Hello and welcome to Comic Drake, where I talk about comic books and my name is Drake!
Every single super team has to have their dimwitted comic relief character and for The
Runaways, this responsibility falls onto a kid named Chase Stein, but there has to be
more to him than just that, right?
I mean he’s lasted from the original incarnation of the team all the way now into the modern
era and he is one of the team’s most iconic characters.
So let’s take a look back at his history and origins and find out for ourselves!
Chase Stein is the son of a couple of mad scientists, but he had more aptitude for sports
instead of academics and they resented it.
Like how when Chase won a little league MVP trophy, his mom drove by a pier so that he
could throw it into the ocean since she would only allow him to keep awards for things that
matter.
When he was sixteen, Chase asked for a solid white van for his birthday since it’d be
inconspicuous on the road, but pretty soon after, he accidentally ran over his uncle
who was possibly trying to get in on the criminal dealings of his parents.
Oh, did I forget to mention that the Steins are literal supervillains?
Yeah, they’re part of a group called The Pride and alongside the rest of the group’s
children, Chase stumbled across them murdering a young girl.
This prompts the kids to run away and thus form…
The Runaways.
Super clever name, I know.
In an attempt to learn more about their parents’ evil organization, The Runaways invade The
Pride’s private workspaces and learned that each of the kids were something special in
the process.
Now Chase didn’t get any cool alien or magical powers like some of the kids, but when breaking
into his parent’s workshop, he obtained a pair of x-ray goggles and some powerful
fire gauntlets called the Fistigons.
Without a place to stay, Chase volunteered his secret hideout to the team, a collapsed
house inside of a cave that he’d slink off to whenever he needed some space.
To help make the cave a little more secure, Stein bought a gamma testing sign for the
outside off of Ebay... which did a surprisingly great job of keeping people away.
So now that they were on their own, The Runaways decided to abandon their names and instead
took up new codenames.
Chase, being the unoriginal dumbass that he is, wanted to be called Neo.
Like… from the Matrix.
That was shot down and he was given the name Talkback instead, but that didn’t stick…
like at all.
If we’re going to be totally honest, Chase didn’t do TOO much during the first Runaways
series, only really serving as a dudebro comic relief character and to provide sexual tension
with the girls in the group.
This all came to a head when The Runaways finally confronted The Pride and Chase nearly
drowned.
Thankfully one of his teammates, a girl named Gertrude who has a psychic connection to a
dinosaur named Old Lace, managed to save his live and the two became a couple pretty much
instantly afterwards.
So it turns out that The Pride was working for some evil godlike things that ended up
turning on them and to escape their wrath, Chase hijacked an all terrain vessel called
the Leapfrog and basically became the team pilot from then on forward.
The Runaways ended up adding a kid named Victor Mancha to the team after a future version
of Gert comes back to the past and warns them that Victor will turn into a serious villain,
but thankfully by taking Victor in, The Runaways seemed to have prevented this from happening
at all.
Chase gets pretty jealous about Victor basically being the perfect guy, but the two eventually
bury the hatchet and become solid bros.
Sadly though, not everything is all friendship and sunshine because a new incarnation of
The Pride rose up and managed to straight up KILL Gert right in front of Chase’s eyes!
Before passing though, Gertrude passes on her psychic connection to Old Lace onto Stein
and he goes a bit insane during the grieving process.
Chase was constantly on edge and started distancing himself from The Runaways.
In fact, he was going to straight up sacrifice himself to the evil gods that his parents
were working for in an attempt to have them bring Gert back to life in exchange, but the
team would not let him!
Fast forward a bit further and The Runaways are starting to have financial issues as they’ve
used up a lot of the remaining resources that their parents had hidden away that weren’t
already seized by the government.
Chase was the only legal adult on the team so he was given the task of finding a job.
Stein ended up working as a P.A.
for a radio host named Val Rhymin who would later go on to… unleash a horde of radio
zombies on Los Angeles…
Because comics.
Pretty soon after defeating the zombies though, The Runaways’ hideout was destroyed by an
unmanned drone which seemingly killed off Old Lace in the process.
This threw Chase into another spiral of depression as the dinosaur was the last link to Gertrude
that he had left and this got taken out on Chase’s uncle who turns out survived being
hit by Chase’s van all those years ago.
Sadly though, the book got pretty abruptly canceled and ended on a major cliffhanger
with Stein getting randomly hit with a car, but thankfully he made an off panel recovery
when The Runaways came back for some small cameos and crossovers.
The biggest of these was then Chase sensed that Old Lace was alive so The Runaways ended
up teaming up with the kids from Avengers Academy in order to save her.
Speaking of, Chase and Nico ended up joining several members of the Academy when they were
all kidnapped and brought to Muderworld, a sick reality TV-esque game run by the villain,
Arcade.
For a solid portion of the book though, Chase and Nico mostly served as background characters
until they joined the Avengers Academy students properly for an alliance.
That is… until Chase was framed for attacking one of them.
Needless to say, tensions were high so Stein took a walk in order to clear his mind.
This was when he found the power armor of one of Murderworld’s first victims, Darkhawk.
Things came to the tipping point though when all of the remaining survivors formed one
giant alliance against Katy, a technomancer who rose up as the villain out of all of the
contestants.
Chase thought the simple solution was to just kill Katy, thus saving the most lives, but
the problem though is that Katy actually shares a body with her innocent twin brother so killing
her would condemn an innocent.
This mindset of kill or be killed ultimately got Chase kicked out of the group, but Katy
instantly used her powers to take over the Darkhawk armor and was able to use Chase like
a puppet.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Katy also used Chase to literally KILL Nico!
But don’t worry, she came back to life pretty soon after and they all take Katy down.
Arcade on the other hand was defeated off screen and the remaining survivors were rescued
including Darkhawk who was apparently not dead this whole time!
The survivors made a pact to not talk about what happened on Murderworld to everyone,
Chase returned the Darkhawk armor, and everything was great…
until Arcade released the Murderworld footage onto YouTube...
With the events of Murderworld becoming public knowledge, Chase broke the pact of silence
and used it as an opportunity to achieve personal fame by going on talk shows and even signing
a book deal.
However, Stein and the other survivors were roped into getting revenge on Arcade, seemingly
killing him in the process.
This got them into a LOT of trouble so they decided to infiltrate an evil organization
called the Masters of Evil as a means of bringing them down from the inside, hoping that by
doing this good deed, their names would be cleared.
The Murderworld survivors worked with the Masters of Evil for about three months before
managing to actually achieve their goal of taking them down from the inside, but that
was the last that we’d seen of Chase for quite a while.
It wasn’t until The Runaways series was brought back in 2017 that we find out that
The Runaways had gone their separate ways and that Chase was working on trying to bring
Gert back to life!
The plan coalesced into going back in time and rescuing Gertrude as soon as she was being
stabbed, busting into Nico’s apartment, and getting her medical attention straight
away.
This actually ended up working, but Gertrude was stranded out of time.
All of her friends were scattered, she missed so much history, she had no life left to go
to, and Chase was a grown man, but she was still just a teenager.
As of right now, everything is uncertain.
Will the Runaways continue to stand divided or will they come back together?
Only time will tell.
It has been awesome seeing Chase grow from this annoying dudebro character to the heart
and soul of the entire team and I really like seeing this character development because
for Chase especially, this has been a literal coming of age story and he has become one
of my favorite characters in the entire Runaways series.
But hey, if you liked this video then why not consider subscribing or even watching
another one?
In fact, I have an entire playlist of all my Runaways videos so if you liked this one,
then you’re probably going to like all of those so why not give them a watch?
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video and hopefully I’ll see you next time!