But contrast that to the comics, where Batman is suddenly running around in a garish purple suit he got in another universe or something, the X-Men fight freaking aliens and Superman stumbles into five alternate dimensions every time he trips over the mantle and all of this is crossed over with five hundred other stories, all of which are just as wierd and ouch my brain hurts.
More so than the inability of super hero stories to focus on one damn story at a time, it's just impossible to take the characters seriously. I cannot feel any empathy with someone who calls themselves [insert animal/concept]man and who runs around all day in a skintight latex outfit. Now you might say that the movies I just claimed to like suffer the same problem, but they also go to great lengths to make their characters seem more human. Movie Wolverine feels like a real person, whereas comic Wolverine feels like, well, Wolverine.
Which is why I love Runaways. There's all sorts of crazy shit going on here- aliens, time travel, robots, mutants, you name it, this series has it, but it's established right from the beginning that the story is going to be a melting pot of different concepts. You don't start off with a comic about, say, a super hero with the ability to control electricity fighting gangs (why yes I have been playing inFamous) and then suddenly there are aliens invading for no apparent reason. The aliens were always there, as were the time travellers and the evil geniuses and what have you, so it's no great surprise when the biblical giants come along.
But the big reason I like Runaways is because the characters are real people, not super heroes. They refer to each other by their real names and wear ordinary clothes. They're teenagers with super powers, not super powers awkwardly shoved into a human frame.
With that rather long winded introduction over, lets look at the latest volume of Runaways!
This volume marks the third artist/writer duo to handle the series, and it's a major artistic shift in style from previous story arcs. That's Major with a capital M.
I hate it when fans complain about changes made to their beloved obsessions, I really do, but unfrtunately the inescapable fact of the matter is that the new style is a massive let down. How so? Well here's the cover, just for starters:
Let's contrast that with a few of the previous covers, shall we?
(for the uninitiated, starting from the top of the first cover above: Chase, Nico, Karolina (the one with fire stuff coming out of her hair), Molly (with the pink hat thing), Old Lace (the dinosaur, long story), Victor and Xavin (the Skrull). The black haired girl to the left of the new cover is Klara, a recent addition who isn't in any of these).
Okay, to be fair I should point out that those covers aren't indicitive of the artwork in the actual books, but even still. Look at how Ramos drew Molly and Nico! They look like Bratz dolls. Chase has some sort of Kurt Cobain thing going on that doesn't at all resemble his appearence in the comic itself even though Ramos drew the whole thing. It's hard to tell here because of his small size but Victor has long greasy hair and is barely recognizable, and why the hell is Klara wearing a mini-skirt? Xavin and Karolina are the only two that look like themselves, even with the huge Desperate Dan jaw Xavin is sporting.
I get that different artists have different styles, and I'm not saying everyone who draws this comic has to stick to one template and never give their own spin on things. But even though the style has varied before, it's always conformed to a basic look and feel, one that suited the characters and suited the story. Ramos' art doesn't do either of those things. And this is just my opinion, but it's an ugly style- I'm sorry, it just is. It's like someone took the worst aspects of manga and the artwork you see on toy box illustration and mashed them together. It's not even consistent- Chase's hair varies in length and style wildly to the extent that I thought he was Karolina a few times and I repeatedly mistook Klara for a boy in panels where you can't see her clothes even though there are no male characters in this comic who look anything like her. Nico is the worst off in this regard. Ramos rarely gets her asian features right, so that she ends up simply looking bizarre in a lot of panels, particularly when she's making any emotive facial expressions. In a few instances I literally could not tell which character was being depicted in certain scenes.
Then there's the anatomy and proportion issues, with Chase in particularly being given a ridiculously inflated body and shrunken head on multiple occasions. This is to say nothing of the cramped panels, incomprehensible action scenes and garish clothes the characters wear.In short, the art sucks.
Okay, there are some positives. A lot of the "special effects" are well rendered with vibrant colours, and the alien enemies are actually really well designed so that they're instantly recognizable as members of Karolina's culture (the name of which I will not mention because I cannot for the life of me spell it). I get the feeling Ramos is a much better artist when he's drawing his own stuff, rather than adapting someone else's.
On the writing side, while this is far from the best Runuways story ever written, it gets the job done. The storyline keeps things simple and relies on the dynamics of the group rather than any complex machinations. Special credit must go to the dialogue here- the "Buffy Speek" in Runaways can get a bit annoying at times and Moore thankfully tones it way down, making way for some fun and witty banter between the character.
Another plus his depiction of Klara Prast, the newest member group. She was a bit bland in the previous volume so I was worried about how well (or whether) she was going to fit in. Thankfully she gets some speedy character development here, losing much of her timidity to make room for hints of maturity and level headedness that will hopefully be buily on by future writers.
Speaking of building on things though, what's up with Molly? What happened to the reveal that she was faking most of her personality? Is that ever going to get brought up again? I hope so because frankly she was starting to annoy me a bit by the end of this volume.
So yeah. I think I can sum up my thoughts on this volume by saying that while I desperately want Ramos to be replaced, I wouldn't mind at all if Moore stayed on with the writing duties.
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