Happy Anniversary: Nova #100 Review

There are bigger and more ostensibly important comic books that have been released this week, but none of them had quite as much resonance with me when I saw the cover as Nova #100. Not because Nova is the biggest book in the world, but because it sure as hell isn’t the biggest book in the world.

My dad bought me Nova #12 when I was about five years old, mostly because Spider-Man was on the cover. And I really fell for the character, as I did DC’s Firestorm who debuted at about the same time, because even at five years old, I kind of understood that there were so many Spider-Man and Batman and Superman stories that I would never be able to never be able to read them all. But when you find a new hero that I found on the 11th issue? Well, that was someone who could belong to me.

However, I soon learned that the world of comics publishing didn’t revolve around the excitement of five and six year olds with 50-cent per week allowances willing to contribute a big $4.15 to the annual bottom line for a single comic book, because it was cancelled in 1978. And then it was cancelled again in 1995 after Eric Larsen brought it back, and again in 1999, and again in 2010 before returning in its current incarnation with a different dude under the helmet.

So it’s kinda cool that after 37 years, Nova has finally hit the hundred issue mark, showing simultaneously that sometimes the things you love when you’re five stick with you forever, and that the tastes of five year olds should never be used as a publishing strategy unless you want to wind up owned by a toy company, or worse, Disney.

But I’m not writing about Nova #100 just because of nostalgia, even though that is the reason it made its way to the top of my stack. It’s because in recent months, this book has become a fun and solid read, getting the mix of millennial spirit and fun, goofy dialogue that the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon on Disney XD often whiffs in trying so hard to deliver. And this issue is no exception, with a couple of cool stories about a kid trying to figure out how to be a hero when he’s got classes in the morning and his family has money trouble out the yang. And it’s a lot of fun.

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.

Flashpoint: Avengers Vs. X-Men #12 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: No more spoilers. Actually, a lot more spoilers.

Avengers Vs. X-Men #12 is a hard book to review because it endeavors to do a whole lot of things all at once. First, it needs to resolve the fact that Dark Phoenix is running around in the body of a petulant dink, and it generally accomplishes that. Second, considering the story was about two linchpins of the Marvel Universe, they had to, pretty much for the first time since the series started by showing Cyclops acting like he was one bad night away from handing the X-Men Nikes, track suits and tainted Kool-Aid, introduce some ambiguity as to who the good guys and the bad guys were, and it accomplishes that damn well.

However, one of the things it needed, and tried, to do, was rehabilitate the Scarlet Witch after the events of Avengers: Disassembled in 2004, when she single-handedly wiped out pretty much all the mutants in the 616. It also needed, given the commitment by Marvel editorial to integrate the X-Men back into the more mainstream, non-mutant based books, to make sure that there were actually X-Men around to add to the Avengers books. And it certainly accomplishes both of those things, but it does it in a strangely unsatisfying way, a way that feels like the decision was made that many of the main events of the past seven or eight years of Marvel stories simply don’t matter. It is the final nail in the events of Disassembled – Hawkeye’s alive again, the Vision’s back, and now the mutants are all returning – and it feels like someone at Marvel, be it Axel Alonso or Joe Quesada or Brian Michael Bendis or Ike Perlmutter, dusted off their hands and said, “There! Now we’re back to 1999!”

We make a lot of jokes here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives about how vehemently Marvel protests that they don’t reboot, but make no mistake: Avengers Vs. X-Men #12 is a reboot. The only question is: it is a good one?