How long have Skottie Young’s variant covers been going now?  Long enough that you’d have thought the joke would have worn thin, but in fact, they’re holding up pretty well.  The idea, and Young’s art, lends itself rather nicely to the one-panel gag format of the variant cover, and it’s now well enough established that it can start playing off its own trope.

So, sure, let’s do something with them for Secret Wars.  In fact, they’ve had a one-shot before, in orbit somewhere around the Avengers vs X-Men crossover.  And this is effectively the sequel.  While it’s technically set on Battleworld, the Battleworld trappings barely come into play.

This also makes it the book which represents Avengers vs X-Men in Marvel’s curious attempt to have a Secret Wars series that is at least named after every major crossover of the last thirty years.  You can understand the thinking when you look at the sales charts and realise that Civil War – an utterly peripheral and forgettable tie-in book – is actually one of the higher selling Secret Wars titles.  Some of these names still have connotations of significance.  (They won’t by October.)

No such games with the AvX-Babies, though.  And while their domain is notionally called Marville, in a nod to Bill Jemas’s notoriously misconceived 2002 miniseries, that doesn’t actually play into anything either.

So the basic set-up is that the Avengers and the X-Men are rival gangs of little kids in suburban America.  Issue #1 spends a lot of time on an escalating sequence of them competing for trade selling street food on opposite corners of the road, which is funny enough in its way.  And then, literally in the closing pages, an actual plot begins.  This took me by surprise.  I genuinely assumed, as I was reading the first issue, that it must be a one-shot with a series of unrelated gag sequences strung together.  But no, it turns out there’s four issues of it.

Four issues of the Avengers and X-Men as kids?  Does the idea really have the legs for that?

Young is a great comedy artist, obviously.  The central hook is neat in a meta way – a pair of twins have just moved into town, and the two gangs fight over who gets them.  And that’s a gag that works all the better because the book doesn’t feel the need to explain it.  There are lovely designs for everyone’s houses – Little Venom trots home from school to a house dripping with black goo.  Wolverine is on both teams but the X-Men haven’t actually noticed.

But about three quarters of the way through, it seems to run out of places to go.  The central gag here, after all, is that the Avengers and the X-Men try to one-up each other and it always ends in a crazy fight.  But you can’t just keep repeating that, and it’s pretty clear by the end that Young is casting around for somewhere to go next.  Issue #3 has a very odd sequence where Galactus and Thanos and talk about how confused they are on Battleworld (because they’re from outer space, which doesn’t exist any more) – which doesn’t play into anything and seems weirdly out of place in its sudden lurch into Secret Wars continuity.

And then issue #4 brings in the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Inhumans – who admittedly get a very funny sequence as they try to impress everyone with their Terrigen Mists and fail spectacularly – before just sort of throwing its hands up in despair and having the twins get recruited out of nowhere by the baddies instead.

Now, obviously it’s a joke book and I’m not suggesting it needs a plot that makes sense.  In fact, that’s probably the last thing it needs.  But one you’re committed to a four-issue story, it at least needs some shape to it, and ideally it needs a punchline.  Instead it peters out, and the last few pages fall flat.

There’s a better book in this idea, and probably a shorter one which doesn’t bother with having a plot at all.  Less would have been more.