None of the Edinburgh comic stores participated in Free Comic Book Day, since the costs involved really don't make it particularly attractive for UK stores.  Fortunately, reader Rik Hoskin has generously sent me his copy of Marvel's contribution, the X-Men/Runaways one-shot.  Evidently he wasn't planning to read it again, and to be honest, neither am I.

An X-Men / Runaways book makes a certain degree of sense for Free Comic Book Day.  The point of the whole exercise, in theory, is to bring in new readers.  There's some doubt as to whether it really works, or whether you're just giving away free comics to the people who read them already, but that's not the point.  The objective is to bring in new readers.  The X-Men have the name value, and the Runaways are the relatively accessible, critically acclaimed book.  In many ways the Runaways ought to be far more marketable to a casual audience, but they don't have the recognition factor, and the X-Men do.

So Marvel have gone with the co-star option.  The X-Men and the Runaways do an eleven page story, and the rest of the book is filled out with... well, stuff.  There's a preview of Marvel Adventures: Avengers, which is much what you'd expect.  There's a recap of the entire plot of Ultimate Spider-Man which goes on for eleven pages, on the questionable assumption that once people know exactly what's going to happen, they'll pay thirteen dollars a volume to find out the details.  There's a four-page Franklin Richards strip which is as inoffensively charming as they tend to be.

And then there's the lead story.  Frankly, one suspects that the big question of what should actually happen in it was left until quite late in the day.  The Runaways are looking for their dinosaur, Old Lace, who has run away.  The X-Men show up out of nowhere and demand that Molly Hayes comes to live with them, because she's a mutant.  They don't appear to care much about the others.  A fight ensues, until Emma Frost (of all people) produces the dinosaur and gives her fellow X-Men a stern ticking off for not taking no for an answer.  The end.

It's tremendously mediocre and an awful waste of an opportunity.  Brian Vaughan can do infinitely better than this, and I can't understand how he's missed the mark so badly with his own characters.  Even as an eleven page promo piece, it's weak.

Art comes from Skottie Young, a talented cartoonist who seems to regularly end up drawing superhero books on which he's hopelessly miscast.  I like Young a lot - on the strength of this, I suspect he could do a rather good Runaways storyline - but his X-Men are decidedly ropey.  And more to the point, it means that the book looks nothing remotely like any of the comics they're trying to promote.

You don't expect wonders from a book like this one, but X-Men/Runaways is way below potential.

Rating: C-

back | continue