The first New Warriors series ran a little over six years, and then there was a 3+-year gap before this brief volume, written by Jay Faerber, started up. Faerber starts with Speedball trying to recruit old friends to restart the New Warriors. But Nova already turned him down once, Justice and Firestar are happy playing in the big leagues with the Avengers now, and Night Thrasher's moved to the Pacific Northwest. Elvin (Rage) is going to school. Darkhawk's got his own school issues. Dagger won't split from Cloak (and Cloak's not interested), and Alex Power won't risk pissing his siblings off again.
Faerber also includes one panel of Speedball getting laughed at by the Slingers (two of them, anyway) when he asks them. Considering none of them had ever been members, I don't know what Faerber was doing there, but it sets the tone for the series (we'll come back to that.)
Ultimately, Namorita and Nova are in the middle of (failing) to cheer up Speedball when they get a call from Genetech that Blastaar's busted through their Negative Zone portal. Turbo joins in on the way, along with a couple of new characters, Aegis (a young man who found an enchanted breastplate sent to Earth by Athena) and Bolt (a mutant with electricity powers, and the Legacy Virus.) Justice and Firestar show up to help, and inadvertently steal the credit for the Warriors' win, but that aside, it's a new team.
A new team that proceeds to not do real well. This feels like the beginning of the slide of the New Warriors' rep. Part of the reason Nova's reluctant to join is he feels the Warriors are "bush league" and he wants a higher profile. The press consistently downplay or misconstrue the Warriors' actions, though this is the Marvel Universe, so that's no huge surprise.
More than that, the team just isn't very competent. In the first series' second issue, the Warriors encountered a street gang with AIM weaponry. It's mostly an excuse for the rest of the team to do something while Night Thrasher hashes things out with Midnight's Fire (read: beat hell out of each other), and they handle it in a handful of pages, the biggest complication being when Nova takes a hit because he charged in on his own.
This version of the Warriors get their headquarters blown up by a street gang using just a regular old rocket launcher and guns. Like, the gang of regular guys was a plot that actually required more than one issue to resolve. Partially because Aegis knew one of them and let him escape, but still. They run into Generation X in the fifth issue, and even though Nova, Namorita and Speedball all have way more experience than any of the mutants, including Jubilee, the Warriors get treated as the over-aggressive rookies.
They get trounced - the entire team, handily - by a suit of Iron Man armor that's gained sentience (the media naturally frames them as being in the wrong for stopping Iron Man from killing the Blizzard.) This after Nova was losing to the Blizzard. They get humiliated by the kid that steals Iron Fist's chi in Faeber's run-up to Iron Fist/Wolverine, then chewed out by Night Thrasher for being so disorganized. Then maybe you should have taken an active hand in the team prior that, Thrash-man. Faerber had this whole thing where the team had no official leader, and I guess that's supposed to make them poorly coordinated, but two-thirds of this roster had been teammates for a long time. There ought to be some base level of muscle memory for how to work together between Nova, Nita, Speedball and Turbo, at least.
The book goes through a bunch of artists for only 10 issues. Steve Scott to start (with Chris Renaud drawing part of issues 3 and 5), Karl Kerschel on issues 4 and 5, Armstrong on issue 6, and finally Jamal Igle for the last 4 issues. Even with Walden Wong as inker for the entire run, the look of the book varies a lot. The Kerschel issues look the roughest, the most rushed, characters reduced to almost blocky outlines. Igle's art is probably the best; he's able to handle fight scenes with lots of characters and keep designs consistent, but I find his faces kind of squishy-looking. All the pre-existing characters get new costumes, though at least Nova ditches the look above later in that same issue. Namorita says she got tired of looking like a swimsuit model, but are the white crop-top and yoga pants really an improvement? I have no idea why Speedball thought he needed goggles, but I do like the change in Turbo's look. Switching from the big circular turbines at the wrists and ankles to something more like an intake or output blower for a jet engine.
As for subplots, Turbo falls for one of the loser super-villains they fight (in his civilian identity) and has to deal with that. The team, Nova particularly, have trust issues with Aegis after the problems with his buddy in the gang. Bolt hides his Legacy Virus issues from everyone except Nita, who lets him use her spare room. You may have noticed Namorita's back to being white instead of blue, well she also got some new powers because of all the stuff that Atlantean scientist put in her genetics to try and avoid issues with being a clone. (Though she seems to lose the ability to redirect electricity considering Iron Man's armor KO's her by zapping her with one of Bolt's attacks. Or, you know, it's the diminished competence thing.) Most of Nova's issues are going on in his own book, but he and Speedball are trying to get a movie made about the New Warriors. That crops up occasionally, mostly in terms of Nova being too concerned with his public image and wanting to hog credit.
The title ends with Bolt telling the rest of the team about his infection, Nova scrapping his dreams of movie stardom, and Night Thrasher deciding they're finally worth his time, though he also blames them for the fight with Iron Man. I'm guessing Tony Stark didn't admit his armor was sentient and beating his enemies to death. What a surprise, I say, in the flattest most sarcastic tone I can manage. Actually, the last page is a lead-in to Iron Fist/Wolverine, which, barely involved the New Warriors, but I guess Faeber's focus was already someplace else.
Next week, things get even worse.
3 comments:
Making a whole series about how incompetent your main characters are is an odd move. Is it really as bad as it seems?
After they fail to protect Iron Fist from the kid who steals his chi (and get thoroughly humiliated by said kid because they're so disorganized), Night Thrasher first laughs at their offer to join the team, then chews them out for being such a mess. It sure feels like a deliberate choice by Faerber.
Maybe if the series had run longer he was going to have them get it together, but he spent almost a year showing an entire team, several of them veteran heroes by this point, struggling to handle third-rate villains and gang members with regular handguns, it doesn't paint a great picture of the cast.
It's a very strange approach!
Post a Comment