I love a diverse cast of characters, but sometimes authors shy away from the conflict that naturally arises when you put wildly different people together on the same team. One encounters casual racism for being Asian, and a cyborg is constantly reminded that machines are soulless, unfeeling, and less than human. One character is repeatedly ridiculed for being chubby, and one endures transphobic insults for being a gender-switching alien. One of the characters, for example, uses the word “gay” as an insult-as in “superhero costumes are gay”-which creates tension because one of the characters is a girl who likes girls. Their reckless insensitivity seems authentically adolescent, and it acts as a foil to the intentional diversity of Vaughan’s cast. The dialogue is PG in terms of cursing, but our teenage heroes fling savage insults at each other when they aren’t getting along. My favorite thing is the character interaction.
So, what about this foray into overtly young adult superhero fiction appeals to me? Vaughan lists Harry Potter as one of the influences on this series, according to the original proposal included in the Omnibus. If I never hear another thing about Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter, it will be too soon. I don’t read many books like that anymore, and most of the “young adult” category of fiction is lost on me. Teenagers are the stars of this series and, it’s fair to say, the target audience. Vaughan run in its original reading order with this Omnibus. So, it was great fun to finally kick back and read the entire Brian K. But they took me a few years to collect, and I read a bunch of them out of order at different times. Once upon a time, I had all the single issues of the first and second Runaways volumes.
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