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.

Sticky Fingers: Avenging Spider-Man #15.1 Review

Editor’s Note: With great spoilers must come great responsibility. More or less.

Okay, so Peter Parker is “dead,” and Otto Octavius is Spider-Man now. Whether you agree with how Dan Slott did it or not, it’s the way things are for the time being. And given that Spider-Man appears regularly in four different comic books that I can think of off the top of my head, if you have any intention of following Marvel Comics – particularly the Avengers books – for the next year or so, you’re going to need to come to terms with this new Spider-Man, and get to know what Otto’s like now that he’s Spider-Man, and what makes him tick. You know, besides being suddenly able to walk, see his own junk without a mirror, and leer at Mary Jane (and make no mistake, it will just be leering; if you follow Dan Slott’s Twitter feed, you know that he’s bought himself enough trouble without setting himself up to be confronted by women in red wigs at every comic convention, asking him why he supports date rape via deception in his comics).

Marvel Editorial, possibly realizing that killing Peter on December 26th and leaving readers to wait two weeks for the debut of The Superior Spider-Man on January 9th would only give the most rankled ones more opportunity to figure out how to plant hooker toes on Slott and then dime the police, made the decision to give us the first real taste of the new Spider-Man in Avenging Spider-Man #15.1, released this week in parallel with The Amazing Spider-Man #700.

So: what do we get in our first full issue of Doc Ock as Spider-Man? Scenes of a former villain embracing the responsibility that comes with his newfound power? Or does he frantically masturbate to Pete’s iPhone gallery of Mary Jane pictures before going to the barber, handing over his favorite bowl and saying, “Just follow this”?