To be honest, when Joe Quesada started hyping Young Avengers as the big thing from Marvel, I assumed it was going to be a complement to New Avengers, and thus at best not my thing and at worst another nail in the coffin of everything I enjoyed about the Avengers. Instead, it turns out Quesada was 100% right in talking this book up as one of Marvel's best, although I'm reading this book not as a complement to New Avengers, but an alternative to it. New characters with some tie to the legacy of the Avengers, real danger but not an overuse of cheap trick deaths and destruction, compelling mysteries and solid action, this is everything I want from the Avengers, young, old or new. Heinberg writes a smart, powerful Kang as an adversary for this team and offers up a few more reveals about the increasingly interesting young lead characters, not to mention serving up a terrific cliffhanger.
Kang is one of the Avengers' classic villains, and I have to give a lot of respect to Heinberg and Cheung for making the guy cool without resorting to one of two common cheap tactics in so many modern comics. One is that they didn't change his costume from the admittedly garish purple and green number, because while you might be able to tweak it into something cooler, in general it's better to make what you have look cool, and Cheung has done that, giving the blue faceplate a small range of expressions to make Kang seem more evil and of course equipping the future dictator with big guns. The other trick that Heinberg neatly avoids is making Kang look like a badass by having him kill someone off for shock value or beat down the Avengers like it was nothing. There's a respect for Kang's danger, but when he does something beyond the pale, Jessica Jones calls him on it and makes him pay for it, and that small but telling moment is no small part of the reason why Heinberg's writing resonates so well for me here.
I'm also increasingly aware of how wrong I was upfront about these characters being kind of hazy. While Heinberg is laying out who and what they are a little more slowly than I would like (even as late as the mid-'90s, it used to be routine to at least introduce your team by name and powers in the first issue), it's clear that the mystery is deliberate. He gets some nice mileage this issue about the late reveal of Hulkling's powers, and some good moments as the team beats themselves up for trying to be the "Young Avengers" instead of themselves. Heinberg also does a great job of making lemonade (the newly weaponized Kate) out of lemons (the lameass deaths of Hawkeye recently and Mockingbird in an equally stupid, shock value capacity several years back). It is clear that while Heinberg's Young Avengers is based on a big idea from editorial, everything that makes the book special, notably the character interaction and their development into a team and maybe even friends, comes from the writer's pen.
Young Avengers is also notable for being one of Marvel's only super-hyped books that isn't running exceptionally late. Part of that is probably due to Jim Cheung, who manages to provide beautiful artwork and seemingly hit his deadlines as well, a juggling act that a shrinking number of big two artists seem able to manage. I still think Cheung could use some work in distinguishing characters' faces more, because really, Cassie, Jess and Kate look almost identical, and the same goes for Asgardian and Iron Lad, if you don't have their hairstyles and costumes to tell them apart, and the "damaged present" backdrop is a little generic, but otherwise, Cheung is doing exceptional work here.
Cheung's pacing and panel design, in particular, is great for highlighting specific moments and shrinking down others so that the dialogue and action is emphasized in the right measure. Big panel for Kang's blast of Cap early on or the reveal of the damaged landscape, smaller and more intimate panels for the growing friendship between the Young Avengers, Cheung's sense of storytelling is about perfect. Justin Ponsor also does some really nice special effects in his coloring, especially with Kang's glowing power gauntlets or the soft glow of light from Iron Lad's chestplate as the Young Avengers make their way out of the mission. 9/10
