Writer: Ed Brubaker
Pencils: Paco Medina
Publisher: Marvel
Price: $2.99

The Young Avengers are back! Well, sort of.

To give the characters a bit more exposure, to placate the fans that are hungry for “season 2” of Young Avengers, and to help integrate them into the wider Marvel Universe, Marvel have released this miniseries. Over the next 6 months, each of the team will get their own one shot (or share one in the case of Wiccan and Speed), by various writers, some of whom have an obvious connection with the characters - such as Captain Marvel and Ms Marvel writer Brian Reed being given the half-Kree hero Hulkling, or current Captain America writer Ed Brubaker on this title.

For those of you who missed the Young Avengers own title, or their various appearances elsewhere, they are a team of teens assembled according to a failsafe contingency plan to find replacement Avengers should the team disband or fall (as they had done at the time in the Avengers: Disassembled event). Patriot is Elijah Bradley, grandson of Isaiah Bradley, “the black Captain America” from the miniseries Truth: Red, White & Black, and he gained his powers through a blood transfusion (after some brief deception and drug abuse). Outside the pages of Young Avengers, young Eli has met both Captain America and the Winter Soldier on a couple of occasions, and this issue builds on those encounters.

When an incident with some of his less racially aware classmates leads to Elijah being expelled from school, he comes home in the middle of the day – just in time to see the Winter Soldier leaving after visiting Eli’s grandfather. Eli decides to track down the former Bucky, in part to find out what he was speaking to Isaiah about, but also to talk to him about what his new role means.

As the writer of Captain America, Ed Brubaker has shown that he has an awareness of the various strands of Cap’s history, and what they mean to the characters in orbit around him. He wrote the above-mentioned prior meeting between Patriot and the Winter Soldier, and thus surprises nobody with his characterisation of them both here. What does surprise is just how well he manages to make the character of Elijah work in a (mostly) solo context. This has the feel of one of the better issues of Chuck Dixon’s run as writer of Robin or Nightwing, and on the strength of this issue alone, it may be worth Marvel considering giving Elijah his own solo title – or possibly just Brubaker giving him a sidekick spot in Cap’s own book.

Paco Medina’s art brings just the right level of youthful energy for the story, and makes even the most conversational pages visually appealing. Despite being the only shaven-headed young black man in the book, Medina doesn’t take the lazy way out and as such, Elijah is recognisably the same person throughout the book as on Jim Cheung’s cover (although the shape of his face mask does change on occasion). Speaking of the cover, those classic Captain America images behind Patriot? That’s all Jim Cheung – no Photoshop involved.

An intelligent and fun start to this mini-series of one-shots. If the next five are this good, I foresee requests for the eventual return of the team to be outnumbered by requests for them to be given solo titles.

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