Cassie Abuse Is Hilarious

Cassie Lang. Fifteen years old. Stature. Young Avenger. Initiative recruit. Mostly reviled due to being a turncoat pro-regger. The universe's bitch.

Wait, what?

Allow me to explain.

After a brief field trip to Wikipedia (this is another article all you non-comic-geeks should have a tab open for), I can tell you where she originated. In 1979 real world time, reformed thief Scott Lang was released for good behavior after three years in jail. He was totally devoted to his tiny daughter, Cassie Lang. Unfortunately, she got sick with a heart condition. Scott stole the Ant-Man equipment to rescue a kidnapped doctor who could save her life. Scott then got into the Avengers and had an obscure career where he fought the Taskmaster repeatedly.

Cassie spent lots of this time getting kidnapped or hanging out with superheroes. At one point, she apparently had some kind of adolescent romance with Kristoff, some kid who thought he was Doctor Doom or something. It was some weird Fantastic Four thing—not my area of expertise. Eventually, Cassie’s mom and her stepdad got full custody. Cassie snuck away to visit her dad until Scarlet Witch sicced Exploding Zombie Jack of Hearts on him after Bendis drove her crazy. Scott Lang died in a pointless, tragic death and Cassie apparently had to spend some time stalking Iron Man to get an explanation of what exactly happened.

This is where Young Avengers comes in.

Cassie had a screaming fight with her mom and stepdad and ran away from home. She saw the original Young Avengers team (Iron Lad/Young Kang, Billy, Teddy and Iron Lad) on the news, where they spectacularly failed to resolve a hostage crisis at a posh wedding. They had to be rescued by a bridesmaid, Kate Bishop, stabbing a guy with one of Eli’s random shuriken (seriously, the hell?). Cassie goes to talk to Kate at the hospital where the wedding guests were taken. The two go to the burnt-out hull of Avenger’s mansion to get Cassie’s dad’s gear. Turns out that hanging around Pym particles has mutated Cassie to the point where she can shrink or grow at will.

Some other stuff happens that I won’t get into here, but Cassie and Young Kang kiss a couple times after knowing each other for a few hours in the middle of a crisis, right before Kang leaves forever. Oh, teenagers. Cassie joins the team and they have adventures for a few issues.

Anyway, Civil War happens. Half of the superheroes decide to slavishly obey the government, put those who disagree in a hellish Negative Zone gulag after having them hunted down by brain-chipped supervillains (Bullseye once killed a church full of nuns) and create a murderous clone of Thor whose brains they scoop out and replace with robot parts. The rest decide to go into hiding and randomly pounce on supervillains and raid the Negative Zone gulag once. They make one attempt to get an interview with a reporter (Sally Floyd, dumbest bitch in the Marvel Universe, who refuses the interview on moral principles because she’s an awful, awful reporter), but otherwise don’t try to sway public opinion at all.

At first, the Young Avengers are all anti-registration. Then there’s a huge pro-reg ambush and Bill Foster, the other anti-reg giant, gets an enormous hole blown into his chest by Clone Thor. The anti-regs are about to be killed en masse and only avoid death because Sue Richards is awesome. They had to leave Bill’s body. He couldn’t be shrunk down, so he was buried in a tarp and chains and a huge hole in the ground. For some reason, Cassie defects that night.

When the rebel Avengers invade the Negative Zone gulag, Cassie fights on the pro-reg side. By the way, one of the main arguments for pro-regs is that they would keep inexperienced, vulnerable, younger heroes out of danger. No comment.

After Civil War finally ends, Avengers: The Initiative begins. This is a huge boot camp for newby supers in the same town where the supervillain supernova that started Civil War happened (Stamford). Some of the other Young Avengers are there, but there’s really no rhyme, reason or explanation for who ends up there and why. In the first issue of A:I, a recruit is accidentally killed and his death is covered up. An ex-Nazi hired by pro-regs decides to clone him. One of the clones merges with a piece of alien technology and rampages through the camp, killing and maiming many. Stamford: Where Children Go To Die. These don't have anything to do with Cassie, although she was present at the last incident. At some point before they happened (I assumed Cassie went home after the clone rampage), the following events occurred:

In Ms. Marvel, the Puppet Master started abducting women and selling them as slaves out of a compound in South America. The normal women were obviously being sold as sex slaves, but he was also selling superheroines for unnamed purposes. Cassie was one of them. She spent days, if not weeks, serving the Puppet Master and being shown off in front of potential buyers. When Ms. Marvel’s sidekick got kidnapped and Ms. Marvel went to investigate, Cassie was sent to fight her as a giant. During this fight, Cassie got a car thrown at her face. It didn’t faze her. Eventually, she was knocked out and rescued with the other women. There is absolutely no mention of anyone missing her or wondering where she went.

In an issue of A:I, Eric O’Grady, the awesomely amoral new Ant-Man, is sent to Stamford and trained by Taskmaster—remember, I mentioned that he fought Scott Lang? Taskmaster remembered too, because he asked O’Grady if he’s Scott Lang. O’Grady quickly says no and makes up some entertaining lies about Lang to get on Tasky’s good side (namely, that he wasn’t a real Avenger and would spy on women in the shower with his powers). Cassie hears this (by the way, she recognized Taskmaster and seems surprised that there were supervillains at the camp, so I guess that was the first she’d heard about the pro-reg’s questionable hiring practices). Unfortunately, this occurred just after Hank Pym had shrunk to escape an explosion and Cassie had asked him if her dad could've survived the same way, only to be told that that definitely didn't happen. Predictably, Cassie doesn't react well to the situation. In fact, she reacts very, very badly. How badly?

She yells “STOP TELLING LIES ABOUT MY DAD!” and tries to STOMP HIM WHILE GIANT-SIZED. Okay, what he said about her dead father was horrible, but… she tries to KILL HIM. She’s unsuccessful, of course, and a giant fight ensues. O’Grady distracts her by yelling “Oh, the humanity! You just stepped on Stingray!” and clobbers her in the face with a bus. I would say Vehicles 2, Cassie 0, but the fact that she doesn’t have a nose like a boxer and shrapnel scars makes me think it’s more of a tie. Anyway, Hank Pym steps in, but before we can have a three-way giant fight (and Cassie can get a hit in) Taskmaster incapacitates all three of them.

Vision’s issue of the Young Avengers miniseries involves him sneaking Cassie out of the camp by posing as Tony Stark and taking her on a date. Young Vision has nothing in common with Old Vision besides appearance, name and operating system. He’s based off of Young Kang’s brainwaves and made out of his armor. He takes the name Jonas to assert his independence. Since he’s based off of Young Kang, he has a crush on Cassie and successfully achieves boyfriend/girlfriend status in this issue. Cassie is still very pro-reg in this issue and returns to the camp after their date.

In Cassie’s issue of the Young Avengers miniseries, she’s back in New York with her mom and stepdad, so I would place it after the disaster with the clone at the camp. Tensions are high. She has another screaming fight, storms out, and promptly gets into a giant fight with the Growing Man, who falls onto her stepdad. She goes… somewhere, I think back to her house, and calls Kate in tears without explaining the situation. Kate gets there and Cassie is totally catatonic and steadily shrinking. When Kate has to get a microscope to see her, she calls Eli and Billy. Since Kate hasn’t been able to snap her out of it, Billy shrinks Eli down. Cassie tells Eli about the fight. He manages to snap her out of it (naturally by yelling, since this is a comic book) and she goes and talks to her mom. Cassie’s stepdad is in a coma and might be paralyzed when he wakes up. Cassie and her mom hug and make up and agree to work on their relationship more.

In Kate’s issue of the Young Avengers miniseries, it’s mentioned in passing that Kate and Cassie are back to being confidants and Cassie has been regularly spending time with Jonas.

In a recent (most recent?) issue of Secret Invasion, the YAs went to the human underground resistance base. One of them was knocked unconscious and woke up there. Guess who?

In summary:

• A large portion of her childhood was spent with her dad in jail. She also had a terminal illness.
• She had some kind of romance or friendship with Doom Junior (?).
• She was forcibly separated from her beloved superhero dad.
• Her dad died pointlessly. She had to stalk Tony Stark to find out why.
• She had regular screaming fights with her mom and stepdad.
• She tried to run away from home.
• She made out with the boy who would become Kang the Conqueror.
  
• She dropped out of school to become a fugitive from the law.
• She joined up with the law and was conscripted into the army (a generous estimation of her age is FIFTEEN) and had to fight her best friends (also, her mom hates superheroes, so she basically had nowhere to go for sympathy or understanding).
• She was kidnapped and enslaved by Puppetmaster and almost got sold, POSSIBLY AS A SEX SLAVE.
• She heard two guys laughing about how her dead dad sucked, TRIED TO KILL ONE OF THEM, and was humiliatingly beaten down by the two.
• She was at the camp when a clone went on a rampage and killed or maimed dozens of people
• She had even more screaming fights with her mom and stepdad
• She accidentally crippled her stepdad
• Secret Invasion. There were lots of other people on the battleground, but I still think it counts, especially since she was apparently singled out to be knocked unconscious since she was the only one who woke up in the issue I read (I didn't read the part where she got knocked out).
  

Even accounting for the fact that she apparently made up with her friends off screen, is getting regular robo-makeouts and has a better relationship with her mom, Cassie should be one huge ball of neuroses. Her life was degenerating into a horrible, sucking black hole of pain and misery. To the credit of the man who wrote her issue of the miniseries, her “epiphany therapy” isn’t portrayed as a cure-all… she and her mom don’t immediately have a perfect relationship, they just understand each other better, and her stepdad is still seriously injured.

However. If Young Avengers ever rises from the grave and has another ongoing series, I will bet you one million Internet dollars that over half the issues with her life that I listed will be dropped forever. Her GOING TO BOOT CAMP AT FIFTEEN WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU MARVEL will only be mentioned as part of issues with her leaving the team for pro-regs, if at all, and the full mental and emotional implications of her GOING TO BOOT CAMP AT FIFTEEN YEARS OLD will be dropped. Her being kidnapped and enslaved by Puppet Master will never be mentioned. The fact that she TRIED TO KILL A STRANGER, albeit one who insulted her dad, will never be mentioned. The continuity issues—when was she at the camp? When did she make up with her friends? How mad were they at her? Did she go home after the Puppet Master thing or after the clone rampage thing? Did anyone care that she went missing for god knows how long?

Before she and Jonas started going out (I don't have a problem with this development), I was hoping that she and Young Kang would have this awesomely messed up, totally unhealthy relationship where they would drag each other down into immaturity and immorality. I mean, I knew it would never happen, but a geek can dream, right? I’m overcritical of every fictional relationship ever, so intentionally horrible relationships of mutual destruction make me happy.

But pipe dreams aside, let’s face it: the only issue anyone will ever remember is “Didn’t she have a dead dad? Okay, that’s her characterization, let’s call it a day.” Maybe, if we’re very lucky, they’ll remember that she turned pro-reg before any of her teammates (some of whom are still anti-reg, though fucking Marvel has never made it clear which ones). The best thing that I can imagine happening is that a) the fact that she almost killed that one dude will be addressed, possibly by explaining that without her friends or family to vent to about the ever-increasing shittiness of her life, she was resorting to violence and b) the unofficial mentor of the team, Jessica Jones, would talk to her about their shared experiences with being mind-controlled slaves (although what Jessica went through was longer, more intense and a hundred times worse than even Cassie's shit life).

Anyway, why am I so pessimistic about this? Because the minor characters get no love. Because Marvel only cares about constantly having A-list characters making drama, only to forget it for the next big event. Marvel is changing the status quo to disguise the fact that their characters don't change or grow or learn from anything. Meanwhile, minor characters like Cassie are put through the wringer and have their lives uprooted, only for it to be forgotten because they don’t have a home title and the people who want to use them as a guest-star can’t be bothered to figure out where they’re supposed to be and if they ever do get a title… seriously, are you expecting someone at Marvel to read some back issues? Really?

There are a few reasons why she's the one who gets this treatment. She's a giant and a teenager. When it comes to a fight that the writer want to look impressive without upping the power levels of all the characters involved, giants are a definite go-to. Marvel hates teenagers and regularly abuses them. Plus, nobody knows which of her teammates are registered and which aren't, so the writers are probably scared of getting jumped on for violating continuity and only feel safe writing her. I've got to give the poor guys credit for that. But still, the level of crap heaped on her is enormous. She shouldn't be fighting aliens or crime, she should be somewhere safe and quiet until she's repaired her relationship with her mom and friends to the point where she no longer gets mad enough to kill strangers.

Her teammate, Tommy, is similarly mischaracterized. He’s supposed to be mentally unstable. Did you miss the part where he had to be stopped from murdering his scientist captors and exploded some Skrulls into a fine mist, BEFORE knowing they’d regenerate?*

But there’s still a spot of optimism. Notable exceptions: Robert Kirkman often creates his own little playgrounds, where each character is lovingly crafted, given a logical arc of growth, and continuity makes perfect sense. Loners, a miniseries by Cebulski, digs into the backstories of a handful of D- and Z-listers to carry on plot points from years ago and preserve their characterization. There are others out there.

But not enough for me. The only defense mechanism is the title of this article.

I like to imagine Cassie and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day That Continued For Several Months: "Woke up, gum in hair, dad still dead, friends still hate me, still being held captive in South America by Puppet Master, who forgot the dessert for my lunch because he was upset that nobody wants to a sex slave that stares at you with completely blank white eyes. Woke up, gum in hair, dad still dead, friends still hate me, still living in boot camp, forgot how to do long division because I haven't been to school since Civil War started. Woke up, gum in hair, dad still dead, apparently friends no longer hate me, stepdad still does, mother still disappointed, and now I screwed up again. I bet stuff like this never happens to me in the MC2 universe."


*Apparently Bendis did, because Secret Invasion wouldn’t exist without a Skrull dying from being STABBED IN THE CHEST.

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.