2010 was one of those years where Marvel decides they want to court women who read comics. Sometimes this takes the form of series that star lady characters, but are still written and drawn by guys (see Fearless Defenders or that Brian Wood X-Men book from 2013). Sometimes it's an anthology series, like the 3-issue Girl Comics book that came out around this time.
Then there's this five issue mini-series, released weekly in June of 2010. It groups together a bunch of characters with varying amounts (Emma Frost, Hellcat, She-Hulk, Monica Rambeau, Valkyrie, and Agent Brand) of shared history and randomly brings back Nova. No, not Richard Rider, the Herald of Galactus Nova, Frankie Rayner, who died fighting Morg back in Silver Surfer #75 and never got brought back.
It's all kind of strange. The characters are brought together through Cyclops asking them to help Emma celebrate her birthday. Because no one would spend time with Emma Frost otherwise. Nova comes back in part because the Silver Surfer placed some piece of her soul (or something) inside a random red-haired waitress named Frances he apparently found similar to Frankie. Which has kind of screwed up Frances' life because, I think, her desires and dreams got overwritten or scrambled by this other person that's inside. Meanwhile, Nova's physical form is running around, attacking Johnny Storm and blaming everyone else for what happened to her.
The problem with that is, I've read the story where Frankie becomes Galactus' herald. She offers to take the job, not to save Galactus, not to save the Earth (this is also the story where Dr. Strange drops Big G and then Reed declares they must save his life), but because she wants to go to space. When Sue points out being Galactus' Herald will possibly mean feeding him planets full of sentient life, Frankie basically says, "Who cares about some bug-eyed aliens as long as I get to go to space?"
Point being, while Frances has every right to be pissed with how her life (bizarrely) got fucked over, Frankie made her own call, so I figure she's pretty well S.O.L. But at the end of the day, Frances ends up merged with the Nova-thing anyway, and that's pretty much it. As far as I know, absolutely no one has used her since this mini-series, not even Immonen. So what was the point? Guys excuse it a lot of ways, but they still fuck up women's lives? Frances' life was ruined by the arbitrary decisions of a shiny imbecile, and Frankie certainly blames a lot of men (Johnny, Reed, Surfer, Big G) for what happened to her, even though, as I've established, she made her own bad decision.
There's also the fact that Frances suffers a kind of freak-out when the Nova thing gets to Earth, and in the process stabs a man in the heart at the diner where she works. As far as we know, he died. This is never commented on again.
Also, why did Immonen choose the characters she did? I can sort of see Valkyrie, who has a history of being superimposed on different women (I don't remember who was the current one at this point, not Barbara Norris.) Val and Patsy are old friends even if, as Patsy notes in this series, there are experiences she remembers with Val that Val does not. Plus, Patsy has her own history of being caught up in schemes of men, as we saw in Sunday Splash Page #236.
Brand's there, probably because she's someone Scott and Emma already know, and to be the government-adjacent person who considers going to extreme measures to resolve the problem. Emma is there because, telepaths are handy? She seems to be feeling her age (whatever that is), but I'm not sure how that ties in. I have no clue about Monica or She-Hulk, who seem to be there mostly to make up numbers. I guess Monica's the one who gets to try and fight the Nova-thing.
And, in typical Marvel fashion, they rushed the damn book. By issue 2, we're already getting fill-in pages by James Harren, whose art does not look a damn thing like Zonjic's, and Emma Rios jumps in for part of issue 3. Why not wait until September, which also had 5 Wednesdays, to release the book? Maybe Zonjic could have drawn the whole thing.
I feel like the first issue is the high point, when it's just a weird birthday party interrupted by an outbreak of clones of famous people SWORD keeps near Las Vegas for some reason. That's where the panel of Hellcat punching Einstein I used in my Favorite Characters post for Patsy came from. Once it gets into all this weird shit about Nova/Frankie/Frances, it really bogs down.
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