Review: Young Avengers #15

Spoiler free review of Young Avengers #15

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about final issues before. I’m also pretty sure I’ve written about comics and music before. What I don’t think I’ve touched upon is how the two work in conjunction with each other. There are people who will immediately disregard the following because they can’t fathom the idea of enjoying more than one form of media at once but for a person like me, comics and music go hand in hand. Apparently, Kieron Gillen believes the same thing. From his music-oriented project Phonogram to the various notes/annotations for Young Avengers he’s posted on the internet, it seems that his comics are written with music firmly in mind.

It is appropriate that the two-part story in both Young Avengers #14 and Young Avengers #15 takes place in a club then, because it doubles as an opportunity to mix music references into the imagery and the words on the page. Even the solicit for this issue is a reference to the classic “Ignition (Remix)” by R. Kelly. Gillen and McKelvie[1] are pop-culture hounds working in a field that is explicitly stuck in the past (at least for the most part), so to give the industry a bit of fresh air they update things to the modern age (which could potentially backfire in the future and horribly date Young Avengers as a relic of a what would be-lost era) with pretty great results.

Young Avengers #15 is pretty much the ultimate sendoff one could ask for out of this series, every bit as snarky and fun as it usually is. Plenty of great character moments, lots of playful joking about, characters exploring their identity and sexuality, and overall just developing a good, healthy team relationship. It’s like if Community had ended at season three and that season four didn’t exist (which hopefully is true in everyone else’s head but it paved the way for the back on point season five).  The art in the issue is pretty great too, even if it’s a tad all over the place, with Becky Cloonan’s signature style (kind of a morphed Scott Pilgrim-type look in my opinion) covering the first 5 pages, Ming Doyle’s surrealist realism on pages six through ten, Joe Quinone’s soft touch on pages eleven through fifteen, and McKelvie closing off the last five pages of the book in his pop art style, a sendoff to the era of Gillen and McKelvie. These guys probably write the best teenagers in comics at the moment.

Now the only proper way to do a sendoff review of a musically oriented issue is probably to drop some music references into this last paragraph but it’s hard to think of any that won’t be forced. But anyways, this is the after-party, and after the after-party comes the hotel lobby, and then around about 4 AM you’ve got to clear the lobby. Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce.