With the news from this weekend’s NYCC that the Runaways are going to be showing up in future issues of Avengers Academy alongside other semi-forgotten Marvel teen heroes, I got to wondering: Do teen heroes necessarily work for audiences nowadays?
Don’t get me wrong; I like Avengers Academy a lot, so I’m not asking whether it’s a bad book. But adding the casts of Runaways, Spider-Girl, Young Allies and other canceled books to the line-up of the book just underlines how many different attempts Marvel has made at teen-led series over the years, and how many have just not found enough of an audience to keep going. Add in things like the various X-Men titles – Young X-Men, New X-Men, the revamped New Mutants before that title was given back to its original owners – and there’s a worrying amount of series that never quite found enough readers to keep books alive.
Over at DC, things are better with an entire “Young Justice” line complete with Teen Titans, Static Shock and Blue Beetle in addition to franchise extensions in things like Superboy and Supergirl (Fury of Firestorm for some reason isn’t included in the Young Justice line, but should be, considering its leads are high school students). But even so, Red Robin has bitten the dust and Batgirl has been revamped to remove the teen star with an older character, which fits with books like Legion of Super-Heroes and Hawk & Dove aging their leads into the seemingly more comfortable young adulthood.
I can’t work out if this is actually a thing, a sign that whatever trends may have seen teen superheroes be the in-thing – In the 1980s, don’t forget, the biggest selling DC books were New Teen Titans and Legion of Super-Heroes, and the Justice League was revamped to bring in new, younger characters to capitalize on the trend – have passed due to the increasing age of the average reader. After all, a ridiculous number of books get canceled at DC and Marvel all the time, so maybe it’s unsurprising that the younger characters just get caught up in that. And yet… I’d like to see one of these books become a big success at Marvel, you know? Just one, to prove that it can be done, and they can last a long time. We’ve come close twice, but both Runaways and Young Avengers fell apart for different reasons – here’s hoping that Avengers Academy can buck the trend and go the distance*.
(* Insert any other cliche you want there, seeing as I apparently have started doing so.)
October 17th, 2011 at 2:13 pm
I consider AVENGERS ACADEMY one of the better-written series, but in terms of audience demographics, it probably shouldn’t sell well. Why would adult males want to read about teens of either sex? The quality doesn’t really compensate for a natural lack of reader interest in the material.
SRS
October 17th, 2011 at 6:34 pm
Given how long I resisted superteen comics, it’s remarkable how big a fan I became of Tim Drake and of the Johns Teen Titans. There was a lot to be said for stories built around young, relatively optimistic heroes.
October 17th, 2011 at 10:01 pm
the reason why these books don’t sell is because the comic reading public is made up of a bunch of old farts
October 18th, 2011 at 3:30 am
Teen heroes might work more for DC than Marvel because traditionally, DC has been more idealistic while Marvel has been more realistic, so the absurdity and / or criminality of sending in TEEN CHILDREN into harm’s way to fight criminals doesn’t seem as cute in a more hard-bitten realistic world.
Meanwhile Young Justice the animated series is so owning it by blending the iconic with the gritty (tho not grim)–but then again, animation can get away with a lot of stuff, even Robin saying he’s been doing “this kind of stuff since he was 9″ (tho whether he meant fighting crime or doing dangerous high-wire circus work is not specified).
October 18th, 2011 at 9:52 am
They work when there’s a good creative team and the book is promoted properly. Young Avengers was a huge success during it’s ongoing run. It’s only faltered because Marvel has mixed up the creative team, lost the schedule, etc.
October 18th, 2011 at 10:12 am
I think the writer do have a point about the increasing age of the average reader. The fact that Avengers Academy is bucking the trend is that it is not strictly focusing on just the teen members. The ‘grown ups’ play key roles in the book and have their own interesting narratives that contribute to the storyline. Perhaps that is the key to their success. The lack of any regular ‘grown-up’ support characters in Runaways and Young Avengers may well be the main reason why they fail to strike a chord with older readers today.
October 18th, 2011 at 2:02 pm
I’ll be picking up AA when the team moves to the West Coast and expands. There’s a very simple reason why I haven’t picked it up before now: crossovers and events.
Marvel has a lot of books I’d love to try, but they are so entrenched in events that I have no interest in, there’s no opening for a new reader.
Here’s hoping they leave AA alone for a while.
October 19th, 2011 at 3:15 pm
“Teen Titans….GO!”
Best iteration of that team, ever.