Oh Kevin Feige, you rascal! You sat with a group of reporters yesterday and held your tongue on an exciting announcement that you allowed the trades to break: the Marvel comic book Runaways is becoming a movie! With creator (and Lost writer) Brian K Vaughn scripting!

A quick lesson for you all who don’t read comics: there hasn’t been a decent new comic book character created in decades. That’s because the system is such that any character you create is owned by the company, so when they become wildly popular, you don’t see a dime. There’s no reward in it. That’s part of what makes Runaways so special; it’s a book with all new characters and it’s great. These characters are a group of kids who learn that their parents are actually big time supervillains. Some of are aliens, some are mutants, some are magicians, some are time travelers – they hit all the bases. And one of them has a dinosaur as a pet! Using the powers and abilities they inherited from their baddie parents, these kids leave home and begin doing the superhero thing. This book was so much Joss Whedon’s favorite comic that he wrote it for a while.

That basic concept is a great one for the movies, by the way – it’s like Power Pack, but interesting. And having Vaughn on board is a wonderful sign. As to when the Runaways movie will happen… like Ant Man, it’s a planned Marvel movie, but one without a date. I wonder if the studio isn’t thinking of expanding their announced slate a little bit now that they have all this Iron Man money laying around…