As a whole new crop of people prepares to meet the Runaways in their upcoming Marvel Television series on Hulu, long-time fans of the characters created by Brian K. Vaughn and Adrian Alphona now have even more reason to be excited. Ahead of the team’s introduction into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they will reunite in a brand new Marvel Comics title that has been years in the making.
Entertainment Weekly revealed earlier this week that Nico Minoru, Chase Stein, Karolina Dean, Molly Hayes, and Old Lace will come together once again in a new volume of ‘Runaways’ from ‘Fangirl’, ‘Carry On’, and ‘Eleanor & Park’ author Rainbow Rowell and fan favorite artist Kris Anka. Originally coming together with Alex Wilder and Gertrude Yorkes in order to take down an evil syndicate of supervillains consisting of their parents, the group has gone through a number of changes since those days. In fact, they’ve mostly gone their separate ways, so Rowell aims to bring the band back together, even if that means raising the dead apparently:
“It’s kind of funny calling them the Runaways because it’s not like they’re the Avengers or the X-Men. They were not formed with a mission and a purpose. They’re just kids who ended up in the same boat. At the beginning of this series they are scattered to the four winds and half of them are dead. One of the challenges now is who are they when they’re apart? They got thrown together, but now they’ve been pulled apart. They’re trying to figure out who they really are without each other… This arc is very much about them choosing to be together.”
While the best-selling writer mentions the themes that this new book will explore, Lowe chimed in with a few more specifics about what True Believers can expect from this book:
“The first is literally the act of growing up, something we can all relate to as one of the hardest things to figure out. There is also an actual adversary in this story as well. Although it might not seem that way from the get-go. One of the cool things about Runaways is the core concept from the launch of that book, which was, ‘What if your parents were supervillains?’ and then the parents got killed. So that’s one of the struggles to any Runaways story. So we were searching for what new twist on that we can do and I think Rainbow came up with something really incredible with it. You’ll start seeing that but there are story elements that we don’t want to give away.”
Though we’ll have to wait until September to pick up ‘Runaways’ at your local comic shop, you can check out Anka’s cover for the first issue along with the teasers featuring his new character designs in the gallery below:
Are you excited to read an all-new ‘Runaways’? How do you feel about the new creative team of Rainbow Rowell and Kris Anka? And how do you think Gert will come back into play considering her current situation? Share all of your thoughts and theories in the comments.
Despite being a “professional writer”, Ben likes run-on sentences far too much. For more of his attempts at being funny and the occasional insightful thought, follow him on Twitter and Instagram.