Gillen posted on his blog his thoughts on why he chose who he chose for the Young Avengers roster as well as a sound track to the characters, it's pretty interesting stuff also I can not wait for this book:
MEET THE TEAM: YOUNG AVENGERS
With two weeks to go until Young Avengers 1 is released, I thought I better actually do this or forever hold my peace. Well, that’s unlikely. I never hold my peace.
You know what I mean.
Basically, the idea being I have a wander through the cast of opening cast of Young Avengers. Not that it’s really a team, but “Meet The Team” seems to be the lens we look at superbooks through, and who I am I to deny convention?
(Seriously? - Gillen’s Sneery Subconscious)
Anyway - I go through the cast, write some things, link to a few songs from my own personal Young Avengers playlist and talk about why they’re connected to the individual. I was going to use some of my fave fan art of the characters, but decided there’s something a little parasitic about that. Assume this is my shout-out. Mad love, etc.
I also thought it worth doing this, as from my casual watching the Young Avengers tag seems to be an exciting battleground. To my eye, it seems to primarily caused by the complete lack of NEW INPUT into the community. When you’ve got people writing big serious critiques on the amount of styling products a character is choosing to use, you know that they are absolutely pregnant with desire and are looking for anything to latch their thoughts onto.
So I figure six random essays give people other stuff to think about. Worth stressing that I’m clearly angling whatever I’m writing to not actually spoiling the book. I’ll be talking about initial thoughts and larger concepts rather than where I ended up - or where I’m planning on taking the characters. I’d warn anyone against reading too much into them. That said, I’d warn against anyone reading too little into them.
Ask the Journey Into Mystery readers. I can be tricksy.
I also have no idea what I’m going to write. There will be very little (if any) proofreading. This will be fun.
This is the opening track of my Young Avengers soundtrack.
It’s Amy Aka Spent Gladiator 1 by The Mountain Goats.
Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive
Do every stupid thing to try to drive the dark away
Let people call you crazy for the choices that you make
Climb limits past the limits
Jump in front of trains all day
And stay alive
Mysterious Girl, our Miss America.
In the earliest prototype stages of Young Avengers, I hit the “Can’t use Eli” note and decided I’d like someone to fill that visual niche. This was before I’d nailed down entirely what I was doing, and wanted to keep at least some of the “Mirroring Niches Of Other Avengers” aspect of the team. I needed a Captain America in the red-white-and-blue.
Did anyone come to mind?
And in one of those quirks of fate that are so appealing, I’d just finished Casey/Dragota’s Vengeance mini. And right there was Miss America Chavez, who even in the group-cast and dizzying structure, came across as the lead. Hyper-strong flying hero with lack of respect for traditional heroes and had been doing the save the world thing on the down-low for years. As she put it, you couldn’t pay her to be an Avenger.
Ah. Let’s have her. She’s great.
I didn’t even realise she was re-using the name of an old character. She’s new. She clearly bears no relation whatsoever to her forebear. I half think she doesn’t even know that anyone else used the name, which is why she’s particularly useful for the cast.
One of the themes of the book is about becoming yourself. The previous Young Avengers was all about this relationship with older people, taking on their roles in order to become what you want to be – which is fundamentally, cosplay as life-direction choice. And that’s fine. That’s just how you grow. I’ve written a lot about that transitional stage in books like Phonogram. You find your own way. Anyone who’s written has a shitload of stuff before you find your own voice which stinks of other people’s. This is just how life works.
What Miss America allows is showing someone who is as much a hero as anyone the cast has ever met, but is only a little older. And if she’s doing this, by herself, and has been for years… why not you? She’s the cool new friend who’s just more worldly than you are, and by knowing them, you get your own expectations scrambled.
In most fiction, you’d probably make her from one of the world’s major cities and move her to the suburbs. In superhero fiction, we dramatise it through the metaphor, and make her have spent a lot of her time in other dimensions. She’s been to places you haven’t. She’s not just living in New York when we first meet her in the .1 story – she’s meeting in a platonic perfect ideal of New York, where the metropolis has swept the entire globe and there’s mountains made of statues of liberty. She’s seen things that Billy and Teddy haven’t even dreamt of. Generally speaking, she’s pretty cool. Which is tricky to write without being try-too-hard.
Mainly I think she pulls it off because she knows that being cool is bullshit.
She’s violent. Which could be seen as skirting a latina-girl-with-fiery-temper stereotype.
But she hasn’t a temper. Or, at least, none that we’ve seen on the page. She’s just terribly direct and believes that appropriate levels of violence are acceptable. She has little tolerance for games. That scene in the .1 issue, we meet her, showing her put up her defences and then start fencing with Loki… before exploding into action.
Before it kicks off, there’s two panels which Jamie renders beautifully.
1) She puts down her chopsticks, very precicely and carefully.
2) She apologises to the waitress and promises to pay for any damages.
That’s not a temper.
That’s control.
Her nailed-down-emotions is absolutely key to her.
She plays her cards close to her chest.
She’s probably swallowed her cards.
Because while everyone’s going to be looking at Loki, what’s the deal with Miss America is as big a mystery. There’s already enough in the .1 to allow people to pick over, and that only grows in her first one. The unspoken we-know-stuff-we’re-not-telling-people between America and Loki is the heart of the dynamic.
Mystery, let us Journey Into It, etc.
I’m not even 100% sure whether I’ll reveal the full extent of her background. I know them. I’ll hint at them, but part of me likes just leaving the pieces there for everyone to put together by themselves.
Or maybe I will.
Man, I’m terrible.
One more thing: the costume. Jamie killed on it. For her to fill the role, she needed to look the part. You know when Jamie hits, because the cosplayers go wild. Hell, if I had the legs, I’d be wearing it too.
(There’s probably an essay on Miss America’s thighs somewhere.)
Honestly, the exact moment when I realised this would actually turn out okay was when Jamie and Mike sent me the first panel of the .1 issue. The scale, the sense of movement and grace, the costume juxtaposed against this imaginary cityscape that offered up more detail the more you looked at it…
You get a panel like that, and you feel exhilarated. I felt I was flying. I immediately paid it the highest compliment a comic writer can give, and stripped captions. Five of them. Why say anything when the image said everything? Cut it down to “I WAS ON EARTH-212” to create the off-handed context and sense of elsewhere and roll with the Azealia Banks nod.
Not a bad job, sometimes.
Don’t Be A Hard Rock
When You Really Are A Gem.
The hardest thing about writing Kate Bishop is, of course, not stealing Fraction’s Lady Hawkguy gag.
This is another one with odd timing. I was planning on hitting up Kate next, and then the first three pages drops unexpectedly kind of pre-empting it. How will I write Kate? You already know.
Okay. Here’s some of the thinking
In the earliest stages of Young Avengers, even before I had officially said yes to the gig, my first task was to decide which parts of the existing cast would remain as mine. I already knew instinctive that Kid Loki would put the team back together – that was a pre-actual-work sort of thinking. This was conscious.
Children’s Crusade had reduced the scale of the decision but increased its importance. Cassie was dead. Jonas was dead. Nate had stepped back on the path to becoming Kang. I didn’t want to explicitly undermine anything that had come before, so all those three were off the table.
Since Patriot was unavailable, I was left with Teddy, Billy, Tommy and Kate.
I’ll be writing more about this later, but in cold, hard dramatic maths and team versatility, there was no way I wasn’t going to include Kate from those options. The other three are tied together by blood and love. Their stories are often each others stories, with a tendency to overlap. Kate, despite the shared experience, was her own thing. She brought a whole different perspective and options of what sort of story I could tell.
Even if I hated her, I’d have picked her.
I didn’t hate her. She was one of my favourite Young Avengers. I liked her enough that even if it didn’t make a lot of dramatic sense for her to be in the mix, I’d have tried to work out a way to work her in.
Phew.
Kate hasn’t superpowers.
The concept of superheroes without superpowers is something that I think about a bit too much. A trope of the genre is how the unpowered human can stand against the power of these walking gods. It’s the Batman Always Wins line – that by force of will and preparation, you can trump anything.
Looked with cold eyes, it’s utter nonsense. You can’t trick an A-bomb by hiding in the shadows. You need to turn anyone with powers into an idiot to pull it off. And that’s putting aside the fact that all the “normal” human heroes are performing stunts that are simply beyond anything any actual member of our species can do. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever when looked at in a literal fashion.
Which makes it lucky that it’s not a particularly literal genre. It doesn’t matter if it’s realistic or factual. It only matters if it’s true. It’s a metaphor. It’s all metaphors.
With Young Avengers, we’re firing everything about being 18-20 through a superheroic filter. As such, powers tend to come across as potential, talent, ability or whatever. And as amazing as Kate is, as hard as she’s worked – and she’s had to work harder than anyone else on the team to be who she is – she still isn’t as mercurially brilliant as everyone else. She looks around the room and knows that she lacks in a way that all her hard work can never overcome.
I’m not leaning into this that much – not least because “unpowered hero realises that being yourself is the true superpower!” - is a pretty threadbare plot by now. But it’s there, lying beneath it all. These are things that she’s come to terms with already. Kate having come to terms with stuff is a big part of her, for me. A compare and contrast with Eli is useful – where Eli was serious, Kate was sensible. She’s got a level head on her shoulders. She weighs her feelings and decides what she’s going to do about them. She doesn’t have an inferiority complex. She’s worked past that. In some ways she’s the oldest of the Young Avengers, even more than Marvel Boy and Ms. America.
This segues neatly into something several people have asked me about: Kate’s origin.
She’s doesn’t let that define her, and I won’t either.
Hmm. I’ve got some other things to say about Kate, in terms of how it was interesting that the previous YA didn’t use her as the reader-entry-point character, and why I decided to use her for that exact purpose, but that’ll wait for my notes on Issue 1.
I’ll end with some notes on how I wanted her to feel on the panel. She’s unusual in the cast, because she’s the only one who’s been in a comic recently. She’s appearing in Hawkeye every month. She’s got her separate life to the Young Avengers – in that she’s been secretly having adventures with Clint Original Hawkeye. The other Young Avengers don’t know this to start, not least because everyone realises how touchy Billy is on the issue of anyone starting up again. But, relevantly to us, she’s got another life. She’s a little more worldly, and you can tell. But worldly is grounded – she’s not otherworldly like Marvel Boy are is
She’s basically phenomenally classy without a fear of the modern. Jamie’s followed David Aja’s design to start with, but his big influence is British Singer Jessie Ware. I believe Jamie noted she manages to be simultaneously both Robert Palmer and the Robert Palmer Girls. Or he stole it from someone and didn’t tell me who. But, for once, she’s right.
Inevitably, she’s on the soundtrack.
Of all the Young Avengers, I think she’s the character I’d most like to be like. The world would be a better place if there were more people like Kate Bishop.
But no. I’m Loki. And not even the good bits of Loki. Man!
That’s Noh-Varr to you.
That’s Noh-Varr to anyone.
I had to start with Marvel Boy lust because of the news that Bowie was returning to the world stage today. He remains Jamie and my primary influence on the character’s visual and mood (specifically, in the Man Who Fell To Earth period, though there’s some Ziggy too). It’s not the first and won’t be the last. When a man has the chameleon aesthetic he works like that.
(The most successful previous one was our SIEGE%3A LOKI where Bowie in glam-mode was our model for our Loki%2C all nail-varnish eyeliner and the seductive potential of they-call-it-evil-we-call-it-us. Because we were in the Loki-should-be-hot camp way before Hiddleston brought anyone with any taste whatsoever to that particular yard.)
I’ll come back to sex as it’s important with Marvel Boy.
Noh-Varr has primarily written by two people previously. Formerly Grant Morrison in the original mini playing as a Namor-esque James Dean archetype Zen-Fascist and carver of expletives by blowing down city blocks in a decorative fashion. Latterly Brian Michael Bendis who took him into the heart of the Marvel Universe acquainted him with Earth gave him the mantle of cosmic Protector and lead to him being rejected by both the Avengers and the Kree. The aim was something that created a composite of those two approaches and send it off in another direction. How to square this particular circle?
It basically was reversing the process I did with the almost-as-argumentative Hope in Uncanny. Over in Generation Hope. She spent most of my run as a is-she-a-villain-or-not. But despite all that, when she was on the big stage, she knew what time it was – and it was the time to do the job. Like someone getting into a dream job, wearing their best clothes and even ironing for the first few months, she did the job. That’s Noh-Varr and the Avengers.
So when you go through that process, and you find yourself fucked over by every adult influence and formal organisation in your life, you may figure “Fuck them all” and look after your own nihilistic pleasure for a bit.
I got this feeling on the summer day when you were gone.
I crashed my car into the bridge. I watched, I let it burn.
I threw your shit into a bag and pushed it down the stairs.
I crashed my car into the bridge.
You’re on a different road, I’m in the milky way
You want me down on earth, but I am up in space
You’re so damn hard to please, we gotta kill this switch
You’re from the 70’s, but I’m a 90’s bitch
I don’t care, I love it. I don’t care.
Noh-Varr has two saving graces. Firstly, he hasn’t collapsed completely. He’s instinctively a hero – his hedonism is almost impossible to separate from a hero. Superheroism as Point-Break Surfer-Zen, world disasters as a wave to be ridden and mastered. Everything has been taken from him, and he acts like a hero anyway, because being a hero is the only thing that has ever meant anything to him.
(Random aside: Noh-Varr was totally the Wesley Crusher of his Kree ship.)
His second saving grace?
He loves Earth. He loves it in a way which us Earth dwellers may find a little embarrassing. And we find it embarrassing just because he’s seeing it with fresh eyes and we’re covered by the tar the 21 century tries to funnel into our lungs.
But Earth is amazing. Marvel Boy realises it, and he’ll die in the hope that some of us will too.
Hell, he’d die to ensure this record lived on.
He’s also hot.
Ever since our work on Phonogram, Jamie have strove to make our comics – for want of a better phrase – slash-fic-able. If you’re working in certain heroic fantasy genres, that’s part of the emotional churn. And that part is what loses the sort of person who thinks by Jamie redesigning Ms. Marvel’s costume he’s destroying the “sex-cake”.
(Oh man. Someone really did say Jamie had removed the icing from the sex-cake. Sometimes all you can do is blink when doing this gig. Blink so hard you hope your eyes open on some kind of better world. I digress.)
Anyway – point being: characters being sexy is cool but objectification in the process is bullshit. An inability to see the difference is a fundamental weakness. My wife’s in the next room watching Lord of the Rings, and I guarantee she’s thinking sexy thoughts about Aragorn. But that works without anything which annihilates him as a character, y’know? The readers mind will latch upon this stuff.
That’s how Jamie and me work.
Generally speaking.
Oh, Noh-Varr. You are the sex-cake.
Anything else?
Oh yeah.
Drop the “Boy”.
(The playlist is a mix of stuff that absolutely is transcendentally beautiful stuff which I connect deeply with the concept of being young, stuff which evokes my own personal experience of the emotions I’m trying to reprocess and stuff I just find funny. This is mostly the latter. Mostly.)
Log in to comment