Written by Allan Heinberg
Penciled by Jim CheungTHE SCARLET WITCH WAR IS ON! Latveria becomes a battle-ground as Magneto battles Doctor Doom — and the Young Avengers take on the Avengers — to determine the ultimate fate of the Scarlet Witch. But the mysterious reappearance of the time-traveling Iron Lad unleashes Wanda’s reality-altering powers upon the timestream itself, changing the game, and the Marvel Universe, forever.
We’re now officially past the halfway point with Avenger’s: The Children’s Crusade, Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung’s return to the Young Avengers characters who had been left semi-dormant for them. However, in it’s execution, the Young Avengers have found themselves faces in the story’s ever-increasing crowd — so how much of a comeback is this? Should we even call it a comeback? Has LL Cool J, in fact, been here for years?
Let’s talk more after the jump.
When last we left the Young Avengers, the Old But New Avengers, Wanda Maximoff, Doctor Doom, Magneto, and whoever else was in the periphery, a huge battle was occurring in the middle of a wedding, in the Mighty Marvel Manner. This was followed by the amazingly titled Avengers: The Children’s Crusade: Young Avengers one-shot, which gave us some insight into the return of Iron Lad (alias Kang the Conqueror, trapped in the midst of a particularly heroic puberty). For those who don’t remember, Iron Lad ‘died’ back in Young Avengers #6 (I think), which I believe was published something like forty years ago now.
That’s noteworthy in that I’d like to digress for a moment about my own Young Avengers experience. When the title debuted, I was taken by surprise; I picked it up more or less at random, and was knocked on my ass. This trend continued for five more issues, before the second half of the series slid into both blown-deadline delays and halfway-incomprehensible hypercompression, as if Allan Heinberg was trying to ram two years of story into four issues. I went from loving the book to being baffled by it, so with The Children’s Crusade, I really wasn’t sure what to expect — a return to form reflecting the book’s earliest days, or another continuity-porn mess of people kicking and screaming at one another?
It’s a little bit of both, to be honest. This is the sort of book where a huge panel of Captain America and Patriot fighting a gaggle of Doombots also has a snappy back-and-forth where Cap unsubtly narrates why they’re fighting (to be fair, it’s been three or four months since #4). It’s committed to the big ideas and continuity crowd-pleasers, but also sidesteps the problems that have those self-anointed continuity cops in the fandom tossing and turning at night, and it doesn’t necessarily sidestep them elegantly. As Iron Lad puts it: “I’ve developed a new technology, which would allow us to inhabit a moment in time WITHOUT altering it.” Well, then! (And to think, written months in advance of Source Code, but coming out so soon after…)
The past may not be altered, but the present sure is. Back up in the intro paragraph, before you clicked over to read this, I noted that the Young Avengers have felt fairly peripheral in this whole story compared to Doom, Wanda, Magneto, et cetera. They get some good time in this issue, but it’s to accomplish a purpose that both involves them and further deflects the focus away them them. I won’t spoil it, especially because who knows if it’ll even stick. The message I’m taking away from Avengers: The Children’s Crusade is not “Heinberg and Cheung, back in action, telling a big new Young Avengers story!” It’s “Heinberg and Cheung, fixing the most griped-about elements and loose plot threads of a seven-year-old Brian Bendis comic, in a story that also happens to feature the Young Avengers!”
This is a strategy that isn’t predicated on much of a risk. It emphasizes that the Avengers line can have something for everyone (any color you like, as long as it’s Avengers!); it rewards longtime fans, both of the Young Avengers and of the Avengers proper; it moves stalled characters forward; it offers a potent hit of nostalgia for the simpler times of 2003 (and some of 2004). The thing is that in trying to move forward as an Avengers event, it’s a case of having it’s cake and eating it too. People reading for the return of the Young Avengers under their original creative team will be disappointed by the fact that they’re mostly bit-players in a comic about the Scarlet Witch. Scarlet Witch fans will be disappointed that it’s taken five issues to put her back in the red and pink, and we still don’t even know what her deal is (granted, if they gave it away on page one, there’d be no story). It tries to do both enormous Doombot-orgy fight scenes and smaller character-reunion moments; it tries to fill the word bubbles with both snappy one-liners and meaningful proclamations. The Children’s Crusade is not bad comic. However, it is a flawed one.
The Children’s Crusade tries to be all things to most Avengers fans (hardcore Bendisians are presumably still getting their fix in abundance), and in doing so much it can’t make any one aspect truly great. The art is fine work from Jim Cheung (with Justin Ponsor standing out with his bright, but not gaudy, coloring). His characters’ ‘acting’ has markedly improved since the early issues of Young Avengers, and the chaos in the issue’s first half is dynamic and explosive. The flashback to Avengers Disassembled is well-done as well — the appearance of Jack of Hearts takes the grotesque withering of Dave Finch’s zombified take, and phrases it in Cheung’s own language, affording Jack expression that even Finch’s best work often struggles to capture. Sure, he’s not the fastest guy in the world, but I can think of few better guys working within the purview of the Big Two today when it comes to stories about lots of characters running around doing lots of things.
I wish Heinberg was as on his game as Cheung. I really do, because the promise is there, showing it’s face in things like the marriage gag between Iron Lad and Vision, and the inspired choice of a turning point for what makes amnesiac Wanda gain a foothold in her past. As stated above, though: the issue is overstuffed. We have the back-end of a huge battle, a trip through time, an extended riff on a past Avengers storyline, and the return of a couple characters. That’s not a long list, and a writer like Jack Kirby would probably have all of that stuff happen within the first few pages of an issue. But once again, Heinberg is trying to have his cake and eat it, too. He wants all that stuff to happen, but within each of these pieces, he wants things to unfold at a leisurely pace to give the characters lots of room to banter with one another, to drop bon mots and exposition in equal proportion, and have fun digressing, Tristram Shandy-like, into various asides that may or may not feed back into the plot.
What this says to me, as a reader, is that Heinberg’s hand needs to be steadier. His comics work has been rare enough, so perhaps he doesn’t expect to ever get another platform to do these stories; perhaps he’s just not leaving it to chance. Still, five issues in (six if you count the Iron Lad special), what we have here is a story that can’t seem to make up it’s mind whether it’s walking or running. Whether or not this is a truly bad thing is, as always, up to individual readers. Those who want to see a slam-bang epic on the order of the Kree-Skrull War might find themselves getting a little itchy waiting for the next plot point to bubble in, but readers who simply want to spend some time with characters that they enjoy and see the ways that a talented writer can make dialogue volley between them will probably be pleased as punch.
I’m somewhere in the middle, and as such, my reaction is right in there with me. There’s a lot to like about The Children’s Crusade, don’t get me wrong. Like, though — not love. It’s not quite the return of a fan favorite, and it’s not quite the franchise-furthering epic that it could have been. It’s a pleasant enough ramble, like watching a rerun of Big Trouble in Little China on a weekend afternoon that will likely end up with no stronger an effect than to return a couple longtime characters to the land of the living and/or usable. Then again, we’ve got four issues left — who knows where we’re going from here? Let’s just hope that things don’t fall apart as rapidly as Young Avengers did, because The Children’s Crusade still has a fighting chance.
Final Verdict: 7.0 – Buy
