Thanks, Rainbow. I can always count on you.

When I heard that Cannonball favorite Rainbow Rowell was joining the Marvel team, I was certainly intrigued. I’m not a huge Marvel fangirl, but I had faith that Rainbow wouldn’t sign on to a project that wasn’t worthy of her. So, at her urging, I went to the library to pick up the first two volumes of the original Runaways, written by the always great Brian K. Vaughan.

And, of course, Rainbow was right. I was immediately taken in and wanted more.*

Here’s a quick overview of what happens in the first two volumes:

A group of six kids are gathered together while their parents have their “annual charity meeting.” The kids aren’t really friends, but are thrown together every year while their parents supposedly meet behind closed doors to decide how to give back to the community. Except their parents are really a group of super villains called The Pride and the kids accidentally see them sacrificing a young prostitute for some unknown reason.

Freaking out, the kids run away from home (hence the name!).

Later, the kids discover that they each have some sort of super ability (one is a witch, one is an alien, one is a mutant, etc..), news that their parents had hidden from them. They discover mystical accessories, like a staff and bracelet and some gauntlets that help to access these powers.

Oh. And they also find a magical, sensory-attuned velociraptor, who can communicate with one of the kids via thought.

And all of this happens while they attempt to process that their parents are evil, and that everything they ever knew had been taken away from them in an instant. The members of the Pride immediately call their contacts in the police (it seems that nothing happens in Los Angeles that the Pride doesn’t know about) and have it staged so that it looks like the prostitute was murdered by the kids, who then went and kidnapped the youngest member of their group, and that they are all wanted by the authorities.

That’s a lot to happen in the first two volumes of a comic. And I didn’t even mention the vampire, the love triangle, and the possibility that one of the runaways is actually a mole, reporting back to the Pride.

These books are fun and exciting (seriously, did you expect anything less if Brian K Vaughan AND Rainbow Rowell are somehow involved?) and I can’t wait to get my hands on the rest of the series. Rainbow’s first issue comes out in September. And, I totally forgot that this is going to be a show on Hulu in November. And its going to have James Master in it as one of the parents in the Pride.  I guess I need to hurry!

*Sadly, my library only has volumes 1 and 2 of the original Runaways. I guess I’ll be hitting up the comic shop this weekend!