Recently I read volumes 1-7 of the graphic novel, The Runaways. My roommate had recommended it to me as something that might appeal to my background as a huge comic book nerd.

Before I start talking about The Runaways, a quick word on criticism:

Thinking about criticism inevitably reminds me of my first and only college theatre course. I think it was literally called Theater 101. Anyway, it was a simple class: we went to plays and then we were supposed to discuss them and write papers on them. The course was led by Fred, a 50-something professor who always wore a sweater tied around his neck and highly shined patent leather shoes. I liked him fine; he had great hair. I didn’t like the class much at first, though.

I had never been very interested in the theatre. Growing up in south Florida, what few plays I had ever seen where local productions put on by friends, and attending these events gave me a distinctly uncomfortable feeling, like being embarrassed by the people I knew who were on stage. Once or twice I was driven down to West Palm to see one of the traveling Broadway shows, but the rare spectacle of a musical with a budget shocked the Floridian audience into appreciative silence. Criticism was the furthest thing from our minds.

Because of this background, I found it very difficult to attend the theatre, let alone be critical of it. For the first class of Theater 101, Fred wanted us to go around the room and say something we thought could be improved in the show we had just seen, Chicago. It was a small class and but by the time it got to me, all the technical quibbles I could have had were already taken (the sound was off, the theatre was too cold, etc.). I had nothing to contribute.

Fred wasn’t having it. “It was not a very good performance,” he said. “There must be something you can be critical of.”

I fidgeted and said, “I’m just sort of happy they all showed up and sang.”

Fred laughed for about ten straight minutes. And then he explained why critics (a class of people I had, until that moment, considered somewhere between nightcrawlers and horseflies in terms of usefulness) mattered: because if we didn’t understand what made a good show, there would be no need for theatre companies to try to put on good shows. I didn’t see the logic in that, since plenty of bad shows make lots of money (Mama Mia, for example, once made a friend of mine physically ill), but Fred said it was the principal of the thing.

OK! So being critical, to bring it all back, is a good thing because it provides a service. So I don’t feel saying that The Runaways failed as a story of rebellion, as a story of youth, and as a story of heroism. The premise is that a ragtag group of teens and tweens discover their parents are evil villains who constitute a secret organization bent on destroying the world. The children rebel against their parents and form their own crime-fighting league whose only tenants are that they don’t trust adults. Most of the kids looked up to classic comic book heroes like Wolverine and Captain America, but in the course of their adventures, are disillusioned by these adults. Oh, and also, they end up getting their parents killed.

There’s the usual teen angst and drama, and that wouldn’t bug me at all if the characters weren’t forced to speak in such a stilted, adult-trying-so-incredibly-hard-to-be-a-witty-youngster way. Kids don’t speak that way; nobody speaks that way. The creators wanted to set The Runaways apart from your Spider-Mans and your Iron Mans, but instead The Runaways becomes an amplified version of those corny old tales filled with snappy, punny dialog and predictable plot twists.

Perhaps to appeal to a generation of young female readers in a bid to get them hooked on comics, the gang includes tons of girls. I give that a thumbs up; chick heroes are good times. But the same tired tropes get applied to this new generation as the old. The girls are almost exclusively tied up in relationship drama, whereas the male characters are more rounded, more concerned with issues of fate, honor, loyalty, and strength. Even the one exciting point in the story, when the female leader is confronted with a version of herself from the distant future who promptly dies, she doesn’t seem as worried about her fate and career as a superhero as she is with her boyfriend. I mean, COME ON. Future!You zooms all the way to the past, dies from wounds sustained in a Very Important Battle, warns you with her dying breath, and your reaction is to smooch some more with the dude who is clearly your intellectual inferior to the point of caricature and who doesn’t ever have any powers fercrissake!

Deep breath, Teej.

Reading The Runaways was not the fun romp I like to get out of a comic book, and it wasn’t as interesting as a story should be, and its characters weren’t as developed as teens or people. It was okay, and the art was pretty rad, but I wouldn’t read any more of it.

And now, some jokes about critics:

Currently reading: Wings by Aprilynne Pike