The Young Avengers won’t be reassembling after all. Last year, Marvel Comics editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski announced that the teen team — who debuted in the pages of 2005’s Young Avengers #1 by co-creators Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung — would be reuniting for their 20th anniversary in 2025. “There have been two Young Avengers teams, but now we’re deciding which characters for natural story reasons are going to join the new Young Avengers team,” Cebulski said at Osaka Comic Con, naming founding members Iron Lad, Patriot, Hulkling, Wiccan, and Hawkeye as potential recruits.
But in a recent update posted to his Substack blog, original Young Avengers editor Tom Brevoort revealed that those plans have fallen through.
Young Avengers vol. 1 (left) and vol. 2 (right)
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“Right this second, there isn’t any Young Avengers project on the horizon,” the Marvel Comics Executive Editor, SVP and X-Men Group Editor wrote in response to a question about the debut issue’s 20th anniversary (which published in February 2005 but is cover dated April 2005).
“We’ve had real difficulties in putting together another run on that series that might be able to stand up alongside the Allan [Heinberg]and Jim [Cheung]and Kieron [Gillen]and Jamie [McKelvie]ones — it’s a fairly high bar,” Brevoort added. “But maybe this will be the year that we get it together.”
Young Avengers vol. 1, written by Heinberg and penciled by Cheung, spanned 12 issues between 2005 and 2006. Heinberg and Cheung reunited for the nine-issue Avengers: The Children’s Crusade in 2010, and writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie reinvented the team when Marvel relaunched Young Avengers as part of the Marvel NOW! initiative in 2013.
The original team — Iron Lad (Nate Richards, a younger version of Kang the Conqueror), Patriot (Eli Bradley), Hulkling (Teddy Altman), Asgardian/Wiccan (Billy Kaplan), Hawkeye (Kate Bishop), and Stature (Cassie Lang) — expanded with the android Vision (Jonas) and Speed (Billy’s twin brother, Tommy Shepherd). Only Kate, Billy, and Teddy returned for the 15-issue Young Avengers vol. 2, which saw Miss America (America Chavez), Marvel Boy (Noh-Varr), Prodigy (David Alleyne), and Kid Loki (a reincarnated Loki) join their ranks.
In a previous Substack blog from 2023, Brevoort explained how plans for a continuation of Young Avengers co-written by Jeph Loeb (Smallville) fell through, so the team instead appeared in the Civil War crossover Young Avengers/Runaways and the Secret Invasion tie-in Runaways/Young Avengers.
“The difficulty for me was that, as far as I was concerned, Allan and Jim were Young Avengers —the thing that made the series function and connect with people was their particular combination of talents,” Brevoort wrote. “But Allan had a far better-paying career as a television and film writer, and Jim’s services were also in demand all over the place. So when the original run of the book ended, there was always a hunger for further Young Avengers material, but without those creators in place, I wasn’t ready to start up another iteration of the series. (There was a brief moment when Jeph Loeb and Ian Churchill were going to take over when Allan and Jim wrapped up their run, but that fell apart largely because Jeph was hoping that Allan would be around to co-write—the two shared a writing studio during that period—but it just wasn’t possible.)”
“I kept holding out for another series by Jim and Allan, which I’d eventually get in what was released as Avengers: The Children’s Crusade a few years later,” Brevoort continued.
“But the fans of the series were definitely getting peeved at me, just wanting more of what they wanted and not understanding the particular limitations that was preventing me from giving it to them.”
In the time since, The Champions — a revival of the Los Angeles-based team of the 1970s that included the likes of Black Widow, Ghost Rider, Hercules, and the X-Men’s Angel and Iceman — have taken over as Marvel’s premiere teen team with a roster that has included Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), Spider-Man (Miles Morales), Hulk/Brawn (Amadeus Cho), Nova (Sam Alexander), Falcon (Joaquin Torres), and Ironheart (Riri Williams).
The Young Avengers won’t be reassembling after all. Last year, Marvel Comics editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski announced that the teen team — who debuted in the pages of 2005’s Young Avengers #1 by co-creators Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung — would be reuniting for their 20th anniversary in 2025. “There have been two Young Avengers teams, Read More