Created by: Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona
1st appearance: Runaways vol. 1 #1, July 2003
Nationality: American
Team Affiliations: The Runaways
Legal Status: Us citizen with no criminal record.
Height: 5’8 Weight: 125 lbs
Eyes: Brown Hair: Black
Relatives: Geoffrey (Father), Catherine (Mother)
Skills and abilities: Advanced intellect grants him superior skill with logic and strategy.
Powers: None. Before his death he commended Nico’s Staff of one for magic, Chase Stein’s Gauntlets for enhanced strength and energy projection and could command “old lace” a dinosaur to do his bidding.
Biography
Alex is a founding member of The Runaways who stumbled onto the fact that his parents, Geoffrey & Catherine Wilder were the leaders of the villain super group The Pride. With the other children of the Pride they created “the Runaways” where he served as their first unofficial leader and had a relationship with Nico Minoru. The team thwarted all of their parents plots until he revealed that he was a mole for the “Pride”. Offering up his friends as sacrifice he offered his parents and girlfriend the chance to survive by joining him. When she refused and disrupted the ceremony leading to the lack of sacrifice he was destroyed by the demons. After his death Nico attempted to resurrect him but was unsuccessful.
He really aught to be on the villains list, no?
From a friend of mine
“The problem with Alex for me was always the fact that in him we had a young black male generally devoid of the classic stereotypes of black masculinity and a ripe opportunity to explore some different narrative themes and instead they fell on the trope of the idea that you can’t trust an educated black man. Yes, eventually youget other examples of black men on the heroic side but Cloak and Dagger don’t show up for a while and it’s not their story.
Alex as the mole was one way the story could go. It was not the ONLY way the story could go.
His turn was also painful because it felt like a betrayal of the reader. For me, Alex was the first time I had a character I could overlay myself onto. I didn’t need to insert myself into Runaways becauase Alex was already there. That was a new feeling for 16-17 year old me. There are a lot of narratives telling black boys they’re destined to be criminals or villains already. It takes a lot of mental effort to rebuke those narratives and Alex’s turn to the darkside carries more problematic baggage because of it. Couple that with his parents being drug dealers of the most stereotypical sort, it strikes me as a somewhat pathologizing. Especially because we never get a really good explanation of why Alex sided with his parents that I remember. He just knew about them earlier and the series decided to use that old anti-intellectual idea of “Smart people let their smarts make them amoral/evil” that we see in a lot of fiction. It’s not at all surprising that none of the other runaways are much above average intelligence (Miko is clever and the little girl is occasionally wise in the way pre-teens can sometimes be but intelligence isn’t a strong suit among the runaways)
As for the redemption aspect of this… well that plays into the idea of the black man needing redemption and saving from his inherent evil nature doesn’t it. *sigh.”
my overview: jarronnelums.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/runaways-another-point-of-view/