BHOC: NOVA #24

I wasn’t yet sophisticated enough in my knowledge of and contact with the comic book industry to be able to tell when a title that I was following was in trouble. While there were places even in those pre-internet days where more plugged-in fans could learn such information, I had no awareness of them. So every once in a while, a series that I’d been following simply stopped showing up at my local 7-11, and it would be months before I realized that the book had been discontinued. That wouldn’t be the fate of NOVA for another issue yet, but the writing is very clearly on the wall here, if you knew where to look for it. I didn’t, and so i was oblivious to the coming end.

NOVA had started out as attempt to do a modern Spider-Man-style super hero for the 1970s. Rich Rider was a high school student who gained super-powers by a fluke, and who used them to battle crazy costumed super-villains while dealing with the difficulties of his personal life. It was the first regular super hero series that creator Marv Wolfman had ever written, though. And, accordingly, it’s a bit safe, a bit derivative. It wasn’t a beloved series overall when it was coming out in the 1970s, for all that I loved it unreservedly once I found it. 24 issues in, in an attempt to keep the series going, Marv was about to shift it heavily towards a science fiction team concept, one with an ongoing crossover component to it as well.

The other big shift in NOVA that had already taken place was the replacement of artist Sal Buscema–a reliable craftsman and workhorse within the Marvel line–with Carmine Infantino, who had formerly head up rival DC. Carmine’s work was a lot more stylized and abstract than Sal’s had been, and many of his inkers of this time (such as this month’s Mike Esposito) did his work no favors. His figures tended towards the stiff, his compositions, which were once expansive, open vistas, now seemed crowded and cramped. Carmine’s work was an acquired taste for the readership of the era. Marv loved it, having grown up reading Infantino’s Flash and Adam Strange stories from the early 1960s. But modern readers were more often put off by Carmine’s current work. It didn’t really fit with the established house style of what a “proper” Marvel Comic was supposed to look like.

So as this issue opens, Nova has already been felled by brain-in-a-robot-body Doctor Sun, a character that Marv had introduced first in TOMB OF DRACULA for what may be the wildest segue of features for any character of this period. Doctor Sun is after the enormously powerful computers that are a part of Nova Prime’s spaceship, but having gained entry through Nova, he finds himself confronted by another of the Human Rocket’s foes, the Sphinx. The Sphinx had been set up all along as Nova’s big baddie, an immortal and incredibly powerful entity who was seeking an end to his eternal existence. He too believes that the answers he seeks can be found within Nova’s prized ship’s computers, and so the two bad guys have a conflict of interests between them.

Nova wakes up at this point and attempts to fight the Sphinx, but he’s unable to even slow the villain down. But Nova is inconsequential to the Sphinx as is Doctor Sun–he intends to take the ship back to its home planet, and to do that, he’ll need an appropriate crew. He dispatches Nova to retrieve one of the beings that he wants, and for some unclear reason Nova goes along with this. Meanwhile, elsewhere, two of the book’s supporting players come into contact with one another. Crime-Buster was a Punisher-style vigilante who used high-tech weapons to wage war on the underworld, whereas the Comet was a cosmic-powered super hero from the 1950s who had gone missing for several decades. The two spar a bit before discovering that Crime-Buster is actually the Comet’s son, and that it was the disappearance of his father that drove him to start his war on crime. So that’s all sorted out then. While the pair talk, another figure observes them from the shadows.

The person Nova has been dispatched to seek out turns out to be another old foe of his, Powerhouse. Of late, he’d been amnesiac, but seeing Nova up close reactivates his ability to absorb the energies from those around him, and Nova winds up having to fight him–of course, so this comic book has the requisite amount of action in it. After a brief tussle, Nova is able to subdue his foe so that he can be transported back to the Nova Prime ship–and just as that’s happening, the Comet and Crime-Buster happen along, having sought out Nova to tell him the news about their discovery. So everybody winds up back on the ship, which the Sphinx then starts up, heading for its home port, the planet Xandar.

But the Comet and Crime-Buster aren’t the only semi-unintentional unexpected crewmen on this voyage. It turns out that the shadowy figure spying on the Comet and Crime-Buster was Diamondhead, yet another Nova enemy, and he stowed away on Crime-Buster’s flying craft so as to maybe find some score for himself. And that completes our cast, and the ranks of what Marv tells us on the letters page (and in the title of this story) is going to be the New Champions. The Champions team that had carried their own series had been disbanded, and Marv liked the sound of the name, so he intended to appropriate it for this new home-grown group.

In fact, let’s reproduce the letters page to this issue so that you can read it for yourself. If you’re paying attention, you can tell by reading between the lines that sales on NOVA haven’t been stellar of later, and that Wolfman is hoping that by shifting it more towards a team situation and typing it directly into the space epic that he was planning to play out in FANTASTIC FOUR, the numbers would go up and the series would continue. That isn’t the way events would play out, sadly, and this meant that FANTASTIC FOUR wound up saddled with having to clean up aspects of this storyline that had been intended for the NOVA series. But we’ll get to all of that in good time.