By Travis Johnson
Runaways is a comic, but it’s a great conceit for a teen series in any medium: a group of youths find out that their parents their parents are supervillains, so they run away and form their own team, dedicated to fighting their evil antecedents. It’s a great combo of modern four-colour madness – there’s an eleven year old with super strength and another character who’s best mates with a velociraptor – and teen angst. Joss Whedon even wrote a bunch of issues for the title, which should give you a fair idea of where it sits in terms of genre and ideology.
Now it’s coming to television – or at least a streaming service. Hulu have ordered a series from Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, who have previously given a grateful world The OC and Gossip Girl. And at this point, that’s all we know – there’s no cast in place, no pics, no idea when or in what form it’ll make its way to Australian shores. What’s interesting is that Runaways has been in development for absolute yonks – the idea of a Runaways movie was floated way back in 2008, with comics scribe Brian K. Vaughan originally on scripting duties. It’s taken eight years and lord knows how many different iterations for it to finally get a green light.
Will it be part of the overarching Marvel Cinematic Universe? No idea. But let’s hope it’s good – it’d be shame for a concept this cool to get wasted through shoddy execution.
