this isn’t so much a “high school” story as it is a story about young people of all kids — high school students, college students, grad students. The characters are at different stages of their lives, but none of them have reached true adult status, and I’ll be interested to see how that plays out.

Plus, while Avengers Academy is made up of brand-new characters, Young Allies consists (with the exception of Toro) entirely of characters who had a lot of potential but have been shuffled to the side. I’m really interested in seeing Nomad, Gravity, Arana, and Firestar get their due, because they all completely deserve it.

On that note, I found myself very impressed with the ways both new books used continuity. Academy really impressed me with the way it managed to balance two incredibly difficult tasks — introducing new characters to jaded older readers to make them care, and introducing older characters (the adult Avengers) to new readers, so they can understand their motivations and histories. It made the first issue a bit exposition-heavy, but I thought it worked well. And Allies used less exposition, but still managed to get the basic facts about each character across; I look forward to how future issues might explore the backstories of the characters, particularly Gravity and Arana, who I know the least about.

Caroline: You know, I usually completely skip over the Marvel Handbook-type stuff in the back that explains backstory on various characters. But for some reason I loved the ones in Young Allies. The layouts were pretty and made me really want to read them. Also, it raised the most important question, when will the books cross over so that Firestar and Justice can get back together? Well, no, really that’s not the most important question — but he’s so dreamy. No, wait, sorry. . .

I am really interested in how both of these books progress and what kind of tone they adopt. I know Gage mentioned, at Heroes, that he was interested in Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways as a model of the balance of light and dark. I had forgotten until you pointed it out that there’s human sacrifice in the first issue of that book. And if you look at what’s going on in Young Adult fiction right now — lots of violence, lots of dystopia — none of the content in Young Allies seems that out of place. This might actually be a good thing to market to the YA reader — assuming that Marvel knows how to market to anybody other than the same aging fanboy demographic they market to every week, but that’s a different conversation.

It’s not so much that I don’t want a book like Young Allies, but it is kind of disheartening that there don’t seem to be any teen books in the Marvel U that aren’t going for the dark content. I’d like to be able to read a book about teenagers without the human trafficking, death penalty debates, and future supervillainy — the equivalent, I guess, of “middle-grade” in prose publishing — but there don’t seem to be many options, which is weird considering the perception outside of comics that comics are kids’ stuff. I want X-Men: First Class, back, I guess that’s what I’m saying. I want that and more Her-Oes. And a pony.

Jennifer: I’ll take that First Class-shaped pony. And the Her-Oes-shaped one. But I’m glad both of these books exist as well, for the YA crowd and above, and I hope they foreshadow a lot more teenager-related awesomeness in Marvel’s future.

How about you, Fantastic Fangirls readers? Any thoughts on either of these books? We welcome your response in the comments!