The Runaways keep trying to lead normal lives, and maybe they’ve finally got it right. It’s like Party of Five, if you remember the 1990s. But who remembers the 1990s? Time travelers, that’s who. It’s a trip back from the future in Runaways #36. Written by Rainbow Rowell, line art by Andrés Genolet, colored by Dee Cunniffe, and lettered by Joe Caramagna.
After a couple of issues with mutant guest stars, the Runaways are on their own as usual, in an issue that makes a terrible jumping-on point but a lovely, anguished stack of romantic dilemmas, once you can figure out flashbacks and timelines. Hold on tight.
If you’ve been reading Runaways for long enough you know that Gertie Yorkes– the non-super, sarcastic, full-figured one with the awesome pet dinosaur– once came back from the future as her older, wiser self, codenamed Heroine, in order to save her present-day friends. You also know that our Gertie died a few years ago, and that our Gertie, present-day Gertie, came back from the dead, thanks to Heroine’s time machine, Chase’s determination, and Nico’s magic. But present-day Gertie came back at the same age she died, making her sixteen years old, while her ex-boyfriend Chase has aged up to perhaps 21. In a rare bit of good judgment on everyone’s part, the pair decided back then not to date.
That was then. This is now, except when it’s not, because we begin with a flashback. A few weeks ago Chase, aimless and looking for love, impulsively asked out a woman he met at a convenience store, then came home to find a confident new Gertie, now with a purple streak in her brown tresses, dressed like a fashionable jungle explorer (khakis, white button-down, neckerchief). “I came back for you,” this Gertie says. She’s 21 now, just like Chase, and she wants to sweep him off his feet and right into her future, using a zap from her high-tech gloves.
The romance dialogue works like, well, a charm. “I love you, Chase Stein! I always have!” (Her inability to say just that was a plot point in the arc where she died.) “We’ve always had bad timing, Stein…. But what’s bad timing to a girl with a time machine?”
Chase, however, won’t be swept away: he’s got responsibilities now, among them Gertie’s present day, high school aged self. But fashionable future Gertie has a riposte:
Since then, or so we gather, Chase has been sneaking out to meet future Gertie for smoochies in the woods. (So that’s where he’s been going– it’s been a mystery until now.)
In the present– not just this year but today, the present present– high school aged Gertie and Victor the ex-evil robot wait for Chase to pick them up from school. He’s a no-show. The pair argue over who should feel guiltier about the last story arc, the one where Doc Justice tricked the Runaways into joining his murderous publicity stunt of a fake teen super-team. Gertie detected the ruse, but maybe that’s just because Doc Justice never invited her to join him, since she has no powers. Victor and Gert both feel bad, and then they both feel better, because Victor feels ready to tell her he loves her, and she feels ready to try out big smooches with him. Behold! They smooch!
And then they wander into the woods and discover Chase– Gertie’s ex-boyfriend, remember– having a starlit hug-and-kiss with future Gertie. Whaaaat?
Andrés Genolet infuses page after page of what could be just talking heads with embodied, sweet-but-not-saccharine life: Runaways at the moment is not just a teen comic but a teen romance comic, and these teens– for whom everything is new and fascinating and scary, and good decisions are like needles in hayrides– stay vivid under Genolet’s pen. Genolet and Cunniffe also understand daylight, and lighting: the storyline requires us to know when it’s midday, and when it’s dusk, and we do.
As for the story itself: why, yes, Runaways is still a very good comic, in a capable novelist’s hands, and gets across all the character beats. Yes, it’s not exactly a superhero comic: that’s part of the point. Yes, it still takes place in its own smallish corner of the Marvel Universe, a few thousand miles away both literally and figuratively from Events and Avengers (yes, Wolverine dropped by lately, but he goes everywhere). And yes, Runaways has reached the point where half the plots refer to other plots and everything feels like an Easter egg and it’s hard for new readers to jump in (though TV soap operas survived on that basis for half the twentieth century). Yes, the characters have been dating and breaking up and re-negotiating their relationships for so long that they now risk combinatorial exhaustion. Yes, “I came back from the future to tell you not to do this thing, but I can’t tell you why” is a bit of a trope (cf. “Battle of the Atom,” or Iron Lad from Young Avengers). And yes, it would be lovely for present-day Gertie and Victor and Chase and future Gertie to sit down and talk about mononormativity and polyamory and the BS rule that says if you’re seriously in love it’s forever. But that conversation might be too much to ask. We’ll see what the future brings.
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.
