Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Young Avengers (Vol. 2), Issue #5 – “The Art of Saving the World”! In the previous installment, parents are coming back from the dead to scold their young, alive superhero children and, as it turns out, to also eat their souls. The Young Avengers certainly don’t want this to happen, but Loki has an idea! He just needs Wiccan’s powers for 10 minutes, that’s it! That’s all! Ready?

*poof*

Then Loki disappears and everyone’s pissed. Don’t worry, though, he’ll be back. He’ll follow through with the plan. He’s not a complete dickhead. Well, he is a complete dickhead, but even he knows where to draw the line. And hopefully soon, because there’s a whole zombie parent horde coming after them, and that business ain’t A+ at all.

This is the final issue of the storyline. It’s been a good run, and I hope to return sooner rather than later.

Young Avengers (Vol. 2), Issue #5 [July, 2013]
Written by: Kieron Gillen
“The Art of Saving the World”

This is all happening in Central Park, location of Avengers Mansion where no real Avengers are going to get involved because this is KIDS ONLY. Billy watches the fight and gets sad-sackey. “I’m the one to blame. I find myself thinking if I had my powers… if Loki hadn’t stolen them… if I could cast one last spell, I know what it’d be…”

“IWISHIWASSOMEONEBETTER”

Ugh. Whatever, dingus. Want some streamers for your pity party? Billy sneaks into the downed spacecraft while no one is looking and finds the ARMORY. If that’s what you call it. It’s the ship’s weapons closet. “If I die, the spell ends. The Mother parasite is banished. This all ends.

So Billy finds a nice gun. One of them top of the line guns. A laser-like gun. The kind of gun with a trigger dealie and an end where stuff shoots out. Usually it’s bullets, but since this is a laser-like gun I wouldn’t expect any bullets to come out of it. They could, of course, be laser bullets, but what do I know? I don’t know about laser bullets! But what I do know is that Billy finds a nice gun. One of them top of the line guns. He looks at it and places the business end right under his jaw.

IWISHIWASSOMEONEDEAD IWISHIWASSOMEONEDEAD IWISHIWASSOMEONEDEAD

Suicide isn’t the answer to anything, even if suicide actually is the answer in this case. A sticky situation, to be sure. “I’m sorry, Teddy?” he says as he braces himself.

JUMP CUT! WHAT’S THAT SCAMP LOKI UP TO?! WUBBA LUBBA DUB DUB! “Loki’s the bad guy!” he yells with jazz hands. “Sauron multiplied by that anti-Dumbledore guy cubed! His alignment is totally chaotic evil! He sends misogynist abuse for the lulz!”

OK, well I’m annoyed. Loki is sitting in the middle of a pentagram like a true Wiccan. He talks about how he died and how he was resurrected as a boy, and he strove to change his evil ways. “And then, just when he proved Loki didn’t have to be a bad guy… a phantom copy of his dead self annihilated his soul and took over his body. Honestly, it was really tragic. Everyone was crying.”

Yes, yes. So now, Loki “thinks he can steal a chunk of that Wiccan guy for good, as he thinks he can get what he wants with it.”

This is a devil-on-the-shoulder situation. A Loki hologram is trying to distract real Loki while he sits cross-legged on the floor. “Shut up. You’re not real,” Loki says out loud, mouth a-twist. He will not shut up. He will keep on talking. “You’re a loathsome murderer in stolen suit of skin, aren’t you?”

These two argue for quite some time. Fighting amongst themselves, as it were. Then, once he’s alone again, he “regains focus”. By that I mean he doesn’t regain focus.

“Oh, I miss it so. I know what I want. But my wants have proved a poor master.”

Probably shouldn’t say things like that while you’re in a situation where saying things makes them happen.

Billy is about four microseconds away from pulling the trigger. A bright beam of blue light bursts vertically from Loki’s sitting spot. Then suddenly it’s REMR>

In the fray, Teddy just now realized that Billy took a powder. Flew the coop. “Left the fight” to go “kill himself”. Then his hands turn blue. He leveled up! Teddy punches a dude and he explodes in a torrent of goo bubbles! The rest have the same increased power: Miss America flies through a conga line of gooey parasites. Marvel Boy blasts a bunch in a row with his gun. Hawkeye’s arrow tears through a real slew of jerkfaces. “What’s happening?” she asks, more perplexed than empowered.

“I’m happening,” Loki says amidst a floating blue pentagram that is feeding its electric blue energy into his lucky superhero family. “Famously so.”

“Okay, chico. You’ve got a plan. Share it,” America glares, ready to finally accept that this puny twerp isn’t going to try to fuck them over. Not anymore, at least. Probably. And here’s the plan: Loki powers you guys up and you keep right on doing what you’re doing! How’s that for a plan? Good.

You’re all breaking curfew! Get out of here before you worry your deader-than-dead parents any further!

All five – Wiccan, Hulkling, Miss America, Marvel Boy, and Hawkeye – position themselves at points around the pentagram and feed on the sweet, sweet, heroin-like energy. They absorb as much as they can and then START REIGNING BLOWS upon these parental parasites! Punching and kicking and wailing and slurping and kissing and fondling and… uh… just punching and kicking, actually. Sorry.

Loki’s having trouble at this point sustaining all this power. It won’t be long before he explodes like a ticking time b- oooooh, a pretty bright blue light… then Loki faints. America thinks he’s faking it, and he may very well be, but she supposes they should carry on as if he weren’t faking it. For a change.

The group returns to the ship, which, as we remember, runs on ”Kirby engines” that are powered by imagination and sparked by belief! Rainbows and unicorns and bald eagles and Fabergé eggs. All it takes is Teddy and Billy holding hands to get that motor a-hummin’! Plot hole!

“So let me get this straight! This machine is powered by teenage delusions! Great! Metaphor!” Hawkeye exclaims incredulously. Marvel Boy tells her to put a sock in it before she ruins the engines with her skepticism.

Teddy’s fake mom fades into nothingness, and I’m not really sure why but I’ll go with it. This causes all the alive parents in Central Park to kind of snap out of it and start ambling home. Everything’s going to be A-OK, but I think I’d rather a guy kill a bunch of dead presidents over watching a group of teenagers kill a group of dead parents so that the alive parents can go home. That’s just a preference.

That’s right, Smiley Boy! Count your blessings like they were all the broken teeth on the ground after America punches you in the mouth.

“Evil mischief god is awake. Can we get back in my spaceship now?” Marvel Boy asks politely. “We need to be gone.”

Loki is like no way Jose. He’s figured something out, so pipe down and listen for once in your goddamned lives, you whippersnappers. #1: Where was Laufey in all this? Where was Kate’s mom? Huh? HUH? #2: The spell seems to only activate based on proximity to the deceased. ERGO, and therefore, we’re too far right now for certain animated corpses and whatnot. #3: The parents involved, for the most part – Noh-Varr, America – they died across the entire multiverse, so they’re everywhere at once anyway! Eh? #4: For anyone whose dead parents are grounded on Earth, stay away from those locations forever! That means no Boulder, Colorado, Hawkeye. I’m sure you can manage.

Right now, Loki’s energy is all tapped now. No more fighting! They have to lay low now or else Teddy’s Fake Mom will go right back to fucking everyone’s shit way up.

Billy has to at least let his parents know that he can never see them again for some reason! So he goes and does just that. Again, this is all his fault and he should have killed himself a while ago!

Gonna follow the Dead for a few months. Rite of passage and all that, I don’t think anyone would understand more than you.

“Come home, Billy. Whatever it is, we can talk it through,” Pa says as Ma cries on the couch.

“You’ve been infected by an interdimensional parasite, and if I’m anywhere near you, it’s risking universal doom.”

Well, why didn’t you say so, son! Get out of our lives, y’hear? Don’t forget all the things we taught you, which was nothing! Beat it.

That’s that. Remember that whole thing about not being superheroes anymore. They’re going to keep being superheroes for a while.

Final Thoughts

Meh. Not too engaging. A lot of this story reeked of “what if your parents were literally monsters, dear readers? As if your teenage years weren’t already bad enough!” Kieron Gillen is 47 years old. Come on, now.

Ms. Marvel is better as far as coming-of-age series go. I’ll keep going with this, though, but young Avengers ain’t got nothing on young X-Men. Those kids are freaks.