Broken Frontier

Things are back to normal around the beach house, which means things are only getting ready to get worse. Chase is working and everyone else is just being kids.

Moore brought the youthful vigor of the team back to the book after a much maligned and delayed run by Whedon. It seemed that the book was on the precipice of the glory that it had once garnered from its fandom. Instead we were given six issues of a fairly rote superhero book. The characters were voiced correctly, but the story was uninteresting. To complicate it even further, the team was either chilling in their house or stuck in some bubble for most of the arc, or at least that is how it seemed.

Now, we move on to the next chapter. We see the younger team members playing video games and others romancing and Chase working. Yawn, wake me when something happens. Oh, there is a fight with some anonymous boy band, how Scott Pilgrim of Mr. Moore.

This issue is all exposition. Seems Chase’s boss wants to use some spell on the people in the area and while I don’t want to spoil what the spell does, well, the title of the story is in the credit box above. Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

Moore has the voicing and the spirit of the characters down. Unfortunately, the book just isn’t that interesting anymore. The team needs a mission, a big bad, well, they just kind of need the Pride. Oh well, I guess the villain du jour will have to do.

To make a less than spectacular book even worse, Miyazawa puts a more manga spin on the book than there has ever been. This is somewhat problematic. When Alphona was working the book, Miyazawa seemed to be able to keep the characters in line with what the creator envisioned. With each arc on the book, Miyazawa has strayed further and further from the fusion of the original design and more in line with books published by Viz.

The style, in itself, would not be a bad thing, except consistency is lost. After Ryan gave the book a typical capes sheen at the conclusion of the second volume of the book and Ramos found his groove again at the onset of this third volume, there was no longer a cohesive style to the book. Just when Ramos’s super cartoonish style had grown on even his detractors, we get this issue. While Molly, Vic and most of the youngsters resemble other variations loosely, Chase is so different that even though his name was referred to in every panel, this reader thought he was a woman. It was confusing trying to figure out who this apparent mother figure was and then he got in the van and the fog lifted from my over comic-ed brain.

This book is fun. That’s okay, but there is nothing new or even remotely compelling going on with it anymore. It is a directionless ship and that is all too often the case with "fun" books. Moore is capable of so much more that this magnifies the problem. It’s time for something to happen in Runaways.