Hulkling, the Young Avenger

This was originally written before YAP came out. I'm leaving that part untouched (since I didn't read Hulkling's issue), but there's some other editing. Looking back on this, I could've gone into his character some more (I'd read the special, but this is written as if I hadn't), but I'm choosing to leave it largely as is.

Young Avengers Christmas comes late this year with the “Young Avengers Presents” miniseries. After hemorrhaging fans during a months-long hiatus full of broken promises and at least one canceled miniseries, the team is finally making a comeback. Every issue except for the Billy and Tommy issue will focus on a team member each. They all have a different, fairly notorious Marvel writer and some fans have speculated that these issues are auditions for the authors--one of them might be writing the eventual Young Avengers "season two".

I think YAP will be a good seller and Young Avengers will be a strong series if it ever gets started again. Like I said, it’s been losing fans, but most of them would probably pick up the book if they saw it. Honestly, I don’t think it’s as good as some people think it is, but it’s still a quality book. I think it’s got too much soap opera for a book without great characterization, but maybe that’s because it never got the chance to move beyond setup. When season one of YA ended, they’d just finished the team and wrapped up the last major origin story arc.

Actually, that’s not true. Let me backtrack. Each of the team members (except Kate Bishop, better known as Girl Hawkeye) has a strong connection to the original Avengers and is like a young version of one of them. They also all have terrible codenames. Anyway, because of this, their origins are a big part of the story. With the end of season one, we know where all of the team members come from and what species they are.

Despite this, there’s still a lot for the book to go through. The origins of Vision, Billy and Tommy are rooted in the origins of previously existing Marvel heroes. They’re ridiculously convoluted and thick with retcons, continuity errors, and (let’s face it) some really, really stupid stories. A huge part of season two will be spent figuring out whether or not Billy and Tommy are imaginary or not.

I was originally going to analyze each of the Young Avengers, but I got bored after writing this Hulkling piece (see what I mean about the names?).

Theodore Altman. Half-Kree, half-Skrull, default shape human, shapeshifting, quick healing, super strength. A few decades back, Marvel had a big event called the Kree-Skrull war. The Skrulls are a race of shapeshifting warriors with a huge empire who’ve picked on Earth a few times. They go way back to the one of the first Fantastic Four issues. Most Skrulls are just faceless legions of soldiers who can be butchered in fancy splash pages because they can grow pretty much anything back, but a few are actually given personalities.

The Kree have super-strength and look like humans, but sometimes they’ve got different color skin. They hate the Skrulls. If you’re a hardcore nerd, that summary made you twitch, but if you’re not, that’s all you need to know about the species.

Anyway, during this war, Skrull princess Anelle and Kree warrior Captain Marvel had a one-night stand, resulting in Teddy. Captain Marvel was an Earth superhero and considered it his adopted home. He was a great man who tragically died of cancer in a fantastic trade paperback that I recommend to everyone. Unfortunately, modern Marvel decided to crap on this by bringing him back in a stupid one-shot, having nobody react to his reappearance, and then not doing anything with him for months. I recall seeing a quote from one of the writers claiming that they couldn’t have been expected to write an epic story about life and death in a one-shot. They shouldn’t have written the damn thing at all.

During a recent “cosmic Marvel” event called Annihilation, the Skrull empire was apparently torn to pieces and has retreated to Earth in a last-ditch effort to take it over. This is called Secret Invasion. I, personally, know it as “yet another excuse to have splash pages masquerading as fight scenes and have a bunch of heroes act like irrational jackasses and fight each other instead of villains.” Don’t worry, there will be no lasting repercussions whatsoever, so you don’t need to know anything about it. Anyway, this all takes place after the story arc I’m about to describe.

At the end of the Young Avengers arc where Teddy found out about all this, the Kree and the Skrull were fighting over him because he could be an heir to both empires and end the conflict forever. There was an agreement that he would leave Earth and spend half a year with the Kree and half a year with the Skrulls. For a few pages, it seems like he did, but it was revealed to be the Super Skrull in disguise (ordinary Skrull with Fantastic Four powers and hypno-eyes). I think the Super Skrull dropped the charade in Annihilation because he had bigger things to worry about.

I doubt the Skrull are still a big enough threat for the Kree to be concerned over, so there’ll be no more huge battles over him. The Skrulls are also too ragtag to risk asking Teddy for help, since he’d probably blow the whistle on their stealth operation. Teddy was raised as a human by one of the servants of Anelle, who took him to Earth as a baby and was his mother—he has no reason to betray humanity. On the other hand, the Skrulls might consider him an ally, since he helped the Super Skrull gain such a delicate position, even after the Super Skrull killed his mother.

I’m not kidding. The Super Skrull set his damn mother on fire and she burned to death in front of him. Then he kidnapped Teddy to be dragged off to become Emperor of the Skrulls. Previously, he’d kidnapped another member of the Young Avengers and threatened to kill him. I don’t have a problem with Teddy setting him up in the super-sweet spy position because he’s a kid who probably has no concept of “cosmic”. He did it to save his own skin and it was a pretty clever solution. Even so, he had a nice long conversation earlier with the Super Skrull that was actually civil. I have no idea what the hell his deal is! The last arc was almost entire about him, but Teddy doesn’t have enough depth or internal conflicts. A teenage boy who helped out the man that killed his mom must have a pretty rich internal life

His issue in YAP will be about him meeting the recently resurrected Captain Marvel. I think it’s a good idea. It's a chance for both of them to get some time in the spotlight and for someone to develop their personalities and how Captain Marvel feels about being displaced in time (this is how his cheap cop-out resurrection was done: by making it not really a resurrection).

Another thing… Teddy and Billy, another teammate, are boyfriends. I have absolutely no problem with gay relationships in comics or the real world and I support equal rights for gay couples. Billy is important to Teddy's character, but their relationship hasn't really been developed. I know they're a lot of people's favorites, and I can't blame the fans for that considering how few positive gay characters there are in comics (or really any media), but I just don't feel like being gay had a major, visible effect on his personality.

Really, all of the Young Avengers were underdeveloped. They'd been introduced and had some adventures, but the entire team had just barely gotten together when season one ended. Getting a spotlight issue will be good for them. Hopefully, they'll get their own title back soon.