The Spinner Rack: 90s Comics Weren’t All Bad — Fabian Nicieza & New Warriors #7 (1990)

Ladies and germs, comics come out one day late this week (darn holiday) but the Spinner Rack is back now. Let’s all give a warm Miltonian welcome to our Resident Comics Writer At Large, Mister Brady Dale Russell.!

It’s December, 1990. I’m 13 years old. I’m one of like 8 people who bought every single issue of Steve Ditko’s Speedball Mini-series the year before and so I was totally pumped, in a way that only a 13 year old can be pumped, to buy New Warriors #1 when it came out earlier that year. Comics had always been an escape for me, but, until I got to my teens, the question was… an escape from what?

By then, though, I’ve gone from living with a single mother to joining a stepfamily. Moving from the house I grew up in to a backwater called Cherokee, Kansas and then back to my hometown of Pittsburg, but a different house, different neighborhood. Most importantly, though, I’m confronting the fact that I don’t really belong in the place I grew up in and I don’t have any idea how to figure out where I do belong.

But I did have comics. At least I had comics.

For this edition of the Spinner Rack, I decided to plunge into the Russellian Incorporated Innovations Corporation’s warehouse o’ comics and find one at random that might be worth a few minutes consideration here on The Daily Miltonian. When I looked at the cover of New Warriors #7, I just saw Night Thrasher fighting a b-list villain named The Bengal with the Punisher’s emblem in the background.

I thought, well, I can write about the way comic books like to run a guest appearance by a popular character in the early issues to boost sales on a new book, and boy was the Punisher hot stuff in the 90s. And, I thought, the New Warriors are coming back right now. They’d slunk off in popularity as a B-list team that Marvel wrecked to kick off Civil War. Now that Civil War is over, The New Warriors have come back as a new team book, the face of the resistance to Tony Stark’s mad new world order and featuring the return of the intense, focused, almost Batman-like Night Thrasher.

Then I opened the book up and read it and remembered: “Oh, yeah, Fabian Nicieza was flippin’ amazing in the 90s.” Wow.

In fact, the only thing I don’t like about Nicieza is his name. I have no clue how to pronounce it and it always throws off my rhythm to read it. Okay, so for the purpose of this little essay, we’re going to call the guy “Nicky.” (Sorry, man, but “Fabian” doesn’t roll off my brain-tongue any easier)

New Warriors #7 turns out to be the narrative bridge between the book’s opening story arc, one which establishes Night Thrasher’s team as a unit and as friends, a sort of intensified version of D.C.’s Teen Titans. Up to this issue, Fabian’s basically establishing the fact that you can believe that this group of amazing individuals has decided to hang together and fight some good ole crime.

With this issue, though, he’s promising that The New Warriors are going to get into all kinds of shizzle and it’s going to be awesome! Check this out — Nicky sets up up, by my count, five different plot lines, one sub-plot and three or four of the most memorable, character-revealing moments of my teen years (including, what I’d call, the most important one).

Here are the plot lines. Get set for awesomeness:

1) Father Janes and the Bengal, who kicks off the book fighting Silhouette and asking the same question over and over again, “Did de jungle breat?” I mean, what the hell is that? Which is, of course, exactly what Nicky wanted you to think.

2) Where’s Robbie Baldwin (aka, Speedball)’s mom? (get set for hints of late-70s B-list villains re-imagined as eco-terrorists … no, no! I’m serious! Eco-freaking-terrorists!)

3) The ladies of the New Warriors take a break from boutique pounding to stop a guy from shooting up a Mid-Manhattan sweatshop, only to let both the illegal immigrant with the gun full of blanks and the owner of the sweatshop off, basically because they realize everyone’s at fault. Either this vignette is establishing something about the comic itself or they are going to get back to it, right? But the illegal immigrant says something about hunting for his sister, so… where you gonna place your bet?

4) Some evil chick in Egypt exhuming her own grave so she can snatch The Scepter of Ka! Comics, man, mother-effing comics!

5) The mystery of Silhouette and the Punisher. Yeah, THAT Punisher. Frank Castle. The one that kills your ass.

Holy how-now brown-cow!

I only have two criticisms of the book at this stage. One is serious and one can’t be helped. The one that can’t be helped is this: some of the exposition is a little ham-fisted. But whattayagonnado? It’s a comic book, and you got 22 pages to pull off an issue and Nicky wants to get to a lot of stuff in this one so that he can leave you hanging through several issues worth of craziness to come and so hopefully he can hook you into a sweet new series with bold new ideas and keep you rolling for years to come.

Nicky is facing an uphill battle, here. He’s trying to pull off a team-book in the Marvel Universe. Marvel is and always has been the deeper of the two big companies, but in a lot of ways they are more known for great characters as opposed to great teams. Marvel characters are deep and complicated whereas D.C. characters are pure and bold; iconic. This makes for much more interesting team books, where a series of more simple characters, together, become one big character unto the team’s self.

With Marvel, though, you get all these tortured characters in one room, under a team title, and a lot of times you just come out with a jumble, or, at best, a jumbled backdrop for one really awesome character (like, how the X-Men sometimes just seem to be a way of giving Wolverine some folks he likes to hang out with).

Marvel has the greatest characters in comics, but D.C. has the best teams. The JLA, Doom Patrol, the Teen Titans, the Outsiders, the Suicide Squad and the granddads of the JSA. They each have a clear identity and a clear mission. Marvel has only two really, truly great teams: The Fantastic Four and the X-Men. The Avengers are good, but they are more or less a JSA knock-off (assemble ye our B-list heroes and Captain America). Here, Nicky is trying to capture a part of what Grant Morrison said makes for great team books, a clear mission and sense of shared identity. It’s not easy, though, especially when it’s not what Marvel fans are looking for.

Especially not in the days of Deadpool and Sabretooth.

So, in this issue, The New Warriors split up, most of them going to Brazil to figure out where Speedball’s mom has disappeared to. They kick it off with a half-page worth of really awkward exposition. Basically, one of them says that “Project: Earth” has taken his mom to Brazil to work on the Amazon Rain Forest’s Deforestation. Another remarks that deforestation is really bad. A third talks about the international relations context and a fourth mentions what he knows about Project: Earth’s methods, which are real shady. It’s like reading a newspaper summary in word balloons. Yuck.

But, okay, whatever, it’s only half-a-page and now we’re done. We’ve established that the hind-end-kicking to come is going to be about more than supervillains killing people, and, in fact, Nicky is hinting at what he wants the mission of The New Warriors to be: he has envisioned a superteam that is willing to step in when the Good Guys and the Bad Guys are hard to define.

After all, if a company destroys a natural resource forever, but does so legally, does that necessarily make it right? And if a group of superheroes tries to stop them with violence, and does it illegally, are they necessarily 100% in the wrong?

Pretty deep stuff for a comic book, but the scene from earlier in the comic when Namorita and Starfire let the gunman and the sweatshop owner’s both off with a warning gives you some idea of where these kids are going to go. It’s deep stuff. It’s the kind of shizzle you wish the kids these days were reading more of.

So that’s critique one and critique numero dos kind of follows along. I don’t think it was a good narrative choice for Nicky to split the team up from its leader this early in the book. In short, Night Thrasher stays in NYC to work on plot lines #1 and #5, while everyone else heads to Brazil. Later in the book, Night Thrasher would become so unpopular that he’d cut out from the title. This is unfortunate, because it’s Night Thrasher who always represented the vision in the team (currently, in the comeback New Warriors volume 2, Thrash is front-and-center in all his B.A. glory once more and that’s what makes The New Warriors feel real), but Nicky will fail in the issues to come to mesh him in with everyone else. He’ll always be sort of like Batman in the 1990s JLA, a member of the team but not of it. That’s fine if you’re Batman and you’re universally loved, but it doesn’t work so well when you are a vision of the Bat as a teen in the 90s.

But let’s talk about being a teen before we close. Nicky writes this book with a strong consciousness that for young people identity is especially fluid and he wants to give us a chance to tap into that. Take this exchange between Starfire and Namorita, in which Starfire has just said that Namorita isn’t really the kind of girl who’s obsessed with clothes and shopping:

It’s good stuff, but not as good as the next little moment I’ve got scanned here just for you. Maybe as you read it now you’ll think of this as hamfisted, too, and maybe it is. That said, I remember this scene absolutely reverberating with me. I can still see myself reliving it as I rode my bike down Broadway in Pittsburg, Kansas. When I think about Robbie Baldwin, and I do, I think about this scene. He’s a pacifist and he’s a superhero. He’s non-alpha but he wears tights to fight. He’s got a really messed up family and at the end of the day he just wishes they’d get along.

He yanks his dad into his bedroom to show him his favorite CDs, as opposed to the Ozzy CDs he likes to leave lying around the house. He does it because he’s fighting with his dad over the fact that his mom has disappeared and his dad has basically continued to go about his business as if nothing has happened. It all leads to this Robbie whipping out his Midnight Oil records to make a point about what he really likes to listen to:

This is the scene where Nicky spells it out. Sometimes we act one way and we do it for reasons we aren’t saying. I think, most of the time, we don’t even realize what our motivations are, and Nicky knows that. That said, he wants the teens reading this book to have a chance to think about why they do things, and boy did I. After I read this I thought and thought about Baldwin’s CD collection and what it meant. It might sound silly if you’re around 30, like I am now, reading this, but Nicky didn’t write this for me-Now. He wrote it for me-Then. I was 13. CD collections were something I understood.

The 1990s in comics were mostly about comic book in-jokes, die cut covers, big breasts, over-the-top drawings and superheroes with guns, like Cable, before he had any friends. It was not an atmosphere in which a comic book diamond-in-the-rough like this one, about sorting out the truth (that’s what the Warriors mission would eventually come to be defined as) could really thrive. Sadly, The Warriors would have a nice run but end up off the shelves and a side story in which a superteam could have a reality TV show. Nothing nearly so profound as the idea Nicky kicked them off with.

Still, looking back, New Warriors #7 exhibits all the promise of literary thought brought to comics. It exhibits the talent of a writer who knows how to use the virtues of the comics medium in powerful ways. Like in the opening sequence where the artwork, Silhouette’s thoughts and the Punisher taking-notes-inside-the-War-Wagon all serve to narrate different aspects of the story as it builds. And it closes with some sweet Karate and Night Thrasher totally flipping out.

I miss everything about comics like this. I miss the cheap paper, the $1 cover price, the straight up story, the subtext and all the promise of things to come. I guess, most of all, I miss being thirteen years-old and (as we say in Kansas) not knowing my ass from a hole in the ground and living every month for four-color excitement that doubles as a means for me to figure it out.

Thanks, Nicky. I loved it while it lasted. The New Warriors #7, y’all. Cheers!