Posts Tagged ‘ New Warriors ’

Be warned: this post contains spoilers.

I know, for an issue that came out a couple of days ago and has already cropped up on most message boards and the like, that’s not a big deal – and I know that as its Nova only a handful of people will care – but still.

Big spoilers.

So I’m putting it behind the jump…

It seems to me that Marvel are screwing with me.

I’ve dropped X-Men in favor of trades, something that would have been unthinkable to me a few years ago and, with the end of Siege and the dawning of the Heroic Age, I was going to jump ship on all the Avengers books too – again, in favor of trades.

While I’m still planning to do this, Marvel seem intent on luring me back to the comic store week to week. It started with Ben Grimm.

The Thing – probably my second favorite Marvel character (or at least Marvel superhero) is on the Avengers, a team that has always been one of my favorites. I enjoyed his (very) brief stint on the West Coast Avengers (yet another firm favorite) back in the early days of that team, loved Marvel Two-In-One and his solo series – so having him on this team is one hell of a way to make me want to carry on picking up the New Avengers.

But no, that wasn’t enough.

They also announced Young Allies by Sean McKeever. Normally this wouldn’t be a huge deal for me, but two of the members are former member of the New Warriors Firestar (favorite team book ever, just in case you missed that) and Gravity (McKeever’s Gravity mini-series made me a fan of the character for life).

Anything else?

Oh yes, the bastards.

Jim McCann has a Hawkeye & Mockingbird ongoing coming March. So that would be my third favorite Marvel hero and his wife.

Goddammit.

What else have you got up your sleeve, Marvel?

A New Warriors relaunch?

The return of Marvel Team-Up?

A back-in-continuity Power Pack?

An ongoing Cloak & Dagger?

What, Marvel, what?

As Robot 6 reports, this week’s Cup o’Joe included an announcement for Marvel Divas (even though the cover is titled Vixens, which I like more, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. RAS says:

“The idea behind the series was to have some sudsy fun and lift the curtain a bit and take a peep at some of our most fabulous super heroines. In the series, they’re an unlikely foursome of friends–Black Cat, Hell Cat, Firestar, and Photon–with TWO things in common: They’re all leading double-lives and they’re all having romantic trouble. The pitch started as “Sex and the City” in the Marvel Universe, and there’s definitely that “naughty” element to it, but I also think the series is doing to a deeper place, asking question about what it means…truly means…to be a woman in an industry dominated by testosterone and guns. (And I mean both the super hero industry and the comic book industry.) But mostly it’s just a lot of hot fun.”

Well. That sounds a bit crappy, and I don’t have a lot of faith in RAS after his run on Books of Magic and Sensational Spider-Man but…dammit all, you had me at Firestar.

The rest of the cast are a bonus, too – although I always preferred Monica Rambeau’s Captain Marvel look myself. No-one’s using that name these days, right?

The good folk at Alert Nerd challenged the comics blogosphere to talk about their Scott and Jean a couple of weeks ago…and everyone was supposed to talk about it yesterday. And there were a lot – a lot! – of great posts.

I didn’t do it.

Partly because I kind of forgot, but partly because I don’t think I have a Scott and Jean. I don’t have something sacred that I just can’t discuss rationally.

I mean, you didn’t like the ending of BSG? Your prerogative, even if it means you’re wrong.

You didn’t like OMD? Me either. But the stuff that’s come after it is the best that Spider-Man has been in ten years, if not more.

You hate that Clark and Lois got married? Well, you’re a moron that can’t accept change and wants everything to be like it was when you were a kid, but I guess I can’t stop you from bitching.

You don’t like Star Trek Deep Space Nine, you don’t get that it’s the best that Star Trek ever was? Fine, your loss.

You hate that Cordelia and Conner slept together? Me too, but I’m not going to get worked up about it.

You think that Dr Pulaski was better than Dr Crusher? Okay, you’re kind of weird – but she did have a certain Bones-esque quality to her.

You’re going to cry and whine about how George Lucas raped your childhood with the last Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies? Grow up, asshole, nobody made you watch them.

You hate what DC editorial did to Cassandra Cain? Me too – but it was more the execution than the edict.

So maybe I don’t have a sacred cow. Maybe I’ve just come around to accepting change. Maybe I know that eventually, everything in comics gets reversed, and different people read or see things differently so there are always going to be differences of opinion. I’m not going to get worked up about that.

So. No Scott and Jean for me.

Unless…

..unless you’re going to say something against New Warriors.

Because if you’re going to diss on the original New Warriors under Fabian Nicieza, if you’re not going to see that at the very least the first two years are as close to a perfect super-hero book as you’re going to get…

In fact if you’re going to take shots at anything in those first four or five years of their book…

…yep, even Night Thrasher on his stupid-ass skateboard..

…you do that and it is on.

Dear Marvel,

I see that you will be celebrating 70 years of Marvel in 2009, complete with variant covers and little ’70 Years’ corner boxes.

Maybe I’m not quite as good at maths as I thought I was because when I started picking up US Marvel comics in 1986, I was fairly certain that all the corner boxes then trumpeted that that was Marvel’s 25th Anniversary.

In fact, I’m relatively sure that all your November 1986 issues carried special anniversary covers too. Of those books, only eleven are still around in some form or other (I’m counting X-Factor and New Mutants to be generous), but only three are still on the same numbering run – and of those, only Uncanny X-Men has been numbered straight through.

Sadly, Ewoks, Care Bears and Heathcliff are no longer published by you, and you’ve lost both the Transformers and GI Joe licenses since then.

But I digress.

The point I would like to make is that if you’ve got a big year planned, maybe I can give you some pointers on ways to make it a good year…

1) No deals with the Devil (or demons, imps, devil substitutes or hedge fund managers). It may actually result in a substantial uptick in quality of the title, but it’s not worth the year of pissing and moaning from people who somehow believe that this will cause mythical young readers to fall into satanism (or become accountants).

2) Stop with the status quo-shaking crossovers. Look, if you change the status quo every twelve to eighteen months or so, the new status quo doesn’t have time to become status quo, okay? I understand that BOLD NEW DIRECTIONS! result in temporary sales boosts, but eventually you’re going to lose readers because of them. I know you’ve got War of Kings and probably some mutant-superhuman war thing lined up, but try to keep line-wide ramifications to a minimum, eh?

3) If you must have a status quo-shaking crossover, try to limit the number of new titles that spring out of it. For every Avengers: The Initiative that actually succeeds, you get a The Order which will fail and a New Warriors that will flounder, or an Omega Flight which will just plain tank. Just concentrate on putting out fewer new books and making sure that they’re good ones. Like Guardians of the Galaxy, which is awesome.

4) Stop launching new titles with old title names that bear little relation to those old titles unless you actually have a plan to tie it to the team’s legacy in some way. A good way of doing this is as Abnett and Lanning have done in Guardians of the Galaxy, which is awesome. A bad way is shoehorning Rage and Justice into the New Warriors book, which only reminds us how much better the original book was.

5) I get that #1′s sell, but if you want to relaunch a character who already has a book, just do it in that book. Otherwise the existing title suddenly becomes secondary and it’s blindingly obvious that it’s being phased out. It just pisses readers of that book off. And yes, I know that Invincible Iron Man is pretty good, that’s not the point. The point is that for the past six months, Director of SHIELD has been the red-headed step child.

6) Reinventing characters is great. I for one would love a new spin on, say, Nomad. Or Rocket Racer. But leave alone existing marquee characters unless they actually need a revamp. For example, if you have a character that has had more development in the past year than in the past ten years put together, don’t revert to the most annoying take on that character and introduce a big mean new-colored version of him who, although he may make a good visual, kind of stinks up the place. Am I being too vague, or would you like to look at the cover above?

7) Quit with the Zombie and Ape variants. I know I don’t have to buy them, and I don’t. But they annoy the crap out of me*. We get it! You’re marketing geniuses! You can change any cover into a variant by changing a little bit…it’s irritating in the extreme. Next things you’ll be sticking Skrull chins onto…oh.

There are some great underused characters out there who could do with a limited series or ongoing to spotlight them. The upcoming Cloak and Dagger is a good start, but how about the main MU Power Pack? Alpha Flight? Werewolf by Night? The Shroud? And, of course, Dazzler? I realize that you must get burned on these things but honestly, don’t they sound better to you than Hellcat or The Last Defenders?

9) Not just Wolverine needs inventory stories when he’s running late. Would it kill you to line up some Fantastic Four one-shots so that by the end of 2009, when we still haven’t finished Millar and Hitch’s run, we at least have a couple of issues starring the team out there? Yes, I’m being facetious and delays have lessened over the past couple of years, but I wouldn’t say no to the odd one-shot starring Marvel’s First Family.

10) You’ve got some great books out there at the moment. Captain America, Nova, Guardians of the Galaxy, Incredible Hercules, Captain Britain and MI:13 are all solid gold and I continue to hear very good things about Immortal Iron Fist. Don’t screw ‘em up, ‘kay?

A little bit of a flashback for you today, with the opening credits of an old favorite. They just don’t make cartoons like this anymore, do they?

It’s interesting to see that Firestar’s civilian identity (Angelica Jones, don’t'cha know!) looks an awful lot like a certain red-headed cast member of Spider-Man’s own book, no? I wonder if there was ever any intention to have Mary Jane be superpowered for the cartoon, maybe nixed so as not to confuse younger readers?

Via

It all worked out for the best of course, as Firestar became the only (that I can think of) character introduced outside of comics to make her way into the Marvel Universe*. She crossed paths with Emma Frost, the Hellions and the X-Men and New Mutants in her own mini-series, then became a member in good standing of the New Warriors and later the Avengers.

These days she’s retired following the Civil War…although I can’t shake the feeling that we’ll be seeing Angelica again, be it as the Initiative’s mysterious Mutant Zero (although my money’s on Aurora there) or somewhere else.

You can’t keep a good redhead down!

*Not including toy tie-ins like Rom or real-life characters, anyway.

It occurs to me that I missed out doing this last week for some reason, so here you go…

In the midst of the carnage at Camp Hammond (how is that not an issue title?), a bunch of Initiative recruits head off to get the (maybe) original MVP’s brain patterns in a Wonder Man-esque way so that they can imprint on KIA and stop him killing everyone on base. This could be a Very Bad Thing for MVP himself as it may render him a blank slate, but that doesn’t appear to bother the recruits (including the usually-sensible Cloud Nine), so they go for it anyway…

But then -

BIFF!

BANG!

WALLOP!

So who exactly is it taking down these wannabe heroes? I’ll tell you who…

…damn straight!

I mean, its not got Nita (sniff), Anjelica (there may be plans afoot), Rich (busy in his own book), Robbie (off trying to get his head straight in Tbolts) or Dwayne (sniff) but it’s got Vance and Elvin on board – so this feels a lot more like the New Warriors than those posers over in the actual New Warriors book.

You can’t imagine how warm and fuzzy that one panel made me. Ah, Warriors…good times.

From Dan Slott’s first published super-hero work back in New Warriors Annual #1.

And they call Tony Stark a futurist…