Young Avengers is full of flash. It boasts beautifully bright artwork from Jamie McKelvie, complete with his occasionally elaborate layouts, and it has a lot of shenanigans from Kieron Gillen’s writing, including the fun he has playing around with Kid Loki’s reputation and Noh-Varr’s hipster music love. But amidst all the snark and circumstance, one of the more low-key members of the team is becoming the book’s breakout character – at least to me. That would be the mysterious Miss America Chavez, the young woman of few words who takes no bullshit and can kick open portals to other dimensions. Plus, she can fly and kick everyone’s ass. Let everyone else bandy about the barbs – she’s there to get shit done and make sure Loki doesn’t pull anything.
In Young Avengers #8, her dimension-kicker abilities come to the fore, as the team is trying to find Wiccan’s brother Speed, who has been abducted to another plane by a mysterious being disguised as their former member Patriot. They’ve been going through multiversal hell trying to track that trail, but they’ve also been having a lot of fun in the bonding process as well. It’s a matter of experiencing a lot of gross places – “Oh, great, another apocalyptic world,” as Kate Bishop says upon landing in a place full of creepy black-hole-faced ladies – until they find the surreal blank-white home dimension of Mother, the creepy parasite who has been posing as Hulkling’s long-lost mom and who has turned all these kids’ parents against them, and they lose two of their number trying to escape – Hulkling and Prodigy. That results in some da-raaamaaaaaaa that plays on Hulkling’s sudden worry that his boyfriend Wiccan is subconsciously using his reality-warping powers to make him love him.
This has been a very fun and good-looking book so far, never losing its sense of youthful exuberance even in the face of the kind of bleakness that would take over most other stories. It’s solid entertainment, and Miss America is that amorphous sense of cool that occasionally cuts through the angst and snappy patter to make sure the team stays proactive. We don’t know much about her history, how she got her powers or anything like that, and it’s stuff she doesn’t feel inclined to offer, since it’s nobody’s business. Instead, she pulls fat out of the fire when she has to, and she cracks skulls when it’s skull-crackin’ time, all with a barely-concealed sneer and a sense that she knows a lot more than she’s telling. She may use the word ‘chico’ o’ermuch, but that may only be noticeable because she doesn’t talk enough to say much else, so every word counts. She just radiates badass, and that makes for an appealing character.
Seriously, if you can pull off a line like “the laws of physics can kiss my ass” and make us believe it, we don’t need much more out of our comic book heroines. Young Avengers isn’t mind-blowing or anything, but it’s always right on that cusp of being a total blast.
