Is the Young Avengers out in book format yet?Yes, there are two books of the main series so far (up until the hiatus):
"Vol 1: Sidekicks" - out in TPB (trade paperback) and HC (hard cover).
"Vol 2: Family Matters" - out in HC, with a TPB due in May.
There's also a TPB which collects the Young Avengers/Runaways mini-series, but I'd avoid that for now, since it ties into the big "Civil War" storyline that's been running recently, and it would make sense to read "Runaways" first.
Having said that, I do have a tendency to pick up (not necessarily buy) books simply because they have A. Gay. Character!! in them.Yeah, I can understand that - I watched the film "Thunderpants"
a while back for similar reasons (a character with anosmia). In the case of "Young Avengers", my main concern was that the vocal fans (in the letters page) were basically saying "Wow, here are two male characters on the same team - they must become a couple!" That's arguably no worse than the plot of the average romantic comedy (one male lead, one female lead, pretty much destined for each other), but it felt more jarring to me in a different context. I think that "Will and Grace" handled it better (at least in the episodes I've seen) - Will and Jack were friends, and both gay, but they weren't a couple because they had quite different personalities.
epi_lj linked to an article in the Toronto Star about race issues in comics, which I found very interesting.It's a decent article, but I'd be wary of taking it at face value. In particular, my opinion is that Reginald Hudlin is a complete hack. I read (and enjoyed) the previous "Black Panther" series, when it was written by Priest (also a black writer); unfortunately it didn't sell well enough to avoid cancellation. I then picked up Hudlin's relaunch, and bought the first 6 issues (his first storyline); I think that was a fair trial, since £12 is more money than I'd spend on a random film at the cinema, and I was pre-disposed to like the series, but I just gave up on it in disgust because I couldn't figure out what was going on. Paul O'Brien has written a good
review of
#8, where he gives more specific examples of this. More recently, Hudlin has had a storyline where the Black Panther marries Storm (from the X-Men), and the motive does basically seem to be "Well, they're both black, aren't they?"
There was a recent Spider-Man story ("The Other") which was a big crossover between three ongoing titles (one written by Hudlin, one written by JMS, and one written by PAD); there were 12 issues, 4 per title, being split equally between the three writers. I figured I'd give Hudlin another shot, but after his first issue I gave up on his share, and preferred to read the story with three chapters missing. I think it takes a certain perverse skill to co-write a story with the man who wrote Hulk comics for 12 years and still completely screw up the characterisation...
Granted, this is my own opinion, and I assume that other people like his work (someone's buying it). However, it's not quite as simple as saying
"Somehow, in this medium people are so out of touch with popular culture that they don't understand that black culture is popular culture." In other words, it's not enough just to publish a comic with a black/female/whatever character: that comic also has to be worth reading!
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