Young Avengers #8 is maybe the most fun you will have all week while also just kinda being stressed and depressed. Which is to say it is a comic by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. Good job, fellows! I read your very good comic and now I have feelings.

The issue is a great example of one of the things its creative team does very well: a well-paced comic that goes a lot of places with a wink and a smile. Hidden underneath that smile, though, is a ceaseless anxiety, a heartbeat of fear. Young Avengers #7, as the series frequently does, literalizes that anxiety of a changing and alien world by having its heroes barrelling through a cavalcade of them, some pleasant (Korean barbecue!) and others less so (gimp suit Kree empire or Loki’s tears in a quick panel’s look at a world where things - and he - went bad.) But holding all those situations, like our heroes, psyches, is the uneasy humour. Loki’s jabs at Prodigy, or Noh-Varr’s shrug of an explanation for why the Kree are so fascinated in Earth. These kids are in a world that’s never the same two days in a row and all they have is their ability to make a joke about how bad it all is. If they don’t laugh, they’ll cry.

Or, you know, make an impulsive, potentially ruinous decision all under the auspices of “no regrets.” David’s choice, in that final scene, is going to have repercussions, and surprisingly few of them will have anything to do with saving the world. Superhero comics’ highest drama was always come from its human side, and Young Avengers #8 has that in spades. It’s a book about being a kid and being so scared all the time that you might burst, and so you do the worst thing at the worst time and damn the torpedoes. David and Teddy are going to see some repercussions from this, and not just from the world that’s constantly trying to kill them. It’s hard to blame David for what he does because the world in which he lives has been established as so real and threatening that most trespasses can be understood if not immediately forgiven.

The world is frequently trying to kill them, though. Maybe it’s M.O.D.O.K-Noh-Varr (N.V.O.D.O.K.?), maybe it’s the actual world itself, never better realized than into book’s final sequence in Mother’s dimension, where the comic book medium itself turns against the team and the panel borders turn into tentacles and chase them and the characters’ only recourse is to jump in and out of their disappearing metaworld, trying to escape it all - and I do mean it all. Gillen and McKelvie‘s greatest strength as a team is how they work together to stretch the form to its limits, and the result here is disconcerting, scary and thoughtful all the same. Add a stab to the gut in the form of Leah, Kid Loki’s friend from Journey Into Mystery and just twist the knife, why don’t you.

Just take your Greg Berlanti Medal for Feels Terrorism already, you monsters. (J)