Awesome New Female Characters: Arana + Nomad

[goggle_kid]

So it's Awesome New Female Character Week. What better time to check in with the hot new non-cannon romance find of 2010 ! I'm talking about the "Girl Without a World"... Bucky NOMAD: Rikki Barnes!* and" the Heart of the Spider" Araña ALL NEW SPIDER-GIRL: Anya Corazon.

So here's a nice moment from issue #4 of the supremely entertaining (though recently canceled) Young Allies.





Minor Spoiler: After-Shock isn't Electro's daughter. In fact non of the Bastards of Evil are villain's children except: [SPOILER!]









*Ok Rikki technically isn't that new a character, but I tend to ignore the whole Heroes Reborn thing and pretend she's an awesome character created in the last two years.

Comments

[goggle_kid]

They're also going to be meeting the kids from Avengers Academy in a couple of the upcoming annuals.

[long_silence]

Is that still happening?

The book is being canceled with issue 6 (which is coming out tomorrow coincidentally) even though issue 7 was solicited.

I haven't really heard either way if that crossover was still going to happen.

[goggle_kid]

You know... I honestly don't know if it's still on or not. Maybe the Avengers Academy annual will contain the whole thing.

[jlbarnett]

Young Allies must have had truly horrible sales to be cancelled despite planned crossovers and solicited books. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the name and I wonder if they should have solicited it as a new New Warriors book or something.

[goggle_kid]

Which is a real pity as it's a good book. Though a title with a C-list cast is a hard sell in today's market.

I'm guessing they might have used the name to hold onto it for copyright purposes as Young Allies was a Golden Age book.

[long_silence]

Honestly I'm not surprised. New Marvel books just do not last very long these days if they aren't X-Related (and even that doesn't help much anymore) or don't have Avengers or Deadpool somewhere in the title.

[goggle_kid]

The depressing thing is that I'm not sure who to blame. It's like the entire fandom has this mindset that any character created after 1987 is inferior.

It's a small wonder Deadpool succeeded.

[kingrockwell]

They have a lot more connections to the Young Allies than the New Warriors.

[long_silence]

Well they have Rikki as a connection to the Young Allies.

But Firestar was a founding New Warrior.

Toro is based on his Counter-Earth counterpart and was only created because they decided to use the Young Allies title.

So they could have used the New Warriors title and still had Nomad, Arana, Firestar and Gravity as the cast. But the name does need a rest after volume 4.

[kingrockwell]

Well, it also spun out of McKeever's Nomad stories, so while I could be wrong, I kinds get the impression that the decision to call it "Young Allies", the inclusion of Toro, and even the idea of making the team are all a little too tied together to put any kind of progression to their separate causes.

What I'm saying is I'm pretty sure they didn't just make Toro because they chose to make them the Young Allies, but that they even made the book because they wanted to make a new Young Allies.

As for it needing a rest, this was, uh, only the third volume published with that name, there hasn't been a volume four. It's also been out of use for over ten years, I don't see why it really needed a rest.

[jlbarnett]

maybe they should have called themselves the Young Defenders or New Defenders or something, I think the New Defenders book with Iceman, Beast and Angel were just called that because it was an almost all new cast, and in uni they were just the Defenders.

[kingrockwell]

But there's no connection to the Defenders when there is a connection to the Young Allies. How would it help the book to name them after the Defenders, who were a relatively little-known team with a completely different mood to them?

[jlbarnett]

does anyone really know the Young Allies? And are you at all familiar with the reboot of Thunderbolts after issue 75 of the first series?

[kingrockwell]

What I'm saying is that people are about as likely to know Young Allies as the Defenders, and maybe a little more so now that the leader of the last Young Allies is gaining some small form of prominence again (not to mention was included in this lineup). I'm saying there were reasons to name it Young Allies, but there weren't any to name it Defenders.
I'm not really sure what point your trying to make about Thunderbolts, they don't seem to be at all related to this discussion.

[jlbarnett]

that other people can claim the name.

Honestly the best name for this book is Young Avengers. I know the Young Avengers are popular with fans, but I wonder if Marvel is regretting giving the name to a book that gets published so rarely.

[kingrockwell]

Oh, I misread your last line there. Didn't realize you were saying "New Warriors" needs the rest.
Sorry about that.

[lieut_kettch]

Hmm... how many youth teams does Marvel have now? It's getting hard to keep track of them. Maybe we should consolidate them into a single team: The New Young Runaway X-Avengers Allies Academy.