Comics I Bought: January 8, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got two new comics. A slow week:

The Walking Dead - 57

Buffy Season Eight - 21

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

"Runaways" Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona

"Runaways" is another book that I checked out a few issues of years ago. I liked them and made a mental note to check out the whole series at a later date. Later is finally here.

The Runaways are a group of teenagers, eleven the youngest and sixteen the oldest, who find out that their parents are super villains. So the kids run away. Of course the kids develop some powers and abilities of their after a little while.

I often find stories about teenagers annoying because of the "Hip young" slang that writers have them speak in. Not that I hang out with a lot of teenagers but I never hear them use the slang that writers have them use. And when I was a teenager I never heard much "Hip young" slang either.

Vaughan keeps the kid slang bearable but every time he uses the slang 'rents for parents it drives me crazy. I've never heard that piece of slang in real life but have heard it in fiction. It has such the ring of teenage slang made up by an adult that it always irritates me. After all teenagers have no conception of rent and the irony of calling their parents that is such grown up writer conceit. But that's just a pet peeve.

The writing is actually pretty good in this book. The script is fairly snappy and the plot interesting. What would someone do if they found out that their parents were super villains? That's what these kids want to know. They've been raised to be good normal kids and are shocked to find out their parents are evil.

And their parents are evil. Not in an over the top way but in a more subtle, "we'll even hurt our kids if they defy us" way. The parents are willing to deal out pain and death to get what they want and they think they're right about things.

The art is that "no line weight" style that I'm not too fond of. The artist (Alphona) can draw pretty well and likes to draw expressions on the kids faces but his lack of any expression in his line hinders what he's trying to accomplish. Every line is thin and reedy and that doesn't help with the variety of facial expressions he's trying for. The overly grey coloring doesn't help either.

It's the writing that is the real star for me in this book. I buy Brian K. Vaughan's "Ex Machina" every month but haven't read a whole lot of his other work. After enjoying this volume of Runaways I'll have to track down some more of his stuff.