Before I even knew that Joss Whedon had a run on this book, I loved the Runaways series. It was fun, had a great story and characters, and was created by Brian K. Vaughn, who wrote one of my favorite Maxi-Series of all time-Y: The Last Man.
The Runaways is set in the Marvel Universe and is about a group of teens and children who find out that not only are there parents super-villains, but they themselves have superpowers. After figuring this out they run away from home and try to contact the Avengers about their parents, and eventually have to defeat their parents.
Joss Whedon was the first person to take over writing duties on the book after Brian K. Vaughn left the series. When you really think about it, Joss is the perfect person for the job. He’s great at writing children and teenagers, he knows how to handle multiple characters and give each of them individual character arcs, and damn, if his dialogue isn’t the best thing ever. Joss’s run only consists of five issues and is titled “Dead End Kids”. It’s a fun and rather strange story arc dealing with time travel, Kingpin and The Punisher.
Only Joss Whedon could make a little girl punching the Punisher work.
Suprisingly enough, Joss does not bring the emotional pain in this book. I mean there is an emotional moment between two characters but they were not strong enough as characters for me to care. I also didn’t feel bad about certain characters dying because they were jerks, and it’s hard to care about a jerk dying, to be honest.
As far as Whedon’s comic book work goes, it wasn’t his strongest, but it wasn’t really his weakest either. It sort of sits awkwardly in the middle. It was also only five issues and I really wish he had done more than just the one volume, because I would have loved to have seen Whedon do another four volume comic book run like he did with “Astonishing X-Men.” Although I think Marvel was smart by not letting him stay on because Brian K. Vaughn had already killed a few characters with his first run and they probably didn’t want Whedon killing the entire team off ( I am pretty sure he would go that far, believe me, it’s freakin’ Whedon)
I would talk more about the comic, but honestly it was so short that there isn’t much else to say. Stay tuned Whedonites, we have more comic goodness coming your way because next time I will be doing an over view on Whedon’s Buffy-verse in comics!
–Coty
The Nerdicon 