When we last saw our chosen family of ill-fated super-powered young people, they had more cliffs than the Grand Canyon and more hangers than Los Angeles Fashion Week. That’s right, more cliff… hangers… oh, never mind. We’re just using bad puns to cheer ourselves up because this one-hundredth issue of Runaways (the 38th in the current run) marks the end of the series for now. Where will they go? What will we do with our time or our teen angst? Runaways #38 (Legacy 100), written by Rainbow Rowell, drawn by Andrés Genolet, colors by Dee Cunniffe, letters by VC’s Joe Caramagna.
You can wrap up a long-running series involving company-owned, shared universe heroes in at least five ways: 1. Solve the problems the characters set out to solve, so that they end up in a better psychological place than they began: we might well feel happy to leave them that way. 2. Return the characters to a status quo ante, fresh and scrubbed and ready for the next creators who come along. 3. Ruin them, kill them off, or otherwise disqualify them from the hero biz. 4. Disperse them geographically, or interdimensionally, or socially: let them say some melancholy goodbyes, just as we the readers might do, while the characters remain available separately for future tales.
This melancholy, satisfying final issue of Rainbow Rowell’s Runaways run goes hard for option four, and it’s a hard-hearted fan who’d refuse Nico, Karolina, and Molly in particular, their semi-happy semi-endings.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Catching back up to the present from last issue’s stack of flashbacks, we find Karolina and Nico smooching, back together at last. We then find them baffled, as present-day, short-haired, Gerty, and purple-haired future Gerty, and present-day Chase, chase (pun intended) one another up the stairs. Future Gerty wants present-day Chase to come back to her future so that he doesn’t grow up to become evil future Chase: she’s chosen today, of all days, for backward time travel because it’s “the last time I knew we were all happy.” (Get out the hankies, Runaways fans. I did.) Chase says no. Present-day Gerty initially says hell no.
But present-day Molly, the team’s youngest member and the one who most wants to do the right thing, trusts future Gerty: “I trust her because I trust you,” she tells the skeptical present-day Gert, who trusts both of them, and it’s a splendid knife for that Gordian knot (as well as a perhaps accidental poke at the far more complicated version of the same plot that X-fans may remember from Battle of the Atom). After a struggle and a dramatic spell from the Staff of One, Nico trusts future Gert too, and we have hit the most classic of all the Runaways beats: betrayed by the adult world that produced them, these teens must learn, right away, how to trust one another.
Meanwhile, the Light Brigade (more super-intrusive super-adults) have come from Karolina’s sort-of-home planet to fix her failing powers: “they’ve treated other Majesdanians with this injury by bringing them closer to our sun.” (Maybe she can go hang out with Starfire.) Andrés Genolet is at his absolute best in these panels of impassioned debate about where young people should go, whom they should believe, and when it’s OK to go where your friends cannot follow: Genolet’s images of Nico hearing the “good news” (that Karolina might leave Earth forever) comprise a masterclass in how to draw people who say one thing and mean another. (Also I want Nico’s black stretchy top. Can I buy it?) As for the later panels in which Karolina and Nico figure out exactly how they love each other, and what their love entails… words fail. That’s why we have comics with pictures.
Some of the pictures are action scenes too: ever imagine a super-macho, super-dangerous future Chase, menacing his future teammates? Now you don’t have to imagine: Genolet has drawn him. Did I mention Battle of the Atom, with its future X-Men turned future-evil?) Still unaccounted for in this dispersal are present-day Gerty and her dinosaur, and Victor and Gibb, who have been enjoying high school (and will presumably keep on going there), and team cutie/ team conscience/ shark-hat wearer Molly Hayes, the only mutant on the team. Remember how Wolverine and Pixie visited her to offer a trip to Krakoa? Molly explains, on the phone, to her age-mate Klara Prast (last seen in, what, Runaways 11?), that Molly isn’t moving to the X-island: “I just think it’s cool. That it exists. A place for people like us.”
Rowell’s series has been a place for people like us for 38 issues now, people with lingering questions about abandonment and allegiance and who to trust, people who might have to be superheroes, and who just want to help one another grow up– even, or especially, when we have no idea what growing up means.
Nor did Rowell neglect the now-ex-Runaways Alex. And Xavin. They’re on the last two pages, drawn by Kris Anka, Matthew Wilson, and founding Runaways penciller Adrian Alphona, in postures best described– not literally but narratively– as lying in wait. Whoever takes up these characters next will get a lot of threads to pull. But for now, it’s time to say goodbye.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
