Avengers: Children's Crusade; Allan Heinberg & Jim Cheung

Avengers Children's Crusade was a nine issue series (collected in one nice softcover collection) that came out from 2010-2012, written by Allan Heinberg (creator and writer of television's Grey's Anatomy) and drawn by Jim Cheung, and is a followup to their Young Avengers run. Actually, Avengers Children's Crusade is really mostly features the Young Avengers characters and mostly has the title Avengers instead of Young Avengers because that probably helped this title get a bigger audience.A person could this not having read the previous adventures of the Young Avengers, but that's also collected in a nice big volume, called Ultimate Young Avengers.

In addition to being a continuation of the Young Avengers characters, Children's Crusade is also the story that addressed what happened to the Scarlet Witch after what she did in the mini series, House of M. There's a lot going on in this nine issue series and a lot of characters running around, but Allan Heinberg gives all of the characters within chances to shine, there's great character interactions, and the villains (Doctor Doom and some would say Scarlet Witch, who is trying to redeem herself here) are apt threats to the power levels of these Young Avengers, and the ending is a good one, not a lackluster one or non-conclusive one as to many superhero story endings are (especially on event series).

Although this was Heinberg and Cheung's swan song on these characters as Heinberg went back to television writing and Jim Cheung is sadly too slow for any kind of regular series, the new Young Avengers series has some of the same characters and some interesting new ones and under the creative team of Kieron Gillen and Jaime McKelvie, is just as exciting and well drawn (and I'd argue that it's even more innovative) as when the Young Avengers first came on the scene.

A reminder: the Las Vegas Comic Expo is next weekend at the Riviera and original Young Avengers artist, Jim Cheung, will be one of the big featured guests!