'Avengers Arena': Marvel kid heroes meet 'Hunger Games'

Brian Truitt, USA TODAY | USATODAY

Marvel Comics' youngest superheroes are feeling the deadly effects of The Hunger Games.

Avengers Arena, debuting Wednesday as part of the publisher's "Marvel NOW!" initiative, places 16 teenage do-gooders in the continuous peril of Murderworld, run by the assassin Arcade, and only one of them can make it out alive.

Death is a major part of the book's concept, according to writer Dennis Hopeless, but fans of characters such as X-23, Reptil and Darkhawk need not worry about Avengers Arena becoming "a meat-grinder book where all of their characters die for shock value," he says.

"It does have really high stakes, but it's a very character-centric piece. It's designed to get you in the head of these characters and fall in love with them and be scared with them."

Kev Walker's art drives home the impact since he illustrates all 16 kids as "so devastatingly young," Hopeless says. "He makes them look like real teenagers. They all have different body types and none of them look fully grown or the adults they'll be, and it adds so much to the drama of the thing."

Teens fighting for survival is the central theme of not only Hunger Games films and books, but also the cult Japanese movie Battle Royale, and Hopeless is leaning into the influences, using a tweaked version of the Battle Royale logo on his first issue and planning homage covers. Arcade even says he got the idea for his latest murderous plan from reading a couple of kids' books.

"Let's just be like, 'Yeah, get it?' This is what it is, and it's going to be really cool," Hopeless says.

Because he has such a large cast, Hopeless is using a Lost-style story structure for the first few arcs of Avengers Arena, focusing on a different character each issue and showing who they are and how they're in this awful situation through flashbacks. Or, using Hunger Games lingo, it's like getting into Katniss Everdeen's head in one chapter and moving to other Tributes in subsequent episodes.

(To better serve new readers, Hopeless includes a map showing who each hero is in the first issue, and utilizes ongoing video-game-style power meters to remind readers who's who and who's in trouble health-wise.)

Hazmat is the central character of the first issue, and is a holdover from the recent Avengers Academy series where she's grown from being bitter about the curse of having to wear a suit to contain the harmful radiation her body emits.

Hopeless liked the idea of taking a girl on the cusp of coming out of a "Why did this happen to me?" phase in her life and then tossing her into a truly worst-case scenario.

"Do you regress and go back to being that angry petulant child who feels like she's been wronged, or do you move on from there?" the writer says.

"She's a character who is quickly relatable because we were all angry at some point in our life and had to figure out how to grow beyond that. Hazmat has a lot of really good reasons to be upset, but she wants to be more than that."

Another hallmark of Hunger Games and Battle Royale is its core relationships, and Avengers Arena has its own romance with Hazmat and fellow "contestant" Mettle.

"Their relationship is a big part of who they are," Hopeless says. "The way these sorts of stressful situations affect them is a big part of this kind of storytelling."

He's unleashing a crop of new characters, too, such as the five students from the Braddock Academy, a superhero school in England run out of Captain Britain's mansion, as well as Ryker, the focus of the second issue who gets the moniker Death Locket since she's a teenage female version of the cyborg Deathlok.

"She's got a goofy name," Hopeless admits, "but once we get to the second issue and people see who she is and how she's different from what she looks like, I think she'll be a character people latch onto."

The third issue shines the survival spotlight on Cammi, a snarky little girl who was living in the wrong tiny Alaskan town when an intergalactic prison ship crashed and she was sucked into an epic cosmic war in Annihilation.

"The Cammi we have in the book has been surviving on her own in space for a coupe for years," Hopeless says. "She's a little bit older and quite a bit more capable of taking care of herself."

Avengers Arena also marks the grand return of Arcade, a popular X-Men supervillain in the 1980s who's evolved from a mastermind making death traps for a price to the most evil version of Jeff Probst ever by way of Francisco Scaramanga.

Getting beaten down by superheroes over the years has turned the psychopath into a joke, and he's on the way back to respectability with his best killer amusement park.

"He's always been a smart guy, he builds all this stuff himself, but our version of him has taken the time to build Murderworld where no one is going to escape, whee he is the most powerful person there and until you figure something out, you're going to do what he's saying," Hopeless says.

"His personality is the same, but a whole lot scarier. He's serious now. He's not going to let you get out of this."

Picking a villain was easy, but finding 16 teenagers Hopeless wanted to write but also put in mortal peril proved difficult. For that, he just turned that emotional part of his brain off and chose the best competitors.

"Characters are most interesting when they're pushed to their absolute limits, and that's what we're doing this entire series," he says. "We're going to show you who these people are deep down, what they will be willing to do when it's a life-or-death situation every single day."