Comic Book / Runaways (2003)

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Runaways is a 2003 comic book series published by Marvel Comics. The series is written by Brian K. Vaughan with art by Adrian Alphona, and is the first volume of Runaways.

Chase Stein, Alex Wilder, Nico Minoru, Karolina Dean, Molly Hayes and Gert Yorkes are old acquaintances. Once a year, their rich parents meet up and hold a charity meeting, and they are stuck in the family room to play while the parents discuss grown up stuff. But one year, when the parents were having their meeting, Alex discovers a secret passageway which allows them to see what really happens in their meetings. They discover their parents are a secret organization called The Pride.

After discovering this, the children run away from home and set up a hideaway called The Hostel. During their escape, one by one, they discover powers and abilities that they have inherited from their parents.

With these new powers, a team of supervillains working for their own mysterious goals, and a large superhero community that is convinced it knows what is best for these kids, these friends are thrown into the Marvel Universe to survive however they can. Even if that means they are on the run forever.

The first issue was released April 16, 2003. The series lasted for 18 issues, with the final issue released August 18, 2004. The series would be followed by Runaways (2005).

Runaways (2003) provides examples of:

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The sewer that the kids escaped through after their first hostel base got destroyed was big enough to fit about four kids across plus a dinosaur.
• Abuse Discretion Shot: The first panel with Chase Stein in it is the one where he's getting punched in the face by his father, but this is the last time we actually see him being abused. Similarly, when Klara, another abuse survivor joins the team, we only see her abuser in a single panel, with the artist preferring to show her ordeal via the ever-growing collection of bruises on her face when she talks to Karolina and Molly.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Played with. Despite Gert's initial shock, no one seems to mind that Molly is a mutant, although the latter's parents are seen in a flashback defending themselves from an angry mob after being outed as mutants.
• All Your Powers Combined - In the final battle of the original series, Alex ends up in control of Chase's fire-blasting gauntlets, Nico's Staff of One, and Gertrude's psychic connection to Old Lace. All of which would have been much more helpful if he weren't secretly working for his parents. He had no way to take Molly or Karolina's inborn abilities, but it's still a pretty impressive accomplishment for somebody with no powers of his own.
• Apologetic Attacker: Karolina when the first Hostel is attacked by the LAPD.
• Arranged Friendship: The kids originally only tolerated each other because their parents were all ostensibly old friends who insisted on all the families gathering together once a year (as a cover for the parents performing an annual blood sacrifice for wealth and power).
• Beat Panel: In the second issue.
  Molly: Duh. S...E...X. I'm not a baby.
  Alex and Gert look at each other
  Gert: Fine. Come on, kid. Let's go powder our noses.
  Molly: That's code for pee, right?

  For reference, Alex and Gert were talking about whether or not to tell Molly that they found out that her parents were supervillains. She tells them she already knows what they're whispering about, before delivering the sex line.

• Beleaguered Boss: Alex is the Only Sane Man on a team that includes a Dumb Jock, a Soapbox Sadie, a temperamental airhead, and a Cute Bruiser. Subverted in that he intentionally built the team this way; they were supposed to die fighting their own evil parents so that he and his parents would reap all the benefits of the Doomsday Plot for themselves.
• Big Bad: The Gibborim, who set the Pride's plan into motion in order to return to power.
• Big Bad Ensemble: It's complicated. The Pride are made to appear like a Big Bad Duumvirate, but two of the couples, the Deans and the Hayes family, were planing to betray the others. However, it's revealed that Alex knew of the plan, and manipulated the kids to run away in order to stop it. Too bad he was killed by the Gibborim not long after The Reveal.
• Big Book of War: The Abstract, a book given by the Gibborim to the Pride. It contains info about everything related to them, including their future. It can only be read with a special ring that decodifies it.
• Big "NO!": The first major Big "NO!" takes place when Wilder screams it after Alex is burned to a crisp by the Gibborim after he admits to being The Mole for the Pride and, "like an adult," taking responsibility for the girl's lost soul.
• Black Republican: All three of the minority couples (Geoffrey and Catherine Wilder, Tina and Robert Minoru, and Dale and Stacey Yorkes) in the Pride were conservatives... because they were all hypocrites, preaching a "pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps" ethos when all three couples gained their wealth and power through a deal with the Gibborim.
• Cassandra Truth: Played with. Most people don't believe the Runaways when they claim that their parents are a cabal of supervillains (in famously meta-crime free LA). Those who do are with the cabal, unable to help because of extenuating circumstances, or are too incompetent to do anything about it.
• Changeling Fantasy: "Evil real family" subversion. The kids' parents weren't just boring Californian rich people, they're also supervillains with a world-ending Evil Plan.
• The Chessmaster: Alex Wilder. His mother mentions early on that Alex is a prodigy when it comes to logic and strategy, and Alex proves the truth of those words when he reveals that he was mapulating his friends from the beginning, all so he and his parents could kill off the rest of the Pride and live forever in Paradise.
• Children Are Innocent: Played with. The kids had no idea of their parent's activities, but were understandably left fairly bitter by the aftermath.
• Crime-Concealing Hobby: Philantrophy, in this case. The main characters' rich parents are supposedly part of a charity group, but this is a front for their world-ending plan involving Human Sacrifice.
• CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: Gert gives Chase CPR after he nearly drowns. He's in no shape to move immediately afterwards, but recovers quickly enough to hotwire the Leapfrog and interrupt the big fight.
• Deal with the Devil: The Pride struck a deal with the Half-Human Hybrid descendants of fallen angels — they sacrifice one innocent a year to restore the Gibborim's power, and their children are guaranteed a spot in paradise.
• Defector from Decadence: The kids after finding out that their comfortable lives are based on murder and a plan to destroy the world.
• Ditto Aliens: Mrs. Dean makes a comment about how all the Skrulls look alike to her.
• Dr. Fakenstein: Chase's parents, Victor and Janet Stein, are a pair of Mad Scientists.
• Driving Stick: Karolina has her drivers licence, but cannot drive a stick shift. Hilarity ensues (and much cursing about the impossibility of stick shifts) when she has to drive Chase's van.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The original Hostel was an entire mansion underground, though some of the Pride facilities are more standard versions of this setting.
• The Elites Jump Ship: The master plan and major plot driven by The Pride. They plan to destroy the world on behalf of a trio of fallen angels, all while ensuring that their own children get to live in the paradise that the angels promised to build in the ruins.
• Exact Words: For the first half of Volume 1, members of the Pride keep commenting that they do what they do to leave a better world for their children, implying that they are some kind of Well-Intentioned Extremists. We eventually find out that they are out to leave a better world for their children and only for their children - the entire rest of humanity, including themselves, are going to be dead.
• Family-Values Villain: While their styles of parenting range from hands off to strict/abusive, the supervillain parents maintain normal upper middle class lives when not involved in villainy and have typical expectations of their children being successful. They want to make the world a better place and believe they are doing what is best for their kids... by letting the Gibborim destroy and remake it so their kids can live in paradise. The series is practically the poster child for Even Evil Has Loved Ones/Evil Parents Want Good Kids.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The Gibborim exploited this for all it was worth when picking the Pride. Time-travelers, magicians, glowing aliens, mutants, scientists and Badass Normals, all in one group.
• First Kiss: The first one in the series is between Nico and Alex. Later on in Volume 1, we get a Kiss of Life between Gert and Chase, which soon becomes the real deal.
• Frame-Up: One of the opening salvos between The Pride and The Runaways is to frame them for all their murders.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Invoked to emphasize the Pride's Moral Myopia. Chase's mother refused to give up her baby, claiming she wasn't a monster...while she and the rest of the Pride were about to sacrifice an innocent girl.
• Great Big Book of Everything: The Abstract, a book given by the Gibborim to the Pride. It contains info about everything related to them, including their future. It can only be read with a special ring that decodes it.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Gibborim in the inital run. They provided the Pride with their power in exchange for their services, namely performing rituals so the Gibborim will have the power to wipe out humanity.
• Hand Wave:
  • The logistics of living as runaways (where do they get food, etc.) are mentioned every now and then, but usually just gilded over. Though it is implied that as they start using abandoned Pride bases as "The Hostel" that these places were already fully stocked with supplies, and possibly money, should the Pride themselves need to hide out there.
  • Frank Dean's explanation of how the Abstract works:
    Dean: It's magic, mutant. If you think about it too hard, your brain will explode.
• Happily Married: All six couples in the Pride, despite being supervillains.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": In Issue # 4 of the first volume, Nico complains of having "a giant rod stuck inside [her] body." Even being half unconscious doesn't stop Chase from snickering about that one.
• Hellish L.A.: Los Angeles is the squatting ground for the Gibborim, a trio of fallen angels who intend to wipe out all of humanity. To this end, they installed the Pride, a cult-like criminal organization that performs human sacrifices in exchange for being given the resources to corrupt every significant organization in the city. Even after the Pride are defeated, the city is still a mess, crawling with supervillains and the odd supernatural monster.
• Horror Hippies: Frank and Leslie Dean initially look like a pair of friendly aging hippies, but are in fact a pair of alien criminals who also happen to be members of the Pride, a combination between a doomsday cult and an organized crime syndicate.
• How Did You Know? I Didn't: Played seriously with Karolina's blood killing Topher in volume one, because she had no idea it would happen and honestly wanted to die.
• Kiss of Life: Gert and Chase's First Kiss comes when the former is trying to give the latter mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
• Knight Templar Parent: All of the Pride could be said to fit in this category, in that they're planning on giving the reward they earn for their Deal with the Devil to the kids. Not everyone is planning to honor this arrangement. And being a Knight Templar Parent does not necessarily translate to being a good or bad one in everyday life: the parents range from being informal and friendly (Karolina's) to outright abusive (Chase's) and everywhere in between.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: To preserve their secret, the Pride wipe memories from Cloak and Dagger. At least they use telepathy, legitimizing the trope. But then Cloak regains his memories after a swift smack on the head from Luke Cage, and this is played totally straight.
• Metallicar Syndrome: Averted but discussed early, where Chase drives the Runaways around and one of them complains about how uncool his plain white van is; he responds that he got it on purpose because a plain white van is the most inconspicuous vehicle possible.
• Microcosm Foreshadowing: The series opens with protagonist Alex Wilder leading an MMORPG campaign that goes off the rails because his tactical skills can't compensate for his teammates' unwillingness to take the campaign seriously because they all seem him as a Stop Having Fun Guy. This foretells his major problem in leading the Runaways — their varied personalities clash with his tactical plans and because they see him as a boring wet blanket, they don't listen to him, even when they know that they must work together to stop a trio of corrupted angels from destroying all humans. Subverted when it turns out that he deliberately intended for the Runaways to fail, as he wanted most of the team to die so that his family and Nico's family could cut a better deal with the Gibborim.
• The Mole:
  • A key part of the plot for the comic's first year and half. It is revealed to be Alex Wilder, by self-admittance. See The Reveal below.
  • Towards the end of the first volume, a few members of the Pride start wondering if one of them is on the kids' side, but this is not resolved.
• "No. Just… No" Reaction: This exchange from #1:
  Molly: Can I ask you a question about girl stuff?
  Gert: Under no circumstances.
• Like Father, Unlike Son: The eponymous characters are a team of Heroes With Bad Publicity, whereas their parents were villains with good publicity.
• Lives in a Van: The Runaways have frequently been reduced to living out of their Leapfrog, presumably because it's hard to get a home loan when you're wanted by S.H.I.E.L.D.
• Logic Bomb: Exploited. Logic bombs are used as a failsafe against Victor should he turn against the team. The logic bomb itself (and the reset switch) are hilarious.
• Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Nico has a self-admitted track record of bad guy boyfriends and failed relationships.
• Mad Scientist: The Steins are evil geniuses who built several gadgets.
• Magic Is Feminine: In the team's first iteration, the only members with powers were Nico (who fought with her family's magical Staff of One), Karolina (who inherited light-based alien powers), and Molly (who had mutant Super-Strength). The other female character, Gert, had a psychic dinosaur, while the two male characters, Chase and Alex, were much more mundane.
• Mon: Old Lace is an empathically bonded velociraptor genetically engineered from the 87nd century for Gert. She's at her beck and call.
• Money Dumb: The Runaways, being teenagers who grew up in wealthy families, are terrible at saving money. The only reason they're still afloat is because Karolina still receives royalties from her parents' old movies.
• Mutually Unequal Relationship:
  • Alex has always hated Chase since they were kids. Chase was unaware of this, and thought that they were best bros.
  • Karolina had a longstanding crush on Nico. Nico completely missed it, thinking that Karolina was just really friendly.
  • Molly assumes that because she and Gert were the two youngest members of the original team, they would naturally be best friends. Gert find Molly annoying.
  • After they started dating, Gert and Chase each suspected that the other would eventually leave them. Gert feared that Chase would dump her for either Nico or Karolina because they were more conventionally attractive, while Chase thought that Gert might dump him for Victor, who was smarter and closer to her age.
  • Xavin constantly frets that Karolina might not really love them. Karolina, for her part, seems to at least care about Xavin enough to stay with them and try and work out any differences the two might have.
• Mistaken for Disease: In the short story "It's Not Lupus", Molly suddenly falls violently ill, and Nico's initial theory is that she caught some sort of old disease from Klara, who hails from the 19th century and thus is unvaccinated. Except that then Chase falls ill, too, despite Nico putting Molly and Klara in quarantine. The actual culprit is Nico herself, who accidentally cast a spell on Molly and Chase after losing her temper.
• The Nicknamer: No one individual, rather all members of the team toss nicknames around that range in use from one-time teases to regularly calling to Nico as "boss".
• Only Smart by Comparison:
  • Much of Alex Wilder's vaunted tactical brilliance is in comparison to his teammates, all of whom are young and sheltered teenagers. When he tries to take on the Gibborim - three impossibly old and powerful angels - they immediately burn him to ash. His fortunes have been even worse since being returned from the dead, as his various failed attempts at teenage supervillainy mean that there is no teenager dumb enough to trust him, and since he's still in a teenage body, no adult supervillains are willing to take him seriously.
  • Gert Yorkes was the second-smartest member of the original team, and has much the same problem as Alex, that her intelligence is relative to the rest of her teammates. This became readily apparent when she tried to bluff Geoffrey Wilder, and ended up with a knife in her chest for her troubles. Post-resurrection, she doesn't even have her relative brilliance anymore, as her teammates have all gotten more life experience in the years since her death, while she's been out of school for so long that when she tries to re-enroll in order to catch up, she is flabbergasted by the concept of shelter-in-place drills.
• Opposites Attract: Gert and Chase, a nerd and a jock.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The password to get into the Yorkes secret lair is 'PRIDE'. Karolina comments that her mom's AOL password is 'PASSWORD'.
• Petty Childhood Grudge: Gert Yorkes decided that her parents were irredeemably evil after they got rid of her Vietnamese pot-bellied pig when she was a child. Ironically, they turned out to be actual supervillains.
• Plutocratic Pervert Parties: Once a year, six of Los Angeles' wealthiest families - Wilder, Minoru, Yorkes, Stein, Hayes, and Dean - hold a secretive meeting. One year, their kids get bored and decide to spy on the meeting, assuming that it's going to be an orgy. The truth is far worse - it's a human sacrifice in order to maintain wealth and power. Horrified by what they witnessed, the kids run away, setting off the events of the series.
• Profanity Police: Issue #1 has Alex Wilder playing an online game about the Hulk, Daredevil and other famous heroes. Playing as Captain America, Alex breaks character to voice his displeasure with the campaign, saying that it's "totally retarded."
  Other player: And just so you know, it's not cool to use "retarded" in a pejorative manner.
• Reinventing the Telephone: An odd example. When the Wilders need to talk to the other members of the Pride, they use a Video-Phone, presumably just a convenient webcam, but the other couples all use a variant based on their area of expertise. The wizards have a mystical portal, the scientists have a Hologram, etc.
• The Reveal: When Alex admits to being The Mole for the Pride.
• Rewatch Bonus: Rereading the first arc can be quite interesting after the revelation that Alex, who lead the Runaways into discovering the true nature of their parents, is actually The Mole and was using them the whole time.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: The Pride have admittedly bought out most of California, allowing them to do pretty much whatever the hell they want.
• Secret Legacy: The kids find out their parents are super villains and all get powers/items of importance from them.
• Sins of Our Fathers: This is invoked when Karolina is threatened at the climax of Volume 1.
• Sixth Ranger Traitor: Topher, when he reveals he's a vampire just out to eat them.
• Sleeping Dummy: "What is our son doing with a male mannequin head in his room?"
• Soapbox Sadie: Gert. She is first shown wanting to join the Communist Club at her school, and correcting her dads etymology.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Gert with Chase in the first volume. When they get together, it's much warmer.
• Symbol Swearing: Most notably used by Chase at the penultimate issue of the original series, and by Karolina in the climactic battle in the second crossover with Young Avengers.
• Take That!: When Molly sees Old Lace for the first time, this exchange happens:
  Molly: You have a dinosaur!
  Gert: Yeah, but it's a friendly dinosaur. Like Barney.
  Molly: I hate Barney!
• Villainous Parental Instinct: The Pride were initially prepared to sacrifice all life on Earth to the Gibborim for twenty-plus years of obscene riches and power. When they started having kids, however, their modus operandi changed; instead of serving the Gibborim for their own ends, they continued to serve them in order to insure that their kids would be spared when the Gibborim carried out their plan to remake the world.
• Virtuous Vegetarianism: Zigzagged. Karolina alludes to this trope when she points out her parents can't be evil because they're vegetarian...but they really are both vegetarian and evil. However, Karolina is a straight example as she's also vegetarian, and she's very much The Heart of the team.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Subverted. The members of the Pride keep saying that they're building a better future for their children, but it turns out that they literally mean just the six kids they spawned—the rest of humanity will die if all goes according to plan. Plus, the original deal with the Gibborim was that three of the couples would get to live eternally in paradise, so their motivations were purely selfish to begin with. Only the Yorkes seem to genuinely think they're doing the world as a whole a favor.
  Stacy Yorkes: Before my dolt of a husband totaled our 4-D portico permanently, we visited thousands of possible futures, each worse than the last...The next generation deserves something new...and that's exactly what we're going to give them.
• Wham Episode:
  • Volume 1, issue 6: There's a mole within the team.
  • Volume 1, issue 13: The Pride's true motivations are revealed: their serving three gigantic monsters, possibly fallen angels, known as the Gibborim that want to extingish all life on earth, leaving only the six runaways, originally the six members of the pride the Gibborim favored the most before a pregnancy led to a change of plans, to inherit the earth.
  • Volume 1, issue 16: Alex is revealed to be the Mole, right after gaining possession of the Fistagons, Chase's goggles, the staff of one, and Old Lace.
  • Volume 1, issue 17: Alex reveals he found out not only what his parents were doing a year ago, but that the Deans and Hayes planned on betraying the rest of the Pride, and that he manipulated the team into finding their various equipment and/or abilities. Alex is then quickly dispatched and Molly destroys the vessel for the rite of thunder, leading to the Gibborim destroying the Pride and Alex.
• White Gangbangers: Parodied in Teenage Wasteland - Nico complains that the group's disguises make them look the sort of politically correct gang that only shows up in bad TV shows.
• "With Our Swords" Scene: Given a clever twist when the character who receives the main character's equipment and powers reveals that they've been the mole all along, and deliberately orchestrated the scenario to play out this way.
• Worst Aid: Analyzed and played straight. When it looks like Chase is dead from being held under the water, the other kids all throw out different suggestions to bring him back to life, ranging from sucking the water out to the heimlich maneuver. They do use CPR, but none of them can remember how many compressions to give him. It does cross over into CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable territory when it brings him back fully even though his heart had been stopped for several minutes.
• You Have Failed Me: Lieutenant Flores in the first volume's last arc, after an unsanctioned attempt to bring in the kids nearly gets them killed and destroys the first Hostel. Alex's dad is waiting for him when the cops get him out of the rubble, and is not happy.
  "Oh thank God. I thought I was dead."
  "And for once, you were right." *shotgun*
• You Watch Too Much X: When the team discovers Karolina's powers, Alex suggests that her Med-Alert bracelet is made of something that inhibits them. He gets halfway through the word "Kryptonite" before Chase cuts him off. "You've been watching too many WB shows, bro."