Team books are fun. Lots of heroes all getting down together to fight crime, bicker, and unite against the forces of evil. The only time team books aren’t fun is when they feel thrown together – when a team book feels like a fruitcake made out of everything the baker couldn’t use. New Warriors #1 feels a lot like that, as if Marvel just swept their hands across the cutting board of characters and swept whoever was a solo act and a peripheral one into this fruitcake of who cares.
As this is a first issue, there is no real way of knowing the direction New Warriors will head. It could become the interstellar glue that holds the deep space areas of Marvel comics together. I doubt it, but it might. That being said, issue #1 feels like a cash-in, a quick attempt by the Marvel bean counters to try and throw a new “space team” into the mix right before the Guardians of the Galaxy movie hits. New Warriors #1 came out twenty-four hours after the debut of the GOTG trailer. Coincidence?
I like writer Christopher Yost, and the opening page of New Warriors piqued my interest. A bull-humanoid creature is crawling, bleeding and pleading to understand why his people are being murdered. Behind a great light comes an answer so cold that you feel real pity for this creature. From that point on, Yost is in introduction mode, which gets boring. First up is Speedball and Justice, the less-than-dynamic-duo who have been irritating Nova by pretending they’re a hero team. Speedball and Justice are trying to defend their small mutant haven in Colorado from an attacking batch of super-powered folks.
Turns out the alien bunch, made up of Vertigo and Brutacus, aren’t bad guys, it was all just a big misunderstanding. Meanwhile, in Mexico, we catch up with Scarlet Spider and Hummingbird, who are trying to stay beneath the radar. Then there is Faira Sar Namora, an ocean dweller who shows up in Mexico because somebody or something slaughtered some of her people. We know what did it: the Evolutionaries, a band of cool looking robots who are apparently the savior of the human race – so sayeth The High Evolutionary, who announces this just as he takes out Nova in the final pages of the issue.
Yost has a crisp writing style, one that usually sparkles when it comes to dialogue. Here, it falls flat, with Yost worrying too much about being funny and not enough about excitement or making the characters compelling. Based on the Guardians of the Galaxy trailer, which is rife with corny humor, this might be the new direction of the Marvel Galaxy. Let’s hope not.
The art from Marcus To is passable, but not particularly memorable. This is a kind of factory-style comic book art, something that tells the story but doesn’t make any kind of statement of its own. Nothing going on here is inherently bad, and it is clear To can draw, but any number of artists could have done this book. To’s work wouldn’t have been missed, as it does not define the book.
I have no clue where the future of New Warriors will go. Hopefully it will be something a little less pedestrian.
(2 Story, 2 Art)
