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Between the almost cameo on this week’s Daredevil: Born Again — Funko POPs of Ms. Marvel held up by her proud father count as cameos, right? — and the Avengers: Doomsday casting announcement, we got to thinking: Marvel keeps teasing an MCU Young Avengers team or something similar. (Yes, we’ve heard the Champions rumors too.) But: where are the MCU Young Avengers right now, ahead of everything falling apart as we head towards Doomsday? If there really is a plan to bring the characters together, it’ll have to do so from some very disparate places. Here’s where we left the next generation of the MCU last time we saw them.

Ms. Marvel

Easily the most enthusiastic of the younger heroes in the MCU, Kamala Khan has already saved not just Jersey City, but reality itself after her appearances in 2022’s Ms. Marvel and 2023’s The Marvels. (No wonder her father is so proud of her.) She’s clearly planning on something even more ambitious, however; the last time she appeared (the post-credit scene of The Marvels), she was approaching Kate Bishop about a new iteration of the Avengers Initiative…

Kate Bishop

Kate Bishop made a big impression when she debuted in 2021’s Hawkeye miniseries, bringing Clint Barton back from the emotional brink through sheer force of will and, sure, pretty much frustrating him until he had no choice but to join in. That kind of can-do attitude is what a new generation of Avengers needs, so it’s no surprise she was seemingly the first inductee into whatever Ms. Marvel is planning, as teased at the end of The Marvels.

Yelena Belova

Will Yelena Belova be part of any MCU Young Avengers initiative? That’s unclear; after first appearing in 2021’s Black Widow, she shared a moment with Kate Bishop in the same year’s Hawkeye — but now she appears to have moved on to the… slightly bigger leagues of this summer’s Thunderbolts* alongside Bucky and a collection of other misfit MCU toys, while also being listed in the cast for Avengers: Doomsday. (It’s worth noting, no comic book version of either the Young Avengers or the Champions has featured the White Widow, so if she didn’t make it onto the team, it would be true to the source material…)

Billy Maximoff

The magical son of the Scarlet Witch and the Vision, Billy first appeared in 2021’s WandaVision before being seemingly magicked out of existence at the end of the show; things are never as straightforward as they seem, however, and he returned as a somewhat amnesiacial teenager in 2024’s Agatha All Along. Last we saw him, he’d discovered who he was and set off to try and find his missing twin, Tommy… who has his own history with the Young Avengers in Marvel comics canon.

Keep up to date on Popverse's Marvel coverage, with these highlights:

• The MCU needs Anya Taylor-Joy's Magik in it (and not just for the X-Men connection)
• How Disney+'s What If...? is the moonshot for the next 50 years of Marvel Studios & the MCU
• Marvel Studios has accidentally created a new Phase that predates Phases 1 - 6: the MCU Phase Zero
• Overgrown children of the atom: Marvel's X-Men can't evolve past their '90s commercial peak
• The biggest outstanding questions of the Marvel Studios' movies & TV shows
• Donald Trump is the landlord for Marvel's House of Ideas
• Marvel Studios swapping out Doctor Doom for Kang offers the chance to jettison the Multiverse Saga
• What Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige is saying (and not saying) about the MCU X-Men franchise says a lot about the future of the Mutant Saga
• If Marvel is going to bring Loki back for Secret Wars, it's time to give him an upgrade
• In 2021, Sony's boss said people won't miss Spider-Man in its Spider-adjacent movie. Turns out, they do.