Only the first volume of New Warriors got any Annuals, but it's also the only one that really lasted long enough to bother. Four in total, each of the first three acting as a single part of some larger story running across various other Annuals that year.
This one, "Kings of Pain" included X-Force and X-Factor among others, and involved someone gathering all the dispersed energy that used to be Proteus. This was a predictably terrible idea. The second, "Hero Killers", ran through New Warriors and the various Spider-Man books, and involved someone abducting young heroes to use as lab rats, essentially. The third was someone with a deep connection to the Darkforce Dimension - not Cloak - going nuts and using the Darkforce to control lots of heroes. You can tell how invested I was in these story by my repeated use of "someone." It was different someones each time, if you care. Only the fourth and final Annual was its own thing, focusing on recurring Warriors' opponents Psionex, but I'm not that interested in Psionex, so I never bought that one.
The rest of each Annual was taken up by short, 4-6 pages stories focused on one character or another. In this one, most of those are different characters relating their backstory to someone - Nova's talking to his kid brother, Namorita's giving an interview, Firestar's is actually narrated by Emma Frost - and how the Warriors got together. Although the stuff about the formation of the team is usually relegated to the last few panels, which seems like a missed opportunity to delve into what each team member thinks about the team, its purpose, their role in it.
This story is the exception, at least as far as this annual, and is about Speedball drinking some concoction that's supposed to let them take readings through Robbie's kinetic field. Then he spends the next two pages trying to activate his powers in various dangerous ways - jumping off buildings, getting hit with a wrecking ball - only to be saved at the last second by one of New York's 5,000 superheroes. And then there's a twist ending, which I won't spoil. Unless you ask, because what the hell, the story is 35 years old.
2 comments:
Go on then, what's the twist?
Also, I didn't realise that Slott had been at Marvel since 1991!
And the cover has Mignola inking Bagley!
The twist is, Robbie wanders back to their HQ and Chord runs up to warn him that he was warned the thing Robbie drank canceled out his powers, so if those heroes hadn't shown up, Robbie would have gotten splattered.
Then either Night Thrasher or Chord points out Robbie doesn't need to be throwing himself off a building to activate his powers, he could, like Jamie Madrox, just punch a wall or something. (Meanwhile, Robbie's fainting.)
As for Slott, that surprised me, too. I knew he was there by '95, because he wrote part of the Earthworm Jim mini-series, but wasn't expecting '91.
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