Boy’s (Super) Life: Nova #7 Review

There are bigger comic books this week than Nova #7, written by Zeb Wells with art by Paco Medina, but you’re not gonna find too many that are more fun. Not in the sense that there’s a lot of big action or spectacular demolition or exciting team-ups (although we see Nova meet Spider-Man, which was a nice bit of nostalgia for a guy who fondly remembers the original Nova’s first crossover with Spider-Man back in 1977 – to this day, I remember the reveal that the murder victim fingered his killer from beyond the grave by tearing out the last pages of a calendar to spell JASOND), but in the sense that the issue asks the question: if you were a teenager from the sticks who had powers and you wanted to become a superhero… how exactly would you go about it?

I mean, I’m an adult who lives in a major American city, who has been known to drink heavy in questionable bars, and I can count the number of actual crimes I’ve personally witnessed in the last decade on one hand. The last house fire I saw was a rural chimney fire I saw right around when I was reading that 1977 Nova / Spider-Man crossover (despite all of my friends’ predictions that I would eventually see a house fire thanks to years of reckless chain smoking while drinking whiskey), and I see my high-speed police chases on TruTV at 2 a.m., the way God intended. Even if I had the power of Superman, I wouldn’t know where to find a crime to fight if I had to, and I’m someone old enough to know what a Bearcat Scanner is and what it’s for.

So what would you do if you were a 15-year-old from the middle of nowhere, imbued with the power of a cosmic hero, looking to make himself a superhero?

And the answer is: apparently, fuck up all over the place.