After the team's ignominious destruction at Mark Millar's hands in Civil War, there was a 4th volume of New Warriors, involving a bunch of depowered mutants using suits loaded with various supervillain weapons to fight crime as unregistered superheroes. I think the team was secretly run by Night Thrasher's brother(?), but other than the idea of following their own consciences, to hell with the opinions of the more established heroes, it didn't seem to have much connection with the "New Warriors" beyond the name.
I'm not sure I ever saw anything positive said about it, but it did last 20 issues, which is the longest of any of volumes 2-5, so take from that what you will.
In 2014, the New Warriors got their next shot, courtesy of Christopher Yost and Marcus To. Justice and Speedball are doing the "Hard-Travelin' Heroes" bit, when they get roped into a mess involving *aggrieved sigh* the High Evolutionary, and some glowy-head weirdos called "Evolutionaries" that had apparently fought the X-Men some time recently. A shadowy figure informs both parties the Celestials are returning to Earth. To save humanity, all these "blasphemies" running around must be eliminated.
The Evolutionaries keep popping up around the world, attacking one person but drawing someone else into the fight. Eventually everyone pictured above ends up inside the High Evolutionary's base, where he's building a machine to kill everyone with powers. So he's actually going to go more lethal than the Wraith Queen's plan at the end of volume 1 (though I assume she was going to kill everyone on Earth once all the superpowers were out of the way, so maybe it's a matter of the time scale you use.)
Roll call! You've got Justice (mutant), Speedball (extra-dimensional energy), Scarlet Spider/Kaine (clone), Water Snake (Atlantean), Hummingbird/the one shouting (demigod), Haechi/the dude with the horn (Inhuman), Nova/Sam Alexander (extra-terrestrial energy) and Sun Girl (regular human with a jetpack). I was going to say Sam was only there because the High Evolutionary thought the alien supercomputer in his helmet would make the death-machine work better, but when he activates said machine in this issue (minus the helmet) it starts killing Sam, so I guess the Nova Force counts.
In terms of team dynamics, Justice is the leader. Scarlet Spider's the grumpy asshole who thinks the whole thing is stupid. Water Snake is the warrior-type that's kind of stiff and doesn't get jokes (or what passes for jokes with Speedball, which is mostly being annoying.) Hummingbird's the hyped-up cheerleader type (which I guess was the contrast Yost played up with Kaine in his solo book.) Haechi's the one with no place else to go. His family got targeted in the factional power play crap Marvel did a lot of when they were trying to make the Inhumans a big deal. I don't really know how to describe Sun Girl.
Since most of the cast are pre-existing characters, Marcus To doesn't get to design many new looks. I think Sun Girl's new, as are Water Snake and Haechi. Sun Girl's look isn't bad, bright and an appropriate emblem, with the tech parts to break up the yellow-and-white color scheme. Water Snake's an Atlantean that Speedball insists is amnesiac Namorita, though Nita never had black hair with blue skin. Rather than the flowing white tattoos Namorita had in volume 3, Water Snake's make me think of kanji, and they're restricted to her arms.
(Yost apparently planned that Water Snake was supposed to magically combine with the time-traveling Namorita that Richard Rider Nova rescued from The Fault in his book, but never got to it.)
Haechi has Bishop's power, although if he absorbs enough energy he transforms into a flame-spitting unicorn on steroids thing. It's weird, or maybe I should say, inhuman?
Audience: NO.
I don't like how To depicts Justice's powers. Traditionally, artists go with an amoebic blue field around whatever he's gripping with his telekinesis, usually with a smaller bit of blue spiking from his forehead as a sign the power comes from his mind. Marcus To draws it like Vance just shoots waves of blue force from his hands, which is less interesting. I also don't always love how he draws Speedball's bouncing in terms of his posture. It suggests leaping more than bouncing, whereas Bagley and most other New Warriors' artists tend to have Speedball's limbs all over the place and with his body turned in weird angles. You could at least argue by this point he's gotten enough training and, post-Civil War and all the resulting "Penance" horseshit, that he's trying to be more focused in use of his powers and actually control his kinetic motion. Still, he loses a bit of the unique aspect of how he moved.
Since the book ended after 12 issues, Yost never gets much past the initial storyline. It turns out the Eternals are the ones manipulating H.E. and the Evolutionaries, for some likely nefarious reason that's never explained. Yost way oversells the Eternals, saying each one is as powerful as an entire team of Avengers. Maybe if we're talking the Kooky Quartet, but otherwise, that's nonsense. Sersi was on an Avengers' squad, she was not more powerful than the rest of the roster.
Still, it's an attempt to make the Warriors look good, that they challenged and ultimately stymied such an enemy. One of the problems with volumes 2 & 3 was they took the approach "street level=incapable." Essentially, if you're a team that's not fighting world-ending threats all the time, you probably aren't very good. The teamwork with this group is nothing to write home about, but they aren't treated as a fractured bunch of goobers incapable of winning a fight.
There are a couple of one-offs. Justice tries to get Kaine to be a team player and they end up fighting a giant local (Kaine's book was set in Houston) sports mascot. Justice telling Iron Man and Captain America where to stick it when they suggest it's a bad idea to call themselves "New Warriors" because of the negative associations is a highlight. If we're using that criteria, Stark should have stopped using "Iron Man" after Armor Wars, if not sooner all the way back in "Demon in a Bottle."
There's not been another New Warriors series since this one. There was a mini-series solicited 5 years ago as part of the mini-event Outlawed, which was going to try and restrict teen superheroes. But Outlawed got kneecapped by all the publishing issues during COVID, so the mini-series never turned up. Considering it was going to put the old-school Warriors on the side of the jackbooted authorities (booo), and the names and designs that were solicited for the new characters got pretty roundly mocked, I don't consider that a loss.
No comments:
Post a Comment