It is hard to find a comic created in the past twenty years that I love as viscerally and purely as Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphonaâs initial run on Runaways. I donât talk about it a lot, and in some sense thatâs because I love it so much. It gives me pure joy. It was thus with great trepidation and some excitement I took the announcement of a Runaways TV adaptation. On the one hand, itâs a great property for such treatment. Itâs funny, irreverent, and starts a Breakfast Club-like cast of likeable and superpowered teenagers in sun-soaked LA rebelling from their parents but doing it for moral, good reasons. Thereâs drama and romance, and BKVâs dialogue is, as always, really great. Oh, and thereâs a dinosaur thrown in for good measure.
On the other hand, itâs a property that has suffered in the hands of other teams. Even Joss Whedon, who is known for writing teens with snarky dialogue, managed to mangle his run on the book (frankly, I donât think heâs particularly good at writing for comics, but thatâs another issue). Only Rainbow Rowell and Kris Ankaâs brand new run has come close to the intangible magic produced by those initial 24 issues.
My initial reaction to the TV show was very mixed. I try to be open to the problems and opportunities afforded by adaptation between media, butâŠwhy werenât they running away? Why were we spending so much time with the parents? Ariela Barer was great, but I was miffed that Gert wasnât properly chubby. This is...
However, upon returning from the holidays, Shaun and I binged through the final three episodes last night, and Iâve been thinking about what makes the TV show different from the comic, as well as considering how the story the TV show is trying to tell serves the medium of television in a way the story the comic told served the medium of comics.
The comic version of Runaways is a pure, distilled concept: when you are a teenager, at some point or another you feel like your parents are the worst. What if you found out they actually were? Because Runaways takes place within the superhero genre, BKV was allowed to play with the broadest strokes of our understandings of moralityâsuperheroes and supervillains. The parents in Pride arenât just annoying or bad or difficult to understand, they are supervillains. This clever turn means the act of teenage rebellion, something relatively quintessential about growing up, changes from a universal experience into a moral imperative.
BKV gets a lot of praise for his writing, and rightly so. If you donât know the name off hand you probably recognize some of his most famous creator-owned series: Ex Machina, Y the Last Man, Paper Girls, or a little book called Saga that everyone seems to like a lot. People tend to focus on his thoughtful characterization and his snappy dialogue and inventive plots. All of those things are true, and itâs one of the reasons heâs probably the closest thing the USA has to producing an answer to Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman. But the real key to why heâs one of our greatest comics writersâand why I compare him the Big Guy himself without being facetious or feeling that Iâm really going too far afieldâis the BKV really understands, loves, and knows that to do with genre. (I could go into a big rant about how Watchmen only works as a critique of superhero comics because the book and Moore love superhero comics so goddamn muchâŠbut I wonât. Not here.)
BKV understands that logic, morality, and consequences mean something different in a comic book superhero world; and that we respond to tales told in a comic book superhero world in a certain way. The seeming purity of the moral conscious of a superhero world is so simple and easy compared to the mental and emotional messiness of growing up. Thus the fantasy of Runaways for teen readers is as much becoming a superhero and being right (especially at the expense of your parents) as it is being in a world in which there is the moral and emotional clarity of a superheroâs mission.
The trick is, the moment the teens form their superhero group and become a superhero team, they discover the fantasy world is, in fact, endlessly complicatedâprobably even more complicated than their lives were before. Actual superheroes want to return them to their parents, or donât trust them to be able to fend for themselves. (Molly especially learns to never meet her heroes.) Doing the right thing feels wrong, and doing the wrong thing feels right, or at least would be so much easier. Then thereâs the pesky fact that they eventually learn why their parents did what they did. Itâs still wrong, but are they willing to live with the consequences of what it means to do the right thing? If they donât or canât, how does that make them any different from their parents?
As they series goes on, the themes inevitably changeâsome of the characters have to become parents themselves (surrogate, to Molly, who is much younger in the comics), to form a new family and discover what that means on their own. They have to decide whether to submit to or defy well-meaning authority that they disagree with, not just actually evil super-villain parents. They have to learn, again and again, what it means to deal with the consequences of their decisionsâespecially poignant in that their rebellion was the consequence of their parentsâ decisions.
Adrian Alphonaâs art is also a huge part in the success of this run. His art is stripped down, with simple linesâa little scratchy at times, which is a nice counterpoint to the hyper-clean studio finish of many superhero booksâbut also cartoony and expressive. Like the early parts of the story, it is pure cartooning: great depth and skill hiding beneath a simple surface.
(Okay, so the above panel is from one of Takeshi Miyazawaâs fill-in issues; but I had to include it because itâs one of my favorite gags. The previous two are Alphonaâs)
So now we come to the TV show. Everything about the show is less focused, and this is what really bothered me at first. The split attention between the parents and the kids seemed like a craven marketing ploy: we donât know if this show is for teens or adults, so letâs make sure thereâs something that appeals to both! The show spends so much time pushing (along with the kids) back and forth about whether we like their parents. Several are set up as more sympathetic than others (the Yorkes are always the least despicable in both comics and TV); there are big reversals and reveals. Especially in the early episodes, I wanted to scream, âTheyâre just murderers, leave them!â
The television show is indeed a superhero story, but it is not primarily a superhero story â not in the same way the comic is. No, it is primarily a teenage melodrama. That means the primary focus is no longer the fantasy or allegory in the same way it was with the superhero comic; the primary focus shifts to the interpersonal relationships and drama. This is not, of course, to say that the comic doesnât focus on the relationships between the charactersâsimply that the driving force behind the comic, especially in the early issues, is the concept. It is only once the concept is established that the relationships truly have room to grow. In the TV show, on the other hand, the concept only has room to be explored once the relationships between the characters are fully established. Even genre television demands a certain verisimilitude because it has a real world with real people speaking the words of the script. Itâs harder to get away with hand-waving genre tropes in TV, even for a period of time to ultimately undermine them, because they donât make sense when there are living people involved, not drawn figures.
This is down to both genre and medium considerations. TV, and especially melodramatic TV, is good at lots and lots of scenes with characters talking about their feelings. Comics, especially in an action- and plot-oriented genre like the superhero genre, is not quite so good at lots of long, talky scenes. Part of this is, quite simply, practical: even the best funded TV shows donât have the SFX budget or the freedom to use superheroes willy-nilly like the Runaways comic did. But I think the show runners shifted the focus to reflect the strengths of the medium.
What the TV show loses with the purity of the original concept, it makes up for with an emotional complexity regarding the parent-child relationship that the comic never really explores. I donât think this is a weakness of the comicâitâs not what it wants to do. The comic uses the clarity of the moral imagination of the superhero fantasy to examine the messy contradictions of growing up. The TV immediately complicates the morality on both sides, and forces us to wonder what it means to desire the superheroâs moral clarity in the ârealâ world. Thus the show is more directly about growing up, just with the emotional stakes ratcheted up to 11. Itâs no longer just the case that you become a different person from your parents, find your own voice and beliefs, and begin to form new bonds outside of the family home--no, these kids have to make a new family caring for a younger kid and draw a line in the sand that forces them to fully confront their differences with the parents head-on. Itâs not an awkward Thanksgiving dinner conversation at stake, but the fate of the world.Â
Which brings us to the emphasis on the parents. For this to work, the parents canât be one-dimensional villains, or the stakes are too low. I donât think the show wants us to completely forgive the parents for the murders, but it does want us to think about what might push otherwise good people, and even good parents (in the case of about 80% of them, at least), to do really terrible things. We may roll out eyes at Chase for continuing to hope his father is savable, but is it ultimately that much different than thinking the Yorkes arenât really that bad because they clearly feel bad about what theyâve done? In the end, all of the members of Pride found something theyâre willing to kill forâand it wasnât their kids. They entered into their bargain before they had kids. Power, knowledge, freedomâŠeven if they had good intentions for that power or knowledgeâthatâs what they were willing to bargain with Jonah for.
In the final handful of episodes, I think another of the show writersâ intentions with the parents became clearer: to juxtapose the made family of the kids with the made family of the parents. A major running theme of both series is that âfamilyâ is what you make of itâthe Runaways really are a family. Though it mightâve been an evil alien that brought them together, Pride is a group of people who have been with each other through pretty-much everything for almost twenty years. Theyâre a family, tooâeven if they donât like each other much any more. There are friendships and rivalries, and the way the group splinters and reforms in the face of betrayal was interesting to watchâŠespecially in juxtaposition with the kidsâ. *Soft-spoiler note: if youâve read the comics, you know that a betrayal is likely coming for the kids, too. Thus, I was particularly interested to see how Pride responded to Leslieâs reveal and attempt to re-join the group.
I have no snappy conclusion except to say that I have come, over the course of the series, to appreciate the adaptation for several reasonsâperhaps the biggest of which is that, by beings the-same-but-different it helped me articulate what I thought was particularly powerful and effective about the original comic. Iâve tried to teach the original comic before, and itâs proven incredibly difficultâI think because itâs deceptively simple. I will end with another pitch for Rainbow Rowell and Kris Ankaâs ( @kristaferanka ) new run on the bookâespecially since Marvel tends to cancel books that donât sell well. You do at least need to read BKVâs original run (#1-24), but you really should do that anyway.
I found most of the gifs on @runawaysource - they are not mine.
