Review by Frank Plowright

With Runaways set for a TV show, Marvel revived the series under young adult novelist Rainbow Rowell for a run that lasted almost as many issues as the original work by Brian K. Vaughan. All those years later that’s success by any standards, and Find Your Way Home is the first of six volumes, with artist Kris Anka responsible for drawing the first three.

Rowell offers a new start, although as the series continues she delves ever further into the past. The cast are now all a little older, and Rowell opens with teenage magician Nico Minoru depressed and alone before being shunted into a life or death situation. With a relatively large cast to be reintroduced to a new audience, Rowell takes her time, only featuring three Runaways over the opening two chapters, although updating on the remainder. When the others are reintroduced Rowell overcomes major obstacles such as some being dead, and although it’s not apparent at first, there is a viable reason for getting the gang back together despite time having moved on two years.

For the Runaways to be who they are it’s important they’re not drawn as identikit youngsters, but as individuals who look different and who are different ages. That’s the starting point for Anka, who ensures everyone has a visual personality and supplies clear storytelling in an attractive style with thought given to accommodation reflecting the people. Molly is now thirteen, and her room shows that.

While creating an entirely new story, Rowell constantly references the past, which is necessary because while time has moved on, it was such a turbulent and upsetting set of experiences for relatively young people. It shaped who they were, and continues to do so, and it’s not as dead as assumed either. By the end of a very satisfying opening volume Rowell has reunited the primary cast without solving all their problems, and that segues into Best Friends Forever.