(season 1)

Brian Vaughan, Adrian Alphona, Josh Schwartz, and Stephanie Savage, 2017

Most Marvel characters of any renown date back to the 1960s or (more rarely) the 1970s.  Here’s a quick breakdown of the charac­ters who have headlined or been members of headlining teams in the MCU movies and TV shows up to this point in the timeline, along with the years they debuted in the comics:

So, what, was Stan Lee the only one who could think up new superheroes?  Of course not.  But other writers were reluctant to, because writing for Marvel was work-for-hire.  If you came up with a character like Wolverine who made billions of dollars for the company over the course of the subsequent half century, you got nothing⁠—or at least nothing other than a standard paycheck for the issue in which he first appeared.  So writers have tended to either play with the existing toys or create derivatives of those toys.  For instance, when Marvel decided that it was time to freshen up its roster with a team of teenage superheroes, the Champions, the charter members were Amadeus Cho (knock-off of the Hulk, created 1962), Miles Morales (knock-off of Spider-Man, created 1962), Viv Vision (knock-off of the Vision, created 1968), Kamala Khan (knock-off of Ms. Marvel, created 1976), and Sam Alexander (knock-off of Nova, created 1976).  They were later joined by such characters as Shaun Lucas (knock-off of Cap­tain America, created 1941), Riri Williams (knock-off of Iron Man, created 1963), and Nadia Van Dyne (knock-off of the Wasp, cre­ated 1963).  The team name itself was a Marvel property dating to 1975.  Other teams over the years that purported to consist of new characters either turned out to be old ones or were tied to the old ones: the Thunderbolts were revealed as established Mar­vel villains in disguise, the Slingers were all Spider-Man knock-offs, etc.  So it was a hell of a thing when 2003 rolled around and Brian Vaughan, having already made a splash with his creator-owned series Y: The Last Man, did something astounding: he took a premise and a batch of characters that absolutely could have stood alone as another creator-owned series, and he brought it to Marvel.  This was more than just whipping up a handful of new Inhumans or saying, “Hey, what if Doctor Druid had a son??”  This was basically adding a whole new room to the house.

As for that premise, Vaughan was kind enough to articulate it flat out on the splash page of the last issue of the first volume: “At least once during our adolescent years, many of us felt that our parents were the most evil people alive… but what if they really were?”  Runaways is about five rich L.A. teenagers and one tween who aren’t friends, exactly, but who are used to hang­ing out at regular intervals when their parents get together⁠—and who discover that the reason their parents get together at regu­lar intervals is that they’re a cabal of murderous supervillains.  This may be where Vaughan saw some value in setting his story in the Marvel Universe.  Most story worlds ask the audience to give them one buy-in: that telepathy exists, say, or that vampires are real.  In the MU, there are thousands of buy-ins: telepathy and vampires, not to mention shrinking gas, weaponized chi, resur­rection from the dead, Norse gods, sentient robots, cat people, archers who fight in melees among superhumans and don’t get instantly killed… the list goes on.  One of the gimmicks of Run­aways is that when the supervillains do meet up, you have several of these buy-ins sitting at the same table.  To wit:

But while the Marvel Universe comes with all these buy-ins as part of the package, the Marvel Cinematic Universe does not.  The MCU is a world in which people accept that Asgardians and gamma-irradiated monsters exist, and that there might be an Inhuman or two lurking somewhere in your city, but unlike the MU, it’s not a world in which half the people waiting in line at the taco truck are visiting from the 31st century or the Negative Zone.  The show therefore makes quite a few changes to its source material.

That said, the Wilders are almost exactly the same.  They all look and act like they just walked off the page of the original comic.

The Minorus also look and act almost exactly the same as their comics counterparts⁠—except they aren’t sorcerers.  Robert Min­oru is now just a schlubby programmer.  Tina Minoru does wield the Staff of One, but it is presented as a piece of advanced tech rather than a true magical artifact.  The biggest change to the Minoru family is that Nico has been given a dead older sister, Amy.  But Nico herself⁠—yeah, perfect.

The Yorkeses⁠—again, a big wow at how perfectly these roles were cast.  I guess Dale looks a smidgen younger than the guy from the comics, but still, even in the days to come when AIs are generating avatars directly from the source material, it’s hard to imagine a better match.  However, the MCU doesn’t really have the latitude to have characters blithely explain that they picked up a genetically engineered dinosaur in the 87th century, as hap­pens in the comic.  So the Yorkeses have been reimagined as bio­engineers, and their dinosaur is the result of a sort of “Jurassic Park at home” project they have undertaken.  As for Gert: she is noticeably slimmer than the Gert from the comics (who is pretty overtly a strike for “fat acceptance” in the creators’ diversity agenda), but more importantly, she’s a lot less dour.  I would even go so far as to say that TV Gert is distinctly winsome!  A signifi­cant improvement.

On to the Steins.  The Marvel Universe doesn’t really have room for any super-geniuses we don’t know about.  After Amadeus Cho was introduced, we heard a lot of talk about a formal ranked list of every big brain in the MU.  The MCU does have space for new world-renowned geniuses, and Victor Stein is put forward as one of these: he’s basically Tony Stark all over again rather than the two-bit inventor from the comic.  A panel of him punching Chase in issue #1 has been spun out here into a lifetime of abuse of his wife and son.  As for that son: in the comics, Chase is sort of the Joey Tribbiani of the group⁠—a slacker, dimwitted fratboy-to-be, but with heart.  He’s been reinvented here⁠—still a jock, but prettied up considerably (they found some sort of 21st-century Jason Priestley to play him) and radically smartened up, with formidable tech skills of his own.

The Deans have also been radically reinvented.  Gone is the planet Majesdane⁠—or, at least, it hasn’t yet been mentioned.  Frank is still an actor, but he’s not part of the cabal, and Leslie is now the head of a Scientology-styled religion called the Church of Gibborim.  (In the comics, the Gibborim are a race of giants to whom the evil parents have been ritually sacrificing teenagers; time will tell whether we’re headed there on the TV show or whether it is just a verbal tip of the cap.)  This gives Karolina a much clearer role than in the comics, where she’s kind of a non-entity.  Here she’s the shiny, buttoned-down religious girl.  Like Chase, she’s been prettied up far beyond her comics counterpart and looks like she could be the cover model for the BYU course catalog.  The one thing the TV folks kept from the comics, I am grateful to say, was Karolina’s power set: when she takes off her bracelet, she lights up with shimmering pastels.  Seeing this effect translated to live action was phenomenal.

And then there’s Molly.  Sigh.

The Runaways without Molly are like the Jackson 5 without Michael.  Like, nothin’ wrong with Tito, but the kid’s the one who sells the tickets.  And sure, the TV show has a character called Molly.  But they’ve aged her up.  Molly’s supposed to be eleven.  So much of the dynamic of the group revolves around this: the way the others protect her, the way she processes running away from the evil cabal differently from the rest, the contrast between her tiny stature and her super strength, all of her “kids say the most goddamned things” one-liners… that’s all thrown wildly out of whack if you create a new Molly who’s indistinguishable from the others.  Sometimes she’s written like she’s eleven, but that just makes her seem immature and not very bright.  The changes don’t stop there.  The writers have killed off her mother and father and had her adopted by the Yorkeses, which I would say ruins the symmetry of six kids and six pairs of evil parents, except that the symmetry was already ruined by writing Frank as an unwitting outsider.  And as there are no mutants in the MCU, she gets her powers in early childhood via some kind of magical rock that seems to be connected to the Church of Gib­borim and thereby to Karolina’s powers.  It felt like the writers were still stuck on the idea of minimizing the number of buy-ins, as if this were a standalone story: you can get your powers via tech, or you can get them via these magical rocks, but that’s it.  But this isn’t a standalone story⁠—it’s part of a shared universe, full of superhumans not connected to the magical rocks, so that ship has already sailed.

Perhaps even more striking than the changes in content were the changes in focus.  In comics, an origin is meant to set up an ongo­ing serial.  For the Runaways, that meant: (a) kids discover that their parents are supervillains; (b) in trying to investigate what exactly is going on, they get various power-ups; (c) with these power-ups, they are able to fend off their parents and escape; (d) with the team formed and a status quo established, the Run­aways have an assortment of adventures.  (As I recall, in their next few stories they had an encounter with a vampire and then squared off against Cloak and Dagger.)  But I watched the entire first season of this show and… they’re still doing the origin.  Ten hours of the kids investigating their parents right under their noses and getting their power-ups at a distinctly more gradual pace.  And most of this time the story is told from the parents’ perspective!  There are loads upon loads of flashbacks from before the kids’ time!  And it turns out that the really big change here is that the parents are given the beginning of a redemption arc: yes, they’ve been kidnapping and murdering teenagers, but they’ve been acting on the orders of the real Big Bad, a guy named Jonah who at the end of the season is still a mystery.  Is he one of the Gibborim?  Is he from Majesdane?  Something else?  The explanations are left for season two, or maybe season three, or possibly never.  The only closure we get is that the comics’ bad guys do a face turn and commit to taking on this even worse guy.

It was hard to escape the feeling that a lot of the narrative deci­sions that went into Runaways the TV show were motivated by considerations of more than just the narrative.  Like, why not just make Molly a mutant?  Because the rights to the X‑Men belong to a different studio.  Why not just make Molly eleven?  Probably because the TV people didn’t want to have to work with an eleven-year-old actress.  And why put so much emphasis on the parents, rather than getting them out of the way in a brief origin story and letting the members of the actual title team have some adventures?  I imagine that a big part of the answer is that it’s hard to get actors to sign on for a role when the pitch is “You’re playing a flat character who’ll be menacing your kid and your kid’s friends, getting defeated, and then scheming with the other baddies in occasional cutaways while the headliners are busy taking on a vampire”.  Much more enticing is a role that gives you a bunch of your own showcase moments, your own subplots full of marital strife and power plays against other members of the cabal, and, of course, opportunities to look sympathetic.  I sus­pect it’s also cheaper to give the adults opportunities to emote than it is to have the kids get into a brawl with the Wrecking Crew or go joyriding on Xavin the Super-Skrull’s spaceship.  And hey, to a certain extent it’s an improvement!  The parents are much more richly drawn characters than their comics counter­parts.  But dang, are we ever moving slowly.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the next couple of seasons to see how far we do end up getting, but it’s disappointing to know that, both because of the leisurely pace and because of the casting, I won’t be seeing the Punisher get taken out by an eleven-year-old girl.

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