The New Warriors: My Thoughts

So not too long ago Marvel made an annoucement about a new comic line for The New Warriors, which is an actual team from the Marvel Universe. My only knowledge of the New Warriors comes from the event comic Civil War, where the team was a reality show and their careless actions basically kickstarted the Superhuman Registration Act, thus resulted in a civil war betweeen our favorite Marvel heroes with Iron Man leading the Pro-Registration movement and Captain America leading the Anti-Registration movement. And yes, a similar concept was adapted (and presented much better) in the film Captain America: Civil War.

Well according to Marvel, it’s time for a new generation of heroes, written by Emmy-nominated writer Daniel Kibblesmith (The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) and and the art is done by Luciano Vecchio (the artist behind Marvel’s Ironheart aka Riri Williams). In their new comic book line the original team members (consisting of Firestar, Speedball, Night Thrasher, Rage, and Namorita) are going to train five young new heroes. Alright let’s break down each of these five new heroes:

-Screentime: a meme-obsessed teenager whose brain is connected to the internet

after being exposed to “experimental internet gas”.

-B-Negative: a goth teen with the powers of a vampire due to a blood transfusion

from Morbius, the Living Vampire.

-Trailblazer: an obese teen with a magical backpag that has its own pocket dimension

for infinite space.

-And finally Snowflake and Safespace: a pair of non-binary twins with Snowflake

having the ability to make snowflake shaped shurikens and Safespace having the

ability to create force fields around others but not himself.

And of course, there’s some big controversy behind these characters. Much of the media seems to highlight Snowflake and Safespace as a major source of controversy (which is partially true but we’ll get to that in a bit). In a surprising turn, it seems that factions of the Right and Left both heavily dislike Marvel’s new team. Who would have thought that a comic could unite everyone?

Okay, bad jokes aside, how do I personally feel about these new characters. Honestly this all reminds me of DC’s short lived comic series the New Guardians. Who were the New Guardians, you ask. Well they were originally a superhero team that first appeared in 1988. It consisted of a diverse cast of characters, ranging from a Japanese cyborg named RAM, a chinese woman with the power of the elements, an openly gay magician, and a walking & talking plant man who was initially a villain. But the big catch behind these characters were that the Guardians of the Universe, the beings that created the Green Lantern Corp, chose these individuals because they “believed” that they were the ones that were going to breed the next generation of humanity.

Yes you read that correctly and no I’m not kidding.

But the big idea was that this series of comics was meant to tackle a lot of social issues that most comics at the time wouldn’t dare cover, such as racism, drugs, and AIDS. The problem was for a comic book series that was trying to sound serious they’ve done a ridiculous job of portraying it like having a literal vampire infect people with AIDS and a comical supervillain named Snowflame who gets his powers from snorting cocaine.

Again, yes, I dead serious. This happened.

The series ran for twelve issues before getting cancelled in 1989. I feel that the New Warriors will share a similar fate. The biggest reason isn’t just Snowflake and Safespace, it’s the whole team. I feel like these characters are going to be isolating their audiences rather than investing them. You can tell there are problems established with their names alone. They don’t sound heroic or inspiring, or at the very least interesting. Their names sound a bit too on the nose on what groups they’re meant to represent in American society. And in doing so they’re doing more harm than good by, what I feel, enforcing labels on individuals. Sure Tyrion Lannister had once stated my favorite quote from Game of Thrones, “Wear it like armor. Then no one can hurt you.” But I feel like this may hurt individuals by having the audience see what each of these characters are rather than who they are as a person.

I get the idea behind the characters of Snowflake and Safespace. They’re meant to represent an orientation/gender identity that majority of people don’t quite understand, myself included. I’m all for LGBT+ representation in media. The Loud House and Craig of the Creek are prime examples of having positive LGBT+ representation on children networks, and they’re among my favorite shows. Even I have representation in my Sins of the Father stories with having different angel and demon characters be part of different sexual orientations. However, I don’t feel that these two are positive representation. They feel like parodies. Their names alone sound like parodies since the terms “snowflake” and “safespace” have been used to describe social justice warriors and other leftist extremists that have been highlighted by media.

If there’s anything I can say in their defense it’s this: it’s just too early to tell. The comics haven’t hit comic book shops yet. Honestly, who knows what they’ll be like. Maybe they’ll be good. Maybe they’ll suck. But for now we don’t know. I just hope Kibblesmith and Vecchio have an idea of what they want to portray in their comics. But all I see is history repeating the same mistake.

#Marvel #superheroes #team #LGBT #news #controversy #thoughts