Continuing through Sal Buscema books I haven't covered on the blog before we come to the ultimate hero, the human rocket called Nova which is about time since the last time I mentioned Nova was way back in 2009 where I did a year wrap up and NOVA was one of the consistent good tie - in books through ANNIHILATION and ANNIHILATION : CONQUEST.
Which is from where Today's readers probably know Nova from ( I just ignore the series with art by Ed McGuinness where they de - aged him into a Kindergarten toddler ) and the older ones may remember him from one of the many NEW WARRIORS titles. He was one of the founding members of the team that made their first appearance in issues 411 and 412 of THE MIGHTY THOR written by Tom DeFalco and art by Ron Frenz .
The team of juvenile vigilantes was so successful that they got their own book written by Fabian Nicieza with art by Mark Bagley and it was on this book that Mark Bagley made his mark. My brother had NEW WARRIORS on his pull list so I read his issues but with the Forever Yesterday story in which the team ended up in an alternate reality where they confronted a female version of the Marvel Comics villain The Sphinx I started buying issues for myself. Longtime followers of the blog already know what a big sucker I am for alternate realities where everybody dies and Mark Bagley's redesigns of classic Marvel costumes was just the cherry on top.
Mark Bagley stayed on the book until issue 25 because back in the day artists usually changed books after the first or second year. Nowadays they bail after having done enough issues to be collected into a trade - or sometimes not even that - but back then you stayed at least one year.
For me those first two years are the gold standard for the title even if Fabian Nicieza stayed until issue 53 and Mark Bagley's replacement was Darick Robertson an artist I like ( and even wrote some posts about ).
Which is why I only stayed on the title until issue 50 which was Darick Robertson's final issue. There were other iterations of NEW WARRIORS but like GEN 13 every subsequent version was worse than the previous one. Anyway, coming back to Nova he was a character that I was always interested in but not someone I would always read about since back when his first series came out I hadn't gotten into american comics yet.
And so had to rely on the german translations or some spanish issues I got during the summer vacations. With the german translations I had to wait until the guys from Condor came ontu the german comicbook scene with their dreaded pocket books as I think they published NOVA issue 12 somewhere because it was a crossover with AMAZING SPIDER - MAN 171.
I'm a rocket man
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