Comic Review #39: The New Warriors #1 (1990)

 

As I wait here to finally get my first dose of the covid vaccine I said to myself... no I needed to write about a better comic than Alpha Flight #106. I just had too. I also wanted to bother portnoyd and I know he has said before that he did not like The New Warriors so I decided to talk about them today. I was going to go with Namor but I had a feeling portnoyd would burst a blood vessel if I made him talk about Namor. So here we go with The New Warriors. The New Warriors was a series following a bunch of young heroes. Marvel does this a lot actually. I mean so does DC with Teen Titans, but Marvel has several young hero groups. Most of them are related to the X-Men. The New Warriors did not. They were created by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz in The Mighty Thor #410-411 which was a Acts of Vengeance crossover. I decided to go with their origin story because it makes more sense to me. Anyway let's discuss The New Warriors #1.

Fabian Nizieca has a name that I cannot type or pronounce. Well last name. I'm sorry dude. I like this guy quite a bit. He started with Marvel in the 1980s with I believe The New Universe. Yes I will get to discussing that in more detail. He worked on 1990S X-Men which I have mentioned I am not a big fan of that era. I really liked his Thunderbolts comics and I can't wait to check out more New Warriors. Mark Bagley drew fantastic stuff. He got his start with Visionaries, New Universe Stuff (hey just like Fabian!) and backup stories in Captain America. He drew New Warriors for 25 issues until he dropped that to draw the Amazing Spider-Man. Now that's something! He's done work for DC Comics and even Ultimate Spider-Man. I've always liked his art quite a bit. Good stuff.

The comic starts off with the lamest New Warrior himself Night Thrasher, a try hard version of Rocket Racer who was also a black guy on a skateboard but at least they knew how silly that concept was and went with it. This guy they want us to take seriously and he's an angry black man. It's 1990 and there's time for Klax and we are arguing about the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis and watching Space Jam and all of the black guys in our comics and tv shows were angry. Except Urkel. I mean Night Thrasher has a good enough reason to be angry but man this just reads as so cliched and silly. Night Thrasher is going to drop Nova off the building they are on. Nova is the oldest of these characters and probably my favorite. 

So throwing Nova off the roof actually brings back his powers, which we learn Reed Richards thought there was only a 35% chance of getting his powers back period. Personally if someone threw me off a Roof I wouldn't join a group of heroes with them. I would bring them to the fucking police and have them lock their crazy ass up in the local mental hospital. Jesus, Night Thrasher you suck. We then meet up with Vance Astrovik who at this time is Marvel Boy. He's trying to join the Avengers and the security robots beat the shit out of him until Captain America comes out and tells him he's too young to join the Avengers. He ends up meeting Night Thrasher and Nova. Oh and apparently this guy is the Vance Astro from Guardians of the Galaxy but the ones no one cares about. I'm sure I will end up talking about some of the comics they've done too but how these two are connected kinda makes my head hurt and I don't need that right now.

So Night Thrasher like a huge prick literally calls up FireStar and says he knows who she is and to meet them at this time. She's like "Couldn't you have asked me to join?" when she actually gets there. Namorita is around a park being torn down because people near it have been getting cancer and the government wants to find out why. Speedball is hanging out with his mom and being a hooligan. He ends up leaving her while she goes to buy a TV so he can fight with heroes on the TV. Yeah they end up fighting Terrax the Tamer, one of the 820,000 Heralds of Galactus. I like Terrax he's a neat fella and I enjoy his design.

The New Warriors after a fight get Terrax off the ground and he just turns to dust. It turns out that he needed to be near the ground to reconstruct himself. I do not remember this as a thing involving the character but I guess he was pretty messed up from that fight with the Fantastic Four. I'm pretty sure Terrax even comes back to fight the New Warriors so I'm sure I will end up talking about those comics too because despite some problems I did enjoy this comic. I enjoy most of the New Warriors (not Try Hard Thrasher though) I just think the fight seemed to end in a weird manner. It was like Aw shit I don't know how to fix this. Art was great but thats Mark Bagley for you!

FINAL VERDICT: This was a fun comic. I had a few problems with it but I still want to check out the next 74 issues and several annuals. They team up with Spider-Man in one! Who doesn't love to see that?