Marvel Pick Of The Week – September 24, 2014

New Warriors 10, by Christopher Yost, Erik Burnham, and Marcus To

New Warriors was one of the first titles I collected when I started reading comic books (raise your hand if you remember The Hero Killers), and a young teen, I connected to the idea of a collection of kids my age with great ideas about how the world ought to work who love each other as much as they love their ideals. As opposed to the X-Men or the New Mutants (X-Force at the time), the Warriors didn’t always feel hated and feared by the world around them. They dealt with sex and death and honor, but they also let loose and shared a pizza in front of a video game once in a while, and I couldn’t get enough. Since then, the title has been relaunched a few times, and some of these have been great, but none recaptured the original spark. Even this time around, the team has spent nine issues without ever really coming together as a group, and it was hard to believe they even knew each other, but I have stayed with the book because it was still entertaining and respectful of its characters.

This is the issue when it all comes together for a long-time New Warriors fan.

The book opens in darkness, with a pair of evildoers up to no good in an evil science lab, a concept that could easily have gone too Silver Age but stopped just before ludicrous. By page six, we’ve gotten a great spread of the Warriors crashing into the lab and looking like a real team. In the subsequent fighting, teammates communicate with each other as if they’ve actually ever met and remember each other’s capabilities. Everyone has a distinct voice and makes choices consistent with the previous nine issues of setup. Speedball bounces around with those silly little bubbles all over, and I had forgotten how much I loved seeing Bagley or Robertson drawing those things. There’s a death at the climax that I never saw coming but that fits well into the pathos of the team’s history. And finally, after a completely satisfying fight issue, some classic Marvel super beings teleport in to set up the cliffhanger.

This book fits in with the best of Marvel’s 90’s output without some of the silly excess that makes that era something of a joke nowadays. This is an issue you could give any kid and get a Marvel convert, or give any thirty-five year old fan and get a smile. It’s a shame that it took so long to get here, as the book is cancelled at the end of this three-issue arc, but it has achieved something special during its short time on our racks.

Honorable Mentions:

Cyclops 5, for the decision that when Sexy Twink Scott Summers and Muscle Daddy Christopher Summers eventually get rescued from their maroon on a harsh planet, they do it shirtless and flexing. Christopher may be dying of some strange raise-the-drama disease, but he still makes time for Crossfit – what’s your excuse?

New Avengers 24, for scaring the crap out of me. This issue is Hickman highlighting eight months when a cadre of villains (Thanos is the only one a casual reader might recognize) gleefully slaughtered planet after planet, an acceptable evil when faced with the obliteration of the multiverse but still a squicky one. Hickman doesn’t always connect to me emotionally, but that distance is used to great horror effect with this crowd. Yikes.

Storm 3, for a gentle address of efforts to help suffering nations with a five-day mission trip. Storm reconnects with Forge as he develops technology for irrigation in Kenya, where she used to be a goddess back in the 70’s. He wants to show how involved he is, and she doesn’t get on his case for deciding he knows better than the residents, but she does encourage him to spend time teaching the local people how to build and repair the technology instead of just dropping off a box, and she tells him that she’s expecting him to be there keeping up the work when she returns in a year. Mission trips do good, and people who volunteer their time and resources to help strangers ought to be encouraged, but Storm demonstrates gentle and clear ways to educate these folks toward lasting change.