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.

Nova has come to New York, having been given his mom’s blessing to be an active superhero, and he gets the welcome that all new unknown superhumans get in New York: a armed confrontation with the NYPD. Nova decides to just start looking for trouble to fight, coming across The Superior Spider-Man, who thanks him for his involvement with words of encouragement like, “whelp,” and, “insolent.” Spider-Man points out that maybe New York has enough superheroes, and maybe some other city could use the help more, so Nova blasts to Los Angeles, only to find that it’s harder to tell the difference between a super crime and a super crime set up for a movie shoot than you might think. Taking Spider-Man’s cue, Nova uses his helmet to scan worldwide police frequencies to find some kind of crime to fight and someone to help… only to find himself back home in Arizona, doing the one thing he knows he can do to help someone out.

By far and away the best part of Nova #7 is Sam Alexander’s characterization, with one exception, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Sam really feels like an actual 15-year-old: young, dumb, and full of… something. Anyway, Sam’s enthusiasm is realistic; he has decided to become a superhero… and that’s really the entirety of his plan. Every step of the way, he is faced with his inexperience, his lack of preparation, and his complete absence of anything resembling a plan beyond the one-line program of new comics.marvel.Superhero() Nova = costume + powers + new Location(comics.marvel.City.NEW_YORK);

And while yes, it makes the action all seem ineffectual and spotty, but it worked for two reasons, the first being that it felt real. New York and Los Angeles are filled with human detritus who dropped out of high school and caught a Greyhound to the big city with no plan beyond showing up and making it. And while it’s a little easier to watch Sam, who can fly home in six-tenths of a second if things don’t work out, make the same mistakes, the fact of the matter is that teenagers don’t always think this kind of thing through, so to see it in a comic book felt real to me.

The second reason it worked was that, no matter how many times Sam fucks up – and he fucks up here over and over again – he never loses his enthusiasm for being a superhero. Sure, his early motivations are tinged with a certain amount of glory-hunting (not to be confused with “glory-holing,” which is the activity that non-superpowered teenagers looking for New York fame often wind up pursuing), but no matter how often he messes up or is knocked down, he keeps trying to make a mark. Which could come across as annoying and narcissistic, but that last thing he tries back at home, which is about a non-glamorous as one can get, where he says that, by God, he’s gonna help somebody before the night is through, it shows that Sam’s motivations aren’t as selfish as it might seem. That final moment ties the whole adventure together, showing Sam as having the right attitude to be a superhero… if he can work on some of the finer details.

And being a story about a character failing repeatedly, it’s got a lot of good, solid humor in it. Nova’s interaction with Spider-Man shows us a good-hearted kid interacting (unknowingly) with a self-important super villain, but it sets up Ock-As-Spider-Man for his first legitimately funny line in the last eight months. And Wells gives us, head-on, a kid-in-the-big-city-getting-a-movie-break scene, and in showing Sam freaking out, it simultaneously gives a laugh, shows Sam’s not in it for the fame, and makes Joss Whedon look like a trolling pederast… so I hope Wells likes working in comics and cartoons, because that faint sound you hear is every door in Hollywood slamming shut on him.

However, the one humor moment that falls flat is right at the beginning, where Sam informs the reader that he has no idea that the Statue of Liberty is a woman. It was a joke that requires the protagonist to be so naive or dumb as to beggar belief, and that’s a hell of a way to start out an issue. It’s a small moment, but as the opening of the issue, it struck a note that was false, and betrayed the character in favor of a cheap laugh that wasn’t even particularly good. And it’s a shame, because there is so much solid natural humor in this issue (that line about $20 an hour toward the end was a killer). It’s not a fatal moment – obviously, I really dug the issue – but it was one hell of a rough moment for me.

Medina’s art is a really good match for a story about a teenaged superhero. His work is fine lined and detailed, with a lot of solid backgrounds to ground everything and give it a sense of realism. But his style is a little bit cartoony – not to the level of manga or anything, but just a bit on the cartoon side of realism. The look gives the story a sense of high adventure over dark realism, which is a good visual style for a story about a kid who is off to the big city to have an adventure. The one issue I have isn’t Medina’s fault: that giant raised Nova crest on his helmet looks fine directly from the front, but from the side? It looks like Starro is trying to eat Sam’s brain. It’s a design issue rather than an execution problem, but it still looks kinda silly. Let’s hope that, in the aftermath of the Infinity event (which the final page of this issue teases), Sam gets a promotion and a big boy’s Nova helmet.

This is a fun issue, in that it gives a view of being a superhero that you don’t see a hell of a lot: that it isn’t as easy as you might think. Seeing Sam flail around and fail over and over again before finally taking a breath and doing something that he really knows how to do so he can actually help someone felt real and organic, and gave a lot of opportunities for some good humor… granted, with one real stinker of a joke up front. But on the whole, it was a hell of an issue.

Up until now, I’ve been reading Nova mostly for nostalgia for those books I loved when I was a kid, watching chimney fires that I never thought would become big enough to burn the whole house… but maybe I’ve said too much. Anyway, Nova #7 has been the first issue of this book where I really liked Sam and wanted to see what happens to him next. Under Wells and Medina, Nova has finally become really compelling. Give this one a shot.