I'm gonna cut off any arguments against this book before they even begin, by reposting my response at Bleeding Cool. You're welcome.
some bro said:
Who is this for?
Fans of McKeever's 'Sentinel,' 'Runaways,' and 'Avengers Academy' don't want to watch those characters get used as cannon fodder in a book that gleefully relishes in the carnage and whose sole purpose is to capture that 'Hunger Games' zeitgeist.
The comic readers who pick this up because they like to buy everything that is SUPER SERIAL and doesn't shy away from a body count won't really be emotionally invested. They weren't into supporting these characters when they starred in bright, melodramatic youthful adventures. They don't care about 'Runaways,' they just like looking at bloodshed. And they can easily get their fix from other more hardcore books.
And no offense to Hopeless -- no matter how much characterization he can infuse in these stories, the book's marketing-driven premise was "buy to watch these teen characters get knocked off."
So really this is a book that will piss off the long long-term devoted fans of those characters and is trying to sell itself to a fickle audience that will move on the moment it gets bored.
And the end result will be jettisoning a whole generation of characters from potential future storylines, and alienating a fanbase.
Or, considering all we have is a cover and blurb it could be..... I don't know... something other than the conclusions you jump to?
I doubt they're going to be killing characters left and right and if they do, they certainly have plenty of fodder to choose from. What we know is that the characters are thrown into a scenario where they're forced to fight for survival. Whether they kill or die or manage to flip the script on Arcade is, well, the story itself.
And what's the appeal? As someone who's a big fan of Runaways and enjoyed the bits of Avengers Academy I've read, the appeal to me is watching how these characters react to being thrown in such extreme circumstances. It's seeing how the inevitable factions end up breaking down, which characters fall to their basest instincts and which rise to the occassion, It's about taking characters I'm quite fond of, putting them through a crucible, and seeing what they've become when they emerge from the other side. And it will presumably set the stage for a new book featuring these characters when it hits the inevitable conclusion. I don't think a series with a limited run premise is necessarily a bad thing, as long as it sets up further stories with the characters.
Hypothetically, of course. All we have is a cover and a blurb. Is it derivative? Sure. But it could also be a lot of fun.
And let me just add, painting either AA or Runaways as "bright, meldoramatic adventures" is kind of white washing it a bit, isn't it? Both books have gone to some pretty dark places and they both have a core theme of whether youth bred as villains can overcome their base natures. Seems to me this sort of scenario is a fitting exploration of those ideas.
I did, and I cracked up. But then, I think I'm one of the few people who dug Franken-Castle.
