Dark Reign: Young Avengers #1(of 5)

For no reason in particular I'm going to give this comic a read tonight. I know NOTHING about this mini-series(I hardly ever check out the solicitations)except that it has Young Avengers in the title. This is written by Paul Cornell, whose work I'm not very familiar with.

-??? OK, first a review, THEN some editorializing.

-This comic introduces us to a team of teenagers who are most definitely NOT the original Young Avengers. We begin this issue with this new team of Young Avengers stopping a store robbery in a style that would probably be more suited to the Punisher as opposed to the Avengers. Two of the robbers get killed, one gets turned into a dog, and the other gets put in a coma.

-From there the title characters head to a bar and have a few drinks before heading to their base, an invisible manor in Central Park. After arriving home they argue about the way the robbers were taken down and ultimately accomplish nothing.

-The next day, the leader of the team, Melter, accidentally melts an old woman who thought he was trying to mug her. After realizing what he had done, Melter retreats back to his base where he sees the original Young Avengers teleport in to confront Melter and his team.

-These Young Avengers consist of: Melter-he has the power to melt stuff, seems to be the team leader and the most "heroic" of the bunch. Coat of Arms-she put Melter as the leader of this team, so it would seem she is the true boss here, she is also an artist and doesn't appear to have any super-powers. Enchantress-claims to have been thrown out of Asgard, wields powerful magicks. Big Zero- she has the ability to increase her size and also appears to be a racist. Egghead- seems to be a robot/android. Executioner- he doesn't appear to have any powers, uses firearms, seems to relate to the Punisher.

Now I can say it. ????? I'm not really sure what the hell was going on here! If Paul was trying to create a completely unlikable team of "heroes" I guess he succeeded. This was all just weird! When you grab a comic book that says Young Avengers on the cover, you almost expect to read the opposite of what was in this book. To be honest though, if this comic didn't have the Young Avengers name on the cover I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more. What I mean is if this team had some kind of anti-heroish name I'd have been fine. But, this team is a VERY far cry from what I expected to be reading about.

After saying all of that, I will state that I'll be picking up the next issue in order to find out what happens next. If this group had some minor tweaking done(change the team name and get rid of the big racist girl!!!)this could definitely be an interesting team. For a score I'll go with a 7 out of 10. This was a solid(if a bit confusing)first issue.