Loners is a spin-off from Runaways.  This is a curious decision on several levels.

For one thing, Runaways isn't exactly a top-selling title.  Unless the digests have been doing extraordinarily well, it's hard to believe that the audience is large enough to sustain a spin-off.  For another, the book features the team formerly known as Excelsior.  (And possibly still known as Excelsior - the book doesn't mention their name anywhere.  But Stan Lee owns the trademark to "Excelsior" for comics, so Marvel had to call the book something else.)

Now, the big idea of Excelsior was that they were former teenage superheroes who felt that it had ruined their lives.  They wanted to save kids like the Runaways from falling into the same trap.  That's a perfectly fine set-up for some supporting characters in the Runaways' book, but it doesn't exactly lend itself to an ongoing title.  How many unregistered teenage heroes are there in San Francisco these days?  How do you write a book about characters who get up each day absolutely determined to not fight crime?

That's a particularly big problem when you consider that writer C B Cebulski is openly lobbying for this to become an ongoing title.  In order for that to work, the team will have to be repositioned - but between the Runaways themselves, the New X-Men, the Young Avengers, the cast of Avengers: The Initiative, and the upcoming return of the New Warriors, the Marvel Universe is a bit crowded when it comes to young hero teams right now.  I'm not sure I see a niche for another - frankly, I'm not sure I see a niche for all the ones that presently exist.

Still, leaving those broader worries aside, it's a good first issue.  Cebulski starts off with Excelsior still working as a faltering Superheroes Anonymous group, where nobody seems to be particularly good at sticking to their pledge.  It's a very talky book - half the first issue is basically one conversation scene - but given the burden of introducing this disparate cast of characters, whom Brian Vaughan gathered from the four corners of the Marvel Universe, that's forgivable.  The third Spider-Woman has been added to the cast, and while the character has never historically been of any great interest, she does at least fit in here. 

It's certainly a book that should appeal to the long-time Marvel fan who will look on these obscure characters with a sigh of happy recognition.  But for audiences coming to the book fresh, Cebulski has been sure to define the characters principally by their roles in the group, and not by who they used to be when they were in the cast of another title.

Karl Moline's art starts very strongly, and holds up nicely during the conversation scenes.  It gets a little cluttered in the action sequences towards the end, though.  And there's something very odd going on with the colouring, where the highlights have great streaks of white all over the place, which I really don't like at all.

But it's a decent start, and despite my scepticism that there's really an ongoing title in this premise, I'm willing to give Cebulski the chance to prove me wrong.

Rating: B

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