Youth in Crisis: Looking Back at Marvel’s Outlawed (Patreon)

By Doris V. Sutherland

The superhero comic convention of the “event” story can be divided into two main categories. The first consists of cosmic-scale storylines like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinity War, where worlds and realities are threatened by godlike beings and universe-destroying menaces. The second, meanwhile, includes the likes of Civil War and Identity Crisis, where the conflict is framed as moral or ideological rather than existential. Typically, the latter story type will kick off with one or more heroes stepping out of bounds, and the superpowered community as a whole being faced with a question: is it time to be reined in, or perhaps even abandon their capes altogether?

Of the two varieties, it is the second that poses the greatest threat to the lives of the spandex class. Saving planets from destruction is the sort of thing that superheroes are expected to do on a regular basis without breaking a sweat; but once the reader is specifically invited to question the social assumptions behind the genre – well, that is when the entire fantasyland is in danger. When done well, it can result in a thoughtful deconstruction, sometimes followed by a reconstruction; when done poorly, however, it becomes merely self-defeating.

Marvel’s 2020 storyline Outlawed belongs very much to the Civil War variety of comic event. Its premise is based on a question that has haunted the genre since 1988, when the Joker killed Jason Todd in the universe next door: is it justifiable to have teenage superheroes out on the streets, putting themselves and bystanders in danger to fight their foes? Or can the authorities be trusted to step in and protect these costumed youngsters from themselves? This was a story that played out across four separate titles with three different authors, each of whom had a different attitude towards the clash between superhero fantasy and real-world concerns.

Outlawed #1 and Champions

The main body of the storyline plays out in the one-shot Outlawed #1 and the first five issues of the 2020 Champions launch, all of which were written by Eve L. Ewing. The one-shot opens in medias res, with a legislative hearing in which various costumed superheroes (plus a developmental psychologist) discuss an event that has not yet been shown. This establishes that the story takes place in what is now the standard setting for superhero comics that articulate real-world issues – that is, a strange, almost dreamlike mixture of fantasy and mundanity. This effect is heightened by how the characters’ emotions – which range from righteous indignation to the grief of potential bereavement – are filtered through Kim Jacinto’s broad, rather Disney-like artwork. The issue’s loose and cartoonish aesthetic,  incidentally, is typical of the Outlawed event: of the tie-ins titles, only Miles Morales: Spider-Man has halfway naturalistic art.

Sam Alexander (Nova) testifying during a congressional hearing

Outlawed #1, Clayton Cowles (letterer), Eve L. Ewing (writer), Espen Grundetjern (colorist), and Kim Jacinto (artist), Pepe Larraz and David Curiel (cover artists), Marvel Comics, March 18, 2020

Outlawed #1 then skips back a few days to high school where the Champions are stationed – two of them, Kamala “Ms. Marvel” Khan and Miles “Spider-Man” Morales, in their civilian identities. After some vaguely-hip banter (“You look like Janet Jackson when you do the whole earpiece thing”) we learn their mission: a 16-year-old environmental activist named Ailana Kanua is delivering a speech at the school; as she has received death threats, the young superheroes are keeping an eye out for her safety. The character of Ailiana is another nod to real-world issues, being an obvious stand-in for Greta Thunberg, although the comic makes a token effort to mask this by making her a native not of Sweden but of the Marshall Islands. After Ailana delivers a two-panel speech on the rising sea levels around her homeland (“She is fierce” declares one of the listening students) the school is hit by an attack, and the Champions jump into action.

The conflict ends when Champions’ android team-member Viv Vision malfunctions and knocks over the school building, nearly crushing Ailana; the latter is saved by Kamala. The battle ends with the attackers defeated, but the heroes are left to face the collateral damage: Viv is missing; their near-failure to protect Ailana is a PR time-bomb; and Kamala (who never switched to her Ms. Marvel identity) is in hospital, leaving the authorities to assume that she is a civilian casualty. A news reporter stands in front of the rubble: “did the teen heroes end the destruction – or cause it?”

The issue ends with string-pulling antagonist Senator Patrick announcing that an organisation called CRADLE (Child Hero Reconnaissance and Disruption Law Enforcement) has been formed to uphold the newly-passed Underage Superhuman Welfare Act. The final two pages show armed CRADLE agents barging into the homes of young heroes; protesters for and against superteens facing off against one another; and Kamala in a hospital bed. The new law, as established in the conclusion, will be informally known as Kamala’s Law in honour of the supposed victim.

After the set-up in Outlawed #1, Champions #1 plunges us straight into conflict: the Champions must handle not only CRADLE, but also internal divisions. The recovered Ms. Marvel delivers a public speech renouncing the new law, declaring that she and her teammates represent “the generation that refuses to accept injustice” and announcing that the Champions will continue “doing the work that the adult superhero community is too busy fighting amongst themselves to do.” This, ironically, leads to the group arguing amongst themselves, as Ms. Marvel delivered the speech without checking with her teammates beforehand. One character, Dust, even blames Ms. Marvel for the entire problem on the grounds that she failed to prevent Viv’s malfunction. The Champions’ hideout is then attacked by CRADLE agents, having been sold out by one of their own – the culprit turning out to be the elusive Viv.

The central plot of the Champions arc – the main characters squabbling amongst themselves while being chased by CRADLE – is rather too thin to sustain five issues, and the comic soon begins meandering. The penultimate issue is an X-Men crossover in which the Champions and Mutants team up to fight an aquatic superfoe who objects to the noise made by a survey ship; this has little bearing on the wider plot beyond restating what the comic has already made loud and clear: that it is sometimes hard to identify the moral high ground.

This narrative vagueness owes a good deal to the comic’s failure to establish a core of character-based drama. Although the story is ostensibly focused on the Champions team itself, the plot impacts all of the  US-based teen (and preteen) heroes in the Marvel Universe, and many of them are given appearances to emphasise this fact: Bombshell, Squirrel Girl, Brawn, Moon Girl, Locust, Wasp, Power Man, Pinpoint, Snowguard and Starling all turn up at one point or another. This leaves the story with little room to actually develop its characters, most of whom blur together into a single mass of adolescent disgruntlement. There is a telling moment in Champions #3 in which Miles Morales – nominally one of the central characters – admits that the narrative has given him no character arc: “Ms. Marvel is trying to keep us together., like she always does. Riri is being snarky. Sam is angry. They’re all scared. And me? I’m not sure I have space to feel anything anymore.” This comes immediately before he spends a page recapping events from the tie-in titles, which turns out to be his main role in the issue.

Splash page from Champions #1 by writer Eve L. Ewing, artist Simone Di Meo, colorist Federico Blee, and letterer Clayton Cowles depicting Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel speaking on behalf of the Champions

Only two of the comic’s subplots give the core characters any real meat. One of these is the conflict between Ironheart and Ms. Marvel, the former blaming the latter for failing to save Viv and also expressing frustration at her real identity as Riri Williams being public knowledge while the other Champions get to hide behind masks. The other is Viv’s journey of self-discovery. Faced with the guilt of having sold out her friends, she heads to rural Kansas where she befriends an elderly African-American woman, Cora, who gives her emotional support.

The Kamala/Riri feud does not last long, peaking in issue 2 and fading by the end of issue 3. The Viv/Cora subplot, meanwhile, is wrapped up with the not-very-well-disguised Viv spilling her problems out to Cora. “I have… friends. Who are very dear to me”, she says. “We put others in danger with our actions. Afterward, I discovered that my friends were putting themselves in continued danger. I was frightened. And I notified the authorities [...] It is a complex situation. My friends are breaking rules, but only to do good things for the world.”  Cora responds by telling Viv about her own history as an activist who fought against racial segregation: “Why were those people mistreating you?” asks Viv, after seeing a photograph of the young Cora and her friends being tormented by a group of white men. “Because we were breaking the rules”, answers Cora. “But the thing is, those rules weren’t fair.” Viv remains conflicted, but decides that her best course of action is to return to her friends and work things out.

This usage of racial segregation to provide a turning point in Viv’s character arc is one of many instances in Champions where real-world strife bubbles through the cracks in the fantastical setting. Issue 1, for example, briefly addresses police corruption (“Why’d you let him go?” asks a cop to his partner as Miles swings away. “We need to get our arrest numbers up or these CRADLE guys are gonna come in and take over our whole jurisdiction”). Miles escapes to an abandoned building: “Always nice to find an ungentrified corner of Brooklyn”, he quips. Later on, a protestor complains that the rules arising from Kamala’s Law “are mostly hurting youth of color and LGBT youth”. Nova finds the arrests all too familiar as he comes from Arizona, “a place where kids are separated from their families all the time”. In one scene Ms. Marvel reveals that she has stayed up all night watching a social media campaign against the Champions, fuelled by fake photographs: “I just start doomscrolling and I can’t… I can’t stop.”

The comic’s most substantial engagement with real-world strife occurs in the detention centre subplot. Here, the captives are forced into a class in which they are given with a role model in the form of superteen Vance “Justice” Astrovik, who accidentally killed his abusive father in a 1990s storyline; their teacher presents him as a reformed miscreant whose tragic past demonstrates why young heroes’ powers need to be reined in. They are forced to recite the phrase “safety is everyone’s responsibility”, and given the essay prompt “most teen superheroes unintentionally murder their loved ones. What I can personally learn from this is…” Their teacher orders them to fulfill these tasks if any of them “want to see the light of day again.”

All of this is too familiar to some of the inmates. “That’s what you call it?” asks Snowguard, who is Inuk. “‘Reeducation center.’ Interesting. My people know all about those. Although where I come from, they called them ‘residential schools.’”

“Yeah, ‘reeducation and rehabilitation camp’, adds another captive, Bombshell. “That’s what they called the place where my great grandmother was murdered.”

The story of Bombshell’s great-grandmother being murdered in a camp is presumably a reference to the Holocaust (although Bombshell’s precise heritage is not divulged by the comic, she has the Germanic surname Baumgartner). Snowguard’s comment is more specific. It refers to the government policy that existed in Canada for part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of taking indigenous children from their families and forcing them to attend Christian boarding schools where they would lose their languages, their culture and in some cases their lives. These atrocities were the subject of an extensively-researched Truth and Reconciliation Commission report released in 2015. Any depiction of the mass-incarceration of minors in 2020 will also invite comparison to the Trump administration’s policy of separating children and adults at the US-Mexico border, as alluded to in Nova’s comment elsewhere about families being separated in Arizona.

Panels from Champions #2 by writer Eve L. Ewing, artist Simone Di Meo, colorist Federico Blee, and letterer Clayton Cowles depicting a CRADLE agent, Amka Aliyak, and Lana Baumgartner

So, with its detention centre subplot, the comic has found itself a setting positively bristling with sharp connotations. The story also emphasising the faultlines that exist between the teen heroes: Justice supports Kamala’s Law from the start (and is viewed as a sellout by the others) while Bombshell, after her initial outburst, is taken away and given a lecture that persuades her to support CRADLE. Her fellow inmates believe her to be brainwashed, but she insists that she has had a genuine change of heart. However, while Champions is eager to explore both the politics and psychology of oppression, it runs into the same trouble that has dogged X-Men since its inception: when a minority group is given superpowers, then it is impossible to explore their oppression except through the lens of escapist fantasy. And so, having set up its issue-based drama, Champions has nowhere to go but wham-bang superheroics.

Come Champions #5, the story concludes with a chasing-and-punching romp in which Viv teams up with Brawn to infiltrate the CRADLE headquarters. As well as freeing the captives, they obtain video footage of the inmates’ ill-treatment and evidence that CRADLE is funded by the evil Roxxon Energy Corporation – all of which is presented to the public by the Champions in a viral video. Most of the heroes conclude that Roxxon was behind the attack on the school back in Outlawed #1 in an attempt to take out the environmentalist Ailana, although Bombshell remains a doubting Thomas. “It’s not that simple”, she says. “Yes, CRADLE held us captive. Clearly, Roxxon is trying to make a quick buck by running these centers on government money. But the accident was us. We do need to be accountable. I’m glad Viv is okay, but it’s bigger than that.”  The others are not especially receptive to her concerns: “The fact that you said ‘they held us captive, but’ lets me know you're out of your gourd”, says fellow inmate Starling.

This argument is left unresolved, a visible crack between the moral ambiguity that Outlawed is aiming for and the superhero genre’s propensity for clean-cut solutions. The storyline wraps up with Kamala’s Law repealed, the young heroes free, and Roxxon positioned as the main antagonists for the next round of adventures; but the underlying impression is that Champions missed the opportunity to actually say anything with its saga of incarcerated superteens.

Whatever the shortcomings for the main Outlawed storyline in Champions, there was still room for the tie-in titles to improve. Of these, the most prominent were Miles Morales: Spider-Man and Magnificient Ms. Marvel – two series that each star Champions members, and were each penned by Saladin Ahmed, who had taken over the reins before the Outlawed story began.

Miles Morales: Spider-Man

Ahmed’s run on Miles Morales: Spider-Man began its crossover with Outlawed in issue 17, although a large part of the ensuing storyline – namely, the part dealing with the machinations of the mysterious villain Ultimatum – follows on from events in #16. Between them, these two issues do much to establish the characterisation that Miles lacks in Champions. Ahmed makes a point out of emphasising his role as a dependable big-brother figure, whether literally (he takes care of his baby brother in #16) or figuratively (#17 has him using his Spider-Man identity to boost the confidence of a bullied schoolboy). His compassionate attitude towards children and general liberality is contrasted with the authoritarian CRADLE agents – led here by sometime SHIELD operative Dum Dum Dugan,

Miles Morales argues with CRADLE agents, led by Dum Dum Dugan

Panels from Miles Morales: Spider-Man #17. Script by Saladin Ahmed.Art by Carmen Carnero. Colours by David Curiel. Letters by Cory Petit. Copyright Marvel 2020.

Miles accuses the black-suited agents of looking like fascists. “I’ve fought real Naizs, son”, replies Dugan. “This is about keeping children safe.” Miles has a retort: “Whether they want to be or not, huh?” He later finds that his school has become embroiled in Kamala’s Law, with staff arguing over the pros and cons of having CRADLE agents patrolling the campus. After this comes a minor disagreement within Miles’ family. His parents know of his secret identity; his father is against Kamala’s Law (“It’s a damn disgrace. Taking kids away from their parents with no damn reason”) but his mother wonders if it might be beneficial: “I’m a head nurse. I see injured kids all day long. Dead kids. The world is vicious. These people aren’t crazy for thinking we all need to be more careful, is all I’m saying.”

Miles soon gets sucked into unrelated superheroic trouble – courtesy of Ultimatum, who has an evil clone of Miles and an army of mutant Goblinoids as heavies – and so it is the supporting cast of Miles’ schoolfriends who face the brunt of Kamala’s law. “[I]t’s unconstitutional garbage” says one student upon being asked to sign a pledge. “‘I pledge to make administrators aware of any students engaged in so-called super-heroics.’ Blah blah doublespeak blah blah fascism”. The students stage a sit-in protest and are arrested, although the goings-on at the CRADLE detention centre play a much smaller role in this comic than in Champions: the protesters receive help first from the local congresswoman and then by Captain America, who manages to free them – all in the space of a single issue.

Captain America pleads for the rights of teenagers incarcerated in a CRADLE detention centre.

Panels from Miles Morales: Spider-Man #19. Script by Saladin Ahmed.Art by Carmen Carnero. Colours by David Curiel. Letters by Cory Petit. Copyright Marvel 2020.

The series’ engagement with Outlawed fades away at this point. Rather than ruminations upon federal overreaching and the rights of the young, the finale is built around superhero action as Spidey, Cap and the rest face Ultimatum’s forces. The artwork takes centre stage while the writing goes into something of a retreat (lines include “We’re surrounded! This sucks!” and “Hmm… we’d need a reverse ionic pulse explosion”). The villain is eventually routed, and Miles has a death in the family – after all, no Spider-Man story would be complete without a touch of angst.

The Magnificent Ms. Marvel

While Ahmed used Outlawed as a subplot for his Miles Morales run, he put it front and centre in Ms. Marvel – after all, there would be no Kamala’s Law without Kamala. The result turned out to be the single strongest contribution to the Outlawed event. With Ms. Marvel, Ahmed explored the repercussions of the teen-hero ban through the established cast of Kamala’s well-rendered friends and family, examining the human element of the story that Champions – with its cast of costumed superfolk and disposable bystanders – could only gesture towards.

Ms. Marvel yells at her parents for arguing over the dinner table.

Panels from Magnificent Ms. Marvel #16. Written by Saladin Ahmed. Art by Minkyu Jung. Colours by Ian Herring. Letters by Joe Caramagna. Copyright Marvel, 2021.

The series’ Outlawed arc begins in issue 14, which depicts Kamala in hospital after the fight at the school. This provides a fairly inventive vehicle for restating the comic’s status quo: Kamala’s loved ones visit her bedside, while she herself suffers a series of nightmares that illustrate her anxieties (her parents learning her secret identity, her friends falling to supervillains, and the events of Outlawed #1). After leaving the hospital, Kamala has to deal with being the face of the new law – a public figure in both her superhero and civilian identities. Upon returning to school she is first mobbed by reporters and then given a surprise party by well-meaning but misguided staff and students while CRADLE agents scour the hallways. The emotional support from her friend Zoe quickly turns sour when Zoe suggests that the Champions might be in need of reining in by the new law. Back home, her parents discuss whether Ms. Marvel is dangerous, completely unaware that she is their own daughter.  “I wish things could go back to normal”, says Kamala in a narrative caption. “But we’re in a new normal now. And it’s no fun.”

Dum Dum Dugan talks down an agent who advocates racial profiling.

Panels from Magnificent Ms. Marvel #14. Written by Saladin Ahmed. Art by Minkyu Jung. Colours by Ian Herring. Letters by Joe Caramagna. Copyright Marvel, 2020.

The comic again casts Dum Dum Dugan as the lead CRADLE agent; but while he was a disposable character in Miles Morales, Ms. Marvel makes a point out of humanising him: shortly after he is introduced, the comic emphasises that he is an antagonist with principals. An anonymous blond agent cites facial analysis data indicating that Ms. Marvel is “a South Asian female, age 15 to 20” and suggests that CRADLE “target that specific demographic with an aggressive series of sweeps”. Dugan pointedly vetoes this plan. He first brings up practical considerations: the potential backlash, the time spent rounding up thousands of girls, the unreliability of facial recognition when tracking a person with shapeshifting powers. “But none of that matters,” concludes Dugan, “because that’s just not how I do things. You hear me loud and clear, agent?”

The comic’s various bystanders are similarly humanised. Members of the public show support for Ms. Marvel and help her to evade CRADLE, painting a picture of a united community that is more convincing than the talking heads and soundbites about “youth of color and LGBT youth” in Champions. These sequences also help to underline the distinctions between individual CRADLE agents: when the authoritarian blond man threatens to arrest a group of bystanders who aided Kamala, Dugan again talks him down. The comic also does a better job of integrating its B-plots than Champions. The issue in which the Champions teamed up with the X-Men was an arbitrary aside; the issue where Ms. Marvel partners with Amulet (a secondary hero introduced shortly before Outlawed) to confront a demon from Arabian folklore, this comes across as a natural depiction of the superheroic exploits that are being interrupted by CRADLE.

Ms. Marvel captures CRADLE grabs pursuing agents with her size-changing hand and drops them on buildings.

Panels from Magnificent Ms. Marvel #17. Written by Saladin Ahmed. Art by Minkyu Jung. Colours by Ian Herring. Letters by Joe Caramagna. Copyright Marvel, 2021.

The storyline concludes in Ms. Marvel #17, which turns out to be a concentrated demonstration of what made Kamala’s adventures a success in the first place: tried-and-true superhero plotting coated with a layer of genuinely sweet humour and characterisation. While fleeing CRADLE agents, she uses her stretching powers to pick them up and deposit them out of harm’s way (“STOP STiCKING MY PEOPLE ON ROOFTOPS!” yells Dugan). Armed with an electrically-charged weapon, Dugan himself is the only agent to pose a threat to Kamala; but the two soon end up allied against a common foe: Monopoly, a body-horror villain introduced in an earlier story. The issue ends with the revelation that it was Kamala’s superhero-skeptical friend Zoe who alerted the CRADLE agents to her activities, paving the ground for more social-circle melodrama in future issues.

Power Pack

Power Pack is very much the odd-one-out of the Outlawed tie-ins. The comic uses Kamala’s Law not as the basis of social commentary, but rather as an opportunity for self-aware riffing on the superhero genre. It should not come as a surprise that Power Pack is played for laughs, of course, given that the comic is scripted by Ryan North – a writer who cut his teeth on bizarre webstrip Dinosaur Comics before graduating to Adventure Time and Squirrel Girl.

CRADLE agents confront the Power Pack

Panels from Power Pack #2. Script by Ryan North. Art by Nico Leon. Colours by Rachelle Rosenberg. Letters by Travis Lanham. Copyright 2020 Marvel.

The whole premise of the comic tends towards the cute more than the melodramatic, dealing as it does with four superpowered siblings – Lightspeed, Zero-G, Mass Master and Energizer – who live in a world without teenage angst, their main concern being how to keep their abilities a secret from their (thus far oblivious) parents. North positively revels in the childlike silliness of all this: the first issue of his run begins with a three-page crayon scrawl (ostensibly drawn by the youngest Power, Energizer) explaining the characters’ backstory; this device is re-used in subsequent issues to recap the plot. Later on, the family listens to Boomer Dinnertunes FM on the radio, only for the broadcast to be disrupted by a news report that aches with genre-referentiality:

We interrupt this broadcast of Jazz for Middle Class Dinner Parties to bring you this breaking news… The super villain known as “The Boogeyman” is attacking an orphanage in the Bronx! The terrorist, once known as Carmody Research CEO Douglas Carmody, became a literal demon several years ago… corrupted as he was by his insanity, rage, sadism, bigotry and obsessive hatred of others.

The heroes duly confront this villain, only to run into a band of CRADLE agents. The following argument breaks out between Zero-G and the lead agent:

Zero-G: “I’m afraid this is all one big misunderstanding, Ms….?”

Agent: “We don’t need to bring names into this.”

Zero-G: “...Ms.. uh, Ms. Paragovernmental Agent. You see, I’m actually 21 or older. Check your files for Zero-G.”

Agent: “Let’s see… I’ve got a note on your file that says you did spend time in space ‘under relativistic effects, which in some circumstances have caused faster aging than observed in a standard space-time gravity well,’ whatever that means…”

Zero-G: “See? There you go.”

Agent: “...but I’ve also got a birth record showing you’re clearly under 21, and the fact that you’ve surrounded yourself with your fellow minors, and the strong impression that you’re trying to use technobabble to let yourself off the hook.”

Zero-G: “What?! Come on! Relativity made me an adult. How are you being fair here?”

Agent: “And I’d add that saying a variation of ‘no fair’ is exactly what I’d expect a child to say when challenged, so – case closed, kiddo.”

Champions established that minors can remain superheroes so long as they find adult mentors; while this is a minor detail in the Outlawed storyline as a whole, Power Pack uses it as a major plot point. The kids decide to track down an established hero who can mentor them, allowing the comic to celebrate the sillier corners of the Marvel universe (one of the heroes they call upon is Frog Thor). They eventually team up with a new hero on the block: Agent Aether.

Agent Aether is the sort of generic superhero who is these days found only in parodies: half Superman, half Captain America, and carrying a humorous business card (“New to big-city-style heroism but has fought for folksy, honest justice in the American Midwest for years – Believes in Peace, Justice and the American Way, but not in like a NATIONALIST sort of way”). Upon accepting the Power Pack as his mentees, he gives them a speech outlining the most efficient method for them to help people. Instead of punching crooks, he argues, their abilities would be better put to use running power plants. “There is nothing we can do that’s a greater help to the life, dignity, security and happiness of your fellow human beings than to give the cheap and reliable electrical power,” he says, before delivering a lecture complete with diagrams.

Agent Aether lectures the Power Pack on the workings of power plants

Panels from Power Pack #2. Script by Ryan North. Art by Nico Leon. Colours by Rachelle Rosenberg. Letters by Travis Lanham. Copyright 2020 Marvel.

This is entirely correct, of course. If people with the abilities of the Power Pack existed in the real world, then their most efficient and beneficial purpose would be producing clean energy. But such considerations are inimical to the core assumptions of the superhero genre: we might just as well suggest that cinematic cowboys spend more time herding cattle and less time shooting men in black hats. And so, Agent Aether is soon unmasked as a ruse perpetrated by the villainous Wizard, who wants the Power Pack under his control for his own nefarious purposes.

The story generally continues along the brightly-coloured, knowing-wink-laden path that it has chosen, although the penultimate instalment brings back the heavier themes of Outlawed and produces a little drama amidst the comedy. During a fight with the Wizard, little Energizer startles her siblings by deliberately trying to kill the villain, placing a bystander in danger at the same time. “What?! Honestly, what?” she cries after the others take her to task. “The adults say it’s the law that we need a mentor, and then the one we get steals out powers and tries to kill us, and I’m supposed to feel – what? Good? Happy? It’s the adults that made this problem and then ruined us with it!!” However, this outburst is explained away as the result of the Wizard’s evil personality temporarily corrupting Energizer, and the comic soon returns to comedy, climaxing in a team-up where Wolverine becomes a fall-guy for the wacky kids..

And finally, New Warriors

Of all the tensions existing between Outlawed and the affairs of the real world, the biggest was its coincidence with the coronavirus pandemic, which threw the event into disarray. Marvel’s pre-pandemic solicitations had Outlawed #1 lined up for March, while the April schedule included the first issues of Champions and Power Pack along with the first Outlawed-relevant issues of Miles Morales and Ms. Marvel. The subsequent disruptions meant that, while Outlawed #1 met its March release date, the other three titles eventually came out in a cluster around October – and a proposed fifth title has, so far, failed to materialise at all.

The series in question, again scheduled to start in April, was to have been a revival of New Warriors written by Daniel Kibblesmith and drawn by Luciano Vecchio. An official release issued in March 2020 announced that the comic would see the established team members mentoring a fresh set of proteges, presumably in accordance with Kamala’s Law. The line-up of new characters was set to include Screentime, a "Meme-Obsessed super teen whose brain became connected to the internet... Now he can see augmented reality"; B-Negative, a Morbius-like vampire "obsessed with all the music and attitude of a ‘classic’ long-past decades like the '90s, and the '00s"; Trailblazer, a plus-sized girl with a pocket dimension in her backpack; and a pair of psychic twins named Snowflake and Safespace, armed respectively with shuriken-like snowflakes and pink forcefields, and motivated by “a post-ironic meditation on using violence to combat bullying.”

Luciano Vecchio's designs for the Marvel characters Snowflake and Safespace.

Luciano Vecchio's designs for the Marvel characters Snowflake and Safespace. Source: https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/introducing-the-new-new-warriors Copyright 2020 Marvel.

The twins shared the longest profile in the announcement, with Kibblesmith outlining the thought process that went into creating the two characters:

"Snowflake and Safespace are the twins," the writer says, "and their names are very similar to Screentime; it's this idea that these are terms that get thrown around on the internet that they don't see as derogatory. [They] take those words and kind of wear them as badges of honor.

"Safespace is a big, burly, sort of stereotypical jock. He can create forcefields, but he can only trigger them if he's protecting somebody else. Snowflake is non-binary and goes by they/them, and has the power to generate individual crystalized snowflake-shaped shurikens. The connotations of the word 'snowflake' in our culture right now are something fragile, and this is a character who is turning it into something sharp.

"Snowflake is the person who has the more offensive power, and Safespace is the person who has the more defensive power. The idea is that they would mirror each other and complement each other."

Unsurprisingly, this rather on-the-nose attempt to grapple with modern youth culture met a backlash, as documented at The Independent, CBR and Digital Spy, with some commentators suggesting that it seemed like a mean-spirited parody. To date, there has been no sign of New Warriors resurfacing; it is likely that the combination of the backlash and the series’ ties to the now-concluded Outlawed have led to it being quietly cancelled. Yet the ghosts of Snowflake and Safespace may still haunt the comic world, Jacob Marley-like, as a warning of what can go wrong when the decades-old superhero formulae are applied to modern social issues.

And this is a problem that Outlawed was never able to resolve. The event was at its strongest when the creators involved were allowed to simply carry on as normal – Saladin Ahmed providing colourful melodrama for Ms. Marvel and Miles Morales; Ryan North penning loving self-parodies for the Power Pack as he did for Squirrel Girl, with CRADLE merely swelling the rogues’ gallery. It is at its weakest in the main series, Champions, which flicks wildly back and forth between addressing the strife and uncertainty of the real world and celebrating the costumes, powers and quips of the superhero world.

Here we have the flaw at the centre of Outlawed. The story was meant to show us that teenage superheroes should be free – but it ended up demonstrating that they are caged by their genre’s conventions.