Fear Itself: Youth in Revolt #2 – Review

By: Sean McKeever (writer), Mike Norton (art), Veronica Gandini (colors), Clayton Cowles (letters) & Lauren Sankovitch (editor)

The Story: The young Initiative characters are still being pressed into action during Fear Itself and Thor Girl is asked to “take one for the team”.

What’s Good: Young heroes are hard to introduce partially because it’s hard to find good stuff for them to do.  During a “normal” time in the Marvel Universe, there are usually at least several major threats to the Earth/universe and the A-list heroes tackle those threats.  It’s a problem I’ve always had with characters like the New Mutants: If the threat is HUGE, it seems like something the X-Men-proper should handle, but if the threat is small, I don’t feel like I need to spend money to watch B-list heroes tackle B-list problems.  It’s a Catch 22.

Enter Fear Itself!  With a mega-event like FI, it makes all kinds of sense that the kiddie heroes and B-listers would get drafted into action out of necessity.  If escaped criminals from the Raft are rampaging in my town I’d want Thor to show up, but I’d rather have Frog-Man than nothing.  That’s basically the set up for Youth in Revolt.  As in the first issue, the mere presence of these kids drives home what a nasty situation FI is and we get to see some non-traditional heroes doing their best and being heroic.  In some ways, they’re almost more heroic because they aren’t as tough.  At one point, the kids end up in battle with a semi-major villain.  Thor or Red Hulk or Iron Man would just destroy the guy, but these kids are legitimately threatened by this villain and you can really respect their actions all the more because of it.  With any luck, one or two of these characters will be compelling enough that they might end up in some other Marvel books after FI.  Others (like Frogman) will go back on the shelf until the next event.