Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning are the writing team behind the new Nova ongoing series. Nova is the last survivor on an intergalactic police force, The Nova Corps. He is now empowered with all the power of the Nova Force from those destroyed during the Annihilation War. As Nova Prime, he is the last chance the galaxy has to protecting that power and the knowledge contained in the Worldmind which exists in his consciousness.

The main theme presented right at the start is that of a young galactic superhero with the pressure of countless deaths on his shoulders. Nova wants to race off to help planets in need, but being the only surviving Nova Corps member makes it impossible to save everyone—he just can’t be everywhere fast enough—and he HATES that. This constant struggle to push himself further and further nearly sets him off on a self-destructive path that puts himself and the Worldmind in life-threatening danger.

The journey that Nova goes through to compose himself and accept the reality of his past is what the readers get to experience with this series. He comes back to Earth after the Civil War story arc has taken place; the Initiative is in full effect, the fact that the New Warriors were the ones connected with the disaster that sparked the Civil War, and a reality where all heroes must be registered with S.H.E.I.L.D. make it all the more difficult to swallow. The world he knew as home, and even the home of his parents, no longer feel like home to him. He feels more alone on Earth than he feels out in space.

After spending a day on Earth he’s realized that the galaxy is a much simpler reality to exist in. He feels more alone on Earth than he feels out in space. That sets up an amazing juxtaposition. Earth’s problems are too small to consider important compared to the tens-of-thousands emergency calls logged in the Worldmind’s queue—issues of planetary and galactic levels and threats.

Something about Abnett and Lanning’s creativity exhilarates me. It’s not just the sci-fi stuff; that genre has never really done anything for me… until I came across Farscape, then Firefly… Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica and Stargate can even be added to the mix (watched in the last 5 years). Mostly, for me, it’s a bit of that Farscape feeling. A person, alone in a space he’s unfamiliar with (literally, get to the end of the first trade to know what I mean), who struggles to survive and find meaning and purpose. That may be a bit over-encompassing, but the essence of what I mean is in there somewhere…

It’s also a bit of that early-90s comic adventure rompy-ness. The first trade spends two issues on Earth and then hits space again. This thankfully grounds the collection with the values I think create the foundations of what makes this creative team amazing! Keep the stories simple, keep them energetic, keep them removed from the gritty “reality strong” directions of the current Marvel Universe, and tell a good story!

I’m in no way saying I think the ongoing series needs to be a closed universe—not at all—only that the core purpose of the Nova title gets to play in a vast arena that hasn’t been explored thoroughly in over a decade (Infinity Crusade I guess was the last one?). DC Comics has their Green Lantern Corps stories that fill this kind of niche (even more so now with the current Geoff Johns stuff Red Lantern stuff… damnit, another trade I’ll be buying at some point…) it’s good to see Marvel finding a way to do the same with a property they already had in place but shelved for very very long. Nova has a couple attempts at an ongoing—I believe this one has found some good foundations and hopefully it can build something great (with Darkhawk preferably of course).

I’m glad Abnett and Lanning have proven that there are shelved properties that can venture into new frontiers of the Marvel UNIVERSE… not Marvel Earth (616 for the geeks out there)! Next month we see an old Nova ally, and “sometimes” member of the old school New Warriors of the early 90s get a 2-part series to start off Marvel’s new event series: “War of Kings”.

Darkhawk flies again as a component of the story arc, and I for one am excited about learning all about his alien origins. Thanks to the Nova ongoing, he’s not only back, he’s handed a bit more of the diversity he had in the old days. I still respect Runaways and Loners giving him some face time, and I love him at the street level, but he can be a lot more than that. He can be COSMIC damnit… make a superfan proud! Hopefully he’ll get his own story in the future too, and a renaissance of super-heroic tales with that early 90s flare will get the rightly deserved attention it needs!