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Marvel’s ‘New Warriors’ Is Going to be the Dumbest Thing Ever

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DC Comics has The Teen Titans and The Legion of Super-Heroes, two very popular comics featuring teams of teenaged super-heroes. Marvel has never really been able to nail that genre down despite having created Spider-Man and The X-Men, both of which started portraying their characters as young adults in the late 70s and early 80s.

Marvel’s attempts at teen super-heroes have mainly focused on X-Men spinoffs like The New Mutants, with mixed success. They struck gold with the critically-acclaimed Runaways and Young Avengers, but were completely unable to capitalize on those successes and turn them into popular ongoing series.

One of Marvel’s teen books, however, has a long history of being absolutely terrible and filled with the kind of incompetent pandering you’d expect from out-of-touch white men trying solve racism: New Warriors.

Just how bad was New Warriors? So bad that even the characters in it didn’t want to be in it. Firestar, the only character in it anyone actually cared about, spent most of time with her boyfriend whining about how the two of them deserved to be Avengers.

Marvel also tried to cram the title full of characters they believed were serving underrepresented demographics like paraplegic hero Silhouette who fought villains with her high-tech crutches and Rage, a black man who was previously invited to join the Avengers because he called Captain America racist.

I wish I was making this up. Hell, I wish I was capable of making this up, but even though I’m Irish-Italian, I’m nowhere near white enough to come up with a black teenager named Rage whose superpower is calling Captain America a cracker.

Following in that tradition, Marvel has announced a new version of the New Warriors that is every bit as pandering and stupid as the original. But before we get into that, let me give some background you’re unfortunately going to need to understand what’s going on.

Marvel’s writers and editors are entirely too online. And they’re constantly getting into fights with fans. The worst part is that they’re usually right. Like when a bunch of people for some reason got angry that some junior editors at Marvel got milkshakes. But they become insufferable even when they’re right by taking their online feuds into the books they’re writing.

“But Eric, comics have always been political!” Yeah, and I’m not saying don’t be political, I’m saying don’t be terrible.

They are really not taking my “don’t be terrible” advice to heart at all. So are you ready to see the new New Warriors?

Yeah, Snowflake and Safespace. Snowflake is nonbinary. Look, I don’t like the people who are online calling people snowflakes and going on about safe spaces either. That whole “lol, did I trigger you by saying the n-word, libtard?” schtick isn’t funny or clever. But this is absolutely terrible.

Here’s how writer Daniel Kibblesmith describes those two characters.

“Snowflake and Safespace are the twins,” the writer says, “and their names are very similar to Screentime; it’s this idea that these are terms that get thrown around on the internet that they don’t see as derogatory. [They] take those words and kind of wear them as badges of honor.

No one is reclaiming “snowflake” dude. No one cares. No one is insulted when @MAGA1488 calls them a snowflake but you. We just think they’re dipshits for a second and move on.

Remember earlier when I talked about Rage, the angry black teen created to teach us a valuable lesson about not being racist? Rage is actually in this book as a “mentor” to the new New Warriors. And there are more than just Snowflake and Safespace. It’s so lucky that I’m a writer and not a YouTuber I wouldn’t be able to say any of this out loud with a straight face.

The team also features someone named Screentime who is described as “A Meme-Obsessed super teen whose brain became connected to the internet after becoming exposed to his grandfather’s ‘experimental internet gas.’” I hate this so much because this concept was already done and done way better.

There’s also an emo vampire character because I guess Kibblesmith thinks Twilight and being emo are still hip things the kids do today do. Seriously, he actually said that he “wanted to have teen characters who felt as ‘now’ as the New Warriors did in 1990. The New Warriors have been zeitgeist characters from the beginning, you get edgy skateboarding Night Thrasher in the ’90s and the Reality TV team in the 2000s.” The New Warriors was terrible and lame in the 90s, so I guess he nailed it with his topical references like having an Edward Cullen character called B-Negative.

And then there’s fat Dora the Explorer.

Her power is literally having a magic backpack that she can pull things out of. I’m done. You know those rumors that Warner is on the verge of shutting DC down and exploding the entire comic book industry? I will take one of those now, please.

Now, there is some hope here. We could all die from Coronavirus before this ships. But there’s also a chance, a small, outside chance that this is an elaborate troll Daniel Kibblesmith is perpetrating on Marvel’s editorial staff. When he talks about the “edgy, skateboarding Night Thrasher in the 90s,” he could be as aware as we all are that New Warriors was some of the worst garbage Marvel pumped out in one of the worst eras in comic book history. Maybe he’s taking the piss here. Maybe they go the route of the original Exiles book and kill the entire team off after a few issues.

Marvel has put out a lot of unironically cringey books, so I’m not in the mood to give them the benefit of the doubt. But we’ll find out next month when the book hit stands. Unless we get lucky and a comet hits the Earth before then.

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Mike
Mike
4 years ago

Spiderman had his origin in the mid sixties not the seventies. The rest of the article is about as accurate, a lot of opinion and angst.

Erica Smith
Erica Smith
4 years ago

The 90’s was all about edgy people. Who needs this NOW? Just but Michael Morbius ion the team (he’s not an American citzen, so now you can have ana illegal alien with a criminal record on your team) and have him point out he’s been through real oppression and problems (rape, assault, harassment at work over medical conditions, medicare crisis, you name it) and they can all piss off.

Darren
Darren
3 years ago

People are after getting so soft. I really hope this is a piss take. I get that they need to be socially inclusive and more modern about their approach, make characters that kids nowadays can relate to, but come on… like my superheroes to actually be cool.

rudy
rudy
3 years ago

‘Trailblazer’ – a fat latina/native american/non-white character that has a ‘magic backpack’ that she can pull thinks out of?!
This is supposed to be a ‘Superhero’?!!
In real life, she’d get tired just walking to the refrigerator and would mostly pull junk food out of her ‘magic backpack’!