Broken Frontier

Why another New Warriors? Volume 4 sets out to fill a necessary slot within the Initiative Marvel U, but it’s a long road to travel before it proves itself.

Now that super-heroes are structured into two specific categories – the illicit vigilante and the registered, federally recognized agent – the Marvel Universe is in awful need of an underground youth revolution, wouldn’t you say? Well, maybe it could have waited a bit, like say more than a few weeks into the new regime, but far be it for comics to go the subtle route, and so this fourth iteration of the New Warriors is all about the dissent. Unfortunately, all the passion of the punks and the righteous indignation of the civil rights movement or any other key element to any extant, recognizable revolution is suspiciously absent, leaving behind a book chock full of rebellion sans spirit, ideology, or weight of any kind.

Sophia Barret (better known as Wind Dancer from her New X-Men days, pre-M-Day), is now a de-powered waitress working in a greasy dive, barely earning a living, and tormented by dreams of her lost mutant abilities. Enter: a mysterious, handsome stranger named Barry and a disembodied voice that patches into her mp3 player. Both lead her to an underground hideaway where they offer an intriguing, (and for her) inviting proposal. Meanwhile, someone is out on the streets wearing an unidentifiable costume and illegally bagging up super-villains for the cops.

How’s that for a beginning? It’s not much, admittedly, though it does get the ball rolling nicely and the theme and purpose of the book is surprisingly clear: the New Warriors are meant to be the underground opposition of the Initiative post-Civil War world, and thus far, believe it or not (and keeping with the tradition of the very first New Warriors) every hero introduced happens to be (or looks to soon be revealed to be) a recognizable face from the near-enough Marvel past. I found the choice of familiar faces both thrilling and also off-putting as the characters weren’t terribly in-character with what we’ve seen before. Sophia especially is practically unrecognizable in attitude and behavior. Gone is the self-doubting loner with the decisive edge, and apparently here we’re introduced to a forward, desperate, depressed and wandering, no-longer-mutant girl of the big city who befriends and takes care of homeless men and every overweight big-mouth-with-a-heart-of-gold city man besides (because all overweight city men with big mouths have hearts of gold and a young girl interacting with them with in an unabashedly flirtatious manner would never lead to terrible things).

Writer Kevin Grevioux (co-writer of Underworld and full-writer the thus-far annually published Valkyries from Alias), has as much success in handling the political and social qualities of the book’s concept as Millar had with Civil War. Largely the story is concerned with only establishing surface-level symptoms of youth culture, such as having the new leader of the New Warriors contact Sophia via e-jargon and ridiculously melodramatic rhetoric: "You moved on. Bravo. But you lack direction. A ship without a rudder. But, not anymore. We are that rudder. The world is blind. It’s an ugly place but doesn’t know it. We’ll open its eyes." And on, and on; and I’m not making this up, that was the dialogue without pause pulled direct from the actual book. Worse, the characters – while already established names – behave only as they need in order to take their new places as organized, rebellious members of a new youth super-team, thereby the writer utilizes their brand names without having to work a whit towards conforming their characters to somehow fit within the book’s conceit.

I’m a huge fan of Paco Medina and Juan Vlasco (their Suicide Squad was bloody brilliant) though even here, they don’t seem to heighten the final effect of the issue. Their art is expressive and busy and definitely worthwhile, but the script offers them little in the way of showing off, either in the action or the interaction department, and ultimately I’m not certain I can enjoy their take on a supposedly gritty book about urban rebel heroes. The overall appearance is simply too bright, too easy-going, too Saturday morning cartoon, the complacency of suburbia being passed off as just urbia, and it struck me as unsuitable to the concept as the script.

So overall a very weak opening effort on the creative team’s part. Though the art is quite good indeed, it isn’t fitting and doesn’t bolster the supposed mood of the story. The story, while plot-wise offering up some hope for healthy intrigue in future issues, has an actual execution that’s pretty piss-poor, unconsidered, and hackneyed to the extreme. Much like the Teen Titans, the New Warriors are a team necessary to the life’s blood of their comic book universe, and so thank God, I say, that they keep coming back. Now if only they could come back and with more than just a cool-sounding concept and fan-favorite characters, maybe they’d actually stick around. The future, though, frankly, after the initial buzz of the Initiative fuzz is over with, isn’t looking good for this go-round.