I’ll be honest — for a long time I couldn’t figure out why everybody loved Nova so much.
They didn’t love him like Wolverine or Spider-Man. Those were easy characters to love, mostly because everybody else already like them and they were (and still are) EVERYWHERE.
But in the comic shop, it never took too long to hear somebody pipe up about their favorite character, the human rocket, Nova. And I thought they were morons.
“Oh, he can fly and he’s strong and there’s a Nova Corps? Kind of sounds like a rip-off of Green Lantern,” I’d say, watching their eyes bug out and beads of sweat form over their ever-reddening skin. “Besides, any member of the New Warriors is lame.”
Nobody ever took a swing at me because of my opinions, but I know a few people who considered bludgeoning me with a plus-2 mace. The truth was, they pitied me, and rightfully so. I just didn’t know the real Nova.
And I wouldn’t until Marvel came up with a smart way to use all those outer-space characters that were just floating in the cosmic void — “Annihilation.”
If you’re not a Nova fan, and God help you sir if that is true, then the best place to start isn’t “The Essential Nova, Vol. 1″ — it’s the very recent “Annihilation: Book 1″ trade.
There is more to that book, of course. You get the Drax miniseries (which is pretty good in its own right) and the prologue book, which sets Nova on his course, but what won me over was the included “Annihilation: Nova” mini.
Forget the indecisive Nova of the New Warriors. Forget the Spider-Man-style angst of his late ’70s debut. My Nova is the battle-hardened space general who, with the Xandarian WorldMind in his head and the full Nova Force at his disposal, led a rag-tag group against Annihilus.
The entire “Annihilation” series is a great read, as are the newly collected “Nova” trades. The superb storytelling of Abnett and Lanning have sent Nova — once scorned and rebuked — to the top of my pile on comic book day.
– Greg Elwell