Young Avengers, Volume 2: Family Matters Book

I'm willing to forgive a lot in a comic book if it has characters that I really like, written really well. Luckily for Young Avengers, I think I've fallen in love with the entire cast. Luckily for me, there isn't much to forgive.

I think the only significant issue I take with this volume of Young Avengers is that it made everything much more complicated than it needed to be. In the first volume, everybody had fairly straightforward origins, and there was nothing wrong with them. But in this volume, extra and needless layers of complication have been added. Take the case of Patriot/Eli, grandson of the original Captain America. In volume one, he says he got his powers when his grandfather gave him a blood transfusion. Nice, neat, simple. Apparently too simple. So in this volume, it's revealed that the blood transfusion never happened, he doesn't have any natural powers, and the abilities he's shown are the result of taking Mutant Growth Hormone. (MGH, for the uninitiated, is the Marvel Universe's version of steroids. Except that, instead of getting you on the Yankees, it can get you on the Avengers.) Or Hulkling. In the first volume, a mutant. Here, the half-Kree, half-Skrull son of the deceased Captain Marvel. Let's not even get into Billy's backstory.

But I love these characters, and overly complicated backstories aside, the writing is solid and delivers a fun story. Bonus points to Kate for getting to call Captain America out: did he really think that nothing bad would come of trying to bar a group of highly motivated teens who (mostly) have superpowers from being heroes?