For once in my Pink Kryptonite life I'm reviewing something so soon after publication that I was having trouble finding images online of the cover to use for this article. That cover up there is a scan of the issue I got in my bag and I am so glad that I was driven to break out the CanoScan because, honey, I was all about sharing the image on the back, too. That's for dessert, though. The meat of the matter is this:

Holy crap but death is not forever in a comic book.

I know, I know, that isn't exactly a newsflash but for real, whoah, who of the dead will not walk again on the pages of this book? Ant-Man is alive again? He gets to witness the event that killed him? It's like a time travel episode of Star Trek sneezed on Dr. Who. And you know what? I loved it.

I really enjoyed the one-shot that reminded us of Iron Lad and his origins. I really enjoyed that little side story of them fighting Electro, something that was just perfectly retro, a sort of rite of passage that fit really well and let Allan Heinberg show off his greatest strength when writing these characters: the relationships between them and the dialogue that lets them play off one another. I had long since forgotten about Iron Lad, to be honest, and so I also found it to be a really welcome and highly practical refresher course. That said, when I saw Iron Lad swoop in on the first few pages of this book I was annoyed. It made that one-shot feel... I don't know, too utilitarian. Seeing him zoom in and save the day in this issue made that issue feel a little cheap somehow.

Setting that aside, the two-page splash of the humongous fight (including Quicksilver pulling out a Doombot's... tongue? I guess?) was gorgeous. I was so in love with that, I grabbed my desk lamp and turned it on the page and studied it for a while. Great art, great moment captured in amber and it's a great example of that classic Marvel thing of having people dialogue at great length in the middle of a single pane of an action sequence. Sometimes that drives me crazy but sometimes I find it endearing, like a bad habit enjoyed by a beloved spinster aunt, and who am I to deny Heinberg his good lines?

The more I read it, though, the more I realized just how wrong I was to think Iron Lad's return cheapened the story. Quite the contrary, he's immediately a complicating factor and that's what Young Avengers does so well when Heinberg is at the helm: it remembers that life is about the complications we find in it and so are our greatest stories. The eventual interplay between him, Stature and The Vision is great stuff. Done before? Yes, absolutely, but it's done so very well here.

I was disappointed that this issue didn't involve more interaction between Wiccan and Hulkling but what we get is good stuff, too. The "I said 'almost'" is classic couples talk. I've been there, and so has my boyfriend, and so has anyone else who has ever had a lover. Likewise, the little moments we get of Speed are great. Again, we are short on Patriot and Hawkeye, but hey, they're not what the story's about, either. What we do get is a great moment of Doom and Magneto fighting - there's a match-up if ever one I've seen - and we get lots and lots of Wanda.

It is so incredibly satisfying - so absurdly, ridiculously satisfying - to have a story about the kids going in search of Wanda Maximoff be about them finding her. Heinberg could have stalled. He could have written eight issues of folderol back and forth that accomplished nothing (coughDark Reign Young Avengerscough). He could have written a story about them failing in their primary mission but learning important lessons. I'm sure those would have sold. This is a better book than that, though, and Heinberg delivers a better story. By the midpoint in the series we've not just seen them find Wanda; we've also seen them out-maneuver Doom, Magneto, the Avengers and a legion of Doombots; we've seen them show an awareness of the nature of time travel stories and the idea of divergent timelines; we've seen them bring the Scarlet Witch back (? - but that's for another paragraph); and we've seen them complicate things - that word again! - in that they seem to have saved Ant-Man from death.

That last bit is part of why I enjoyed the book so much. I have never been much of an Avengers kind of guy. It just isn't the flavor that I'm looking for in comic books, by and large, and so I do not know the story of how Ant-Man died and blah blah blah, nor do I especially care. On the one hand, all of that sort of felt like exposition meant for me, the person who didn't read it the first time around and doesn't know the context, and that shows a keen awareness on Heinberg's part that this book - his baby - is precious to, and purchased by, an audience to some degree other than that buying the regular Avengers comics. That's smart. On the other hand, it kind of bothered me to know it was exposition. Yes, I'm that picky. I don't know. I just am. The part of me that was annoyed, though, was heavily outweighed by the parts of me that enjoyed watching these kids live up to expectations, both good and bad, smart and dumb, and watching them have an effect on the world. Watching Stature save Ant-Man isn't just a great moment of character development for her and a believable plot twist and a way to impact the world overall (assuming he survives this mini-series); it's also a moment of unquestionable personal heroism. It's an expression of everything that makes the Young Avengers who they are in the first place. It was their refusal to sit by and observe wrongs that got them to where they are now. It would be crazy to write them any way other than continuing to follow that guiding principle.

I acknowledge an important point in that paragraph, though: the built-in impermanence of the otherwise seemingly immutable world of comic book continuity. There's zero guarantee that Ant-Man won't just bite it all over again in some other way as timelines assert themselves. There's not even a guarantee that the Scarlet Witch we see on the last page is the reborn Scarlet Witch, is there? The kids have gone back to a time when the Scarlet Witch was alive, active and completely bat shit. When she says she "remembers everything," how do we know that isn't the Scarlet Witch of the past, of the time in which Ant-Man died, just magically "remembering" the future as well, or lying, or just being crazy at them? For all we know, the Wanda Maximoff they rescued, powerless, and then with whom they zipped off into time itself, is tied up behind a bush a block away.

In some ways, though, wouldn't that just be another interesting plot complication: these kids worked so hard to find and save the Scarlet Witch and the one they found is the one who's arguably the greatest villain of the last twenty or thirty years?

I loved this book. Fantastic writing and, as always, fantastic art. I cannot wait for the next issue. I am champing at the bit. I made a bit just so I can champ at it. This book is good stuff, and I am eager for the next installment.

Now, about that beefcake on the back? How about that beefcake on the back? It's like the back page just wants me to take it to bed tonight. Chris Hemsworth looks like the daddy top in a '70s porn flick and I am completely OK with that. That Brawny Man look works like a charm.