Writer: Curt Pires / Penciller: Alex Diotto / Colour Artist: Dee Cunniffe / Letterer: Micah Myers / Designer: Ryan Ferrier / Collects: Youth #1-#4 / TP ComiXology Originals Via Dark Horse Books
Review by Paul Dunne
27th April 2023 (Released: 7th April 2021)
The Pitch: YOUTH is Larry Clark's Kids meets Chronicle. X-Men by way of Frank Ocean. It smashes together the violence of coming of age with the violence of the superhero narrative - as well as the beauty. YOUTH is a coming-of-age story that tells the story of two queer teenagers as they run away from their lives in a bigoted small town, and attempt to make their way to California. Along the way their car breaks down and they join up with a group of fellow misfits on the road. Embarking together in a van traveling the country they party and attempt to find themselves. And then something happens . . .
Do you remember your first time? You know, the first time you gained powers from what looks like a meteor strike? Suddenly found out you could fly? Found out you could create a kind of localised explosive force and kill everyone who wasn't just like you? Man, me neither! This sure wasn't my Youth! Doesn't speak to me… Only maybe it does. In Youth, Curt Pires and Alex Diotto create an angry, simmering frustration, one that is always on the back-boil. It's one I can recall from my directionless years, those ones between milestone birthdays. There's familiar oppression in this book, stemming from a variety of places: Identity, sexuality, parental interference... But most of all it's the restlessness of simply not knowing what to do with your emotions and the endless time that stretches before the young. Forever is a long time. There's also the idea that the answer lies across state lines, somewhere west, like the promise of a distant song on the radio or the sound of lapping waves on a beach as you lay on the sand, get drunk, get high. But you know, problems have a way of following you.
The restlessness of not know what to do with your emotions.
The powers granted the disaffected teens of Youth have a strange provenance, one that could be alien or could be biblical, but like so much of life when you're young, remains just out of reach and unexplained. In this and much else in the book, Pires and Diotto capture the oppressive uncertainty of not only your younger years but of now. I mean honestly... look around. Can you truly say you know what the fuck is going on anymore? Not just with the world at large but with yourself? Youth brings to the fore the sweet and sour beauty of unknowing yourself. Of incompleteness. Of life unfinished because by and large, you don't know where to begin. As one of the book's leads, River says at a critical juncture in the story: “I don't know if I have a plan... But I might have an Idea.”
The low-level, simmering oppressions of small towns.
But sometimes, ideas are where the trouble starts. Especially if those ideas are a reaction to the low-level, simmering oppression of small towns that don't get you and try to consume you instead. Worse still, if you don't know who you are yet, like River's sometime lover Frank, since those ideas become experiments on oneself and moral limits. It's to their credit that River, Frank, and the rest of their friends gain powers... and resist the urge to do good with them. Their choices are instantly self-serving, money motivated, and even a little greedy. But again you get the sense that they are a reaction, not a direction, and that leads us to the central problem once more: of knowing that you can do things but not knowing what those things should be and from there, not being able to fully extrapolate what the consequences for your actions will be. Or if you deserve them.
The sweet and sour beauty of unknowing yourself.
It's an easy leap to compare this to X-Men, with its young protagonists. But I think that may be a tad lazy. It hews much closer, at least in my mind, to Spider-Man's central theme – that with great power, comes great responsibility. There's also a dash of the FF in there, with the possible cosmic origins of the power set. Only as the characters in Youth prove, they sure as shit ain't no rocket scientists. By the end, new pathways open up for some of the characters and we get a hint of Xavier's educational bent, but also of a larger plan at work, one that could change the world. But will it be for the better? We can be glad there's a second volume out now, to see where this will lead. Pires writes with the knowledge of someone not too far removed from the age of the characters he's writing about, as well as shared political and societal beliefs with them and I daresay, a little of that anger, still simmering. There's an authenticity to his words, his pacing, and his humanity. Diotto's art has the urgent, fast-moving feel of the years that blip by us too fast. There's an intimacy in the way he poses his characters. There's a half-glimpsed, not-quite fully formed feel to the faces and bodies that makes everything look like the blur of life, zooming past you, where everything happening is urgent because you're young. Dee Cuniffe's colours add to this, giving it all the shimmer of reality only not quite. Life as you might remember it, not as it is. Micah Myers' letters add more authenticity to the speech and the sound of the characters. An intriguing first volume that makes the second worth a look. Surely the continuity that every comic creator wants in long-form work? You'll have to forgive me if this review seems a little vague. Life's like that when you're young.
Youth Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are available now. Indigo Children, the team's new book, has just begun its first run from Image Comics and the early issues are available at all good comic shops.
