Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing Nova 1-3, originally released February, March, and April 17th, 2013, respectively.

Drew: Cliche is a complicated subject in genre fiction. We tend to characterize predictability as bad, but it’s only by setting up expectations that writers are able to thwart them. Moreover, those tropes may be the very thing that draws us to those genres in the first place — we want the hero to beat the villain, get the girl, and ride off into the sunset. As a veteran writer conversant in a number of genres, Jeff Loeb understands the power of those tropes, mixing them potently in his take on Nova.

Issue one opens wearing its cliche trappings on its sleeve — the story of Jesse Alexander, former Nova (the Green Lanterns of the Marvel Universe), told as a bedtime story to his kids. His son, Sam, resents the fictions of his seemingly unremarkable father — actually, unremarkable is charitable: he’s an alcoholic who can barely maintain a job as a high school janitor. Sam picks up the slack in his father’s life, taking care of him when he’s sick, and covering for him at work — the perpetually put-upon good son. It’s a dizzying set of tropes, but Loeb then hits us with a bevy of high-school cliches: the meat-head bully, the cute girl our preoccupied hero can’t be bothered to notice — it’s right around the time that Principal Strickland shows up that I thought Loeb was going hoverboard overboard.

I was wary of the sheer volume of cliches here, but Loeb seems to be using them as a shorthand for the kind of story Sam should be in. Instead, Sam’s dad disappears, and Rocket Raccoon and Gamora deliver Sam his father’s Nova helmet. Sam’s dad leaves him a cryptically garbled message in the helmet, which maybe sorta suggests that Rocket and Gamora aren’t to be trusted.

What did he say? “Whatever you do, don’t trust them” doesn’t really jibe with the fact that he trusted Rocket and Gamora with the delivery of his helmet, but on the other hand, “whatever you do, trust them” doesn’t sound like a thing anyone would ever say under any circumstances.

Anyway, it looks like Sam’s dad met his end fighting an invasion of Chitauri, who we’ll all recognize as the monstrous invading force from The Avengers. Rocket and Gamora insist on training Sam in the ways of Novas, opting for very vivid and violent kung-fu-master tactics. Unfortunately, there isn’t much time for lessons, and they quickly send Sam off to scout the Chitauri’s forces. Only, Sam is immediately blasted out of the sky, suggesting that maybe he was set up.

That possible betrayal comes right on the heels of Rocket’s assertion that Sam shouldn’t trust anybody — his friends, allies, and family — as “anybody can be turned.” Rocket and Gamora also repeat over and over that Sam is Earth’s “last, best hope” of survival, which means he might also be target number one for anyone hoping to destroy Earth. Combine all of that with the fact that Rocket and Gamora are the ones who send Sam into that ambush, and you have a pretty damning case against them.

But maybe that’s the point. Loeb has so expertly played to our expectations throughout this series that it feels like he’s due for  faking us out. Rocket and Gamora’s allegiances could really break either way. Hell, the fact that it really seems like it’s them flies in the face of the fact that these are Marvel superheroes, anchoring their own title. They couldn’t send a kid to his death, right?

This series has grown on me — I was turned off from all of the high-school cliches of the first issue, but Loeb seems to have left those behind with no interest in turning back. I’m now fully invested in figuring out just what Rocket and Gamora’s game is. Oh, and I guess making sure Sam is okay. What did you think, Patrick? Did you find the cliches ham-fisted, or does Loeb have a bigger plan here? I mean, we’ve already seen the Marvel Universe’s solution to this particular invasion. There’s got to be more going on, right?

Patrick: I don’t know that I think Rocket and Gamora are up to anything sinister here, but I certainly do think there’s more going on in this title. It’s true – we’ve already spent a record amount of money to see  the Avengers beat back the Chitauri. But, I’ll tell you what, while the film did a great job of paying off character arcs for most of the heroes and Loki, the force that actually threatened Earth is surprisingly generic – especially when you consider how chock-full of character every other square inch of that movie is. The Avengers treats the Chitauri as a bottomless pit of henchmen, which is precisely what that movie needed to make Loki a credible threat. Nova shows the Chitauri as a much more immediate and present threat – instead of being slowly funneled through a magical portal, they’ve got a whole armada in our solar system. 

They also have a little more skin in the game this time ’round. This race of alien warmongers is sick and tired of having everyone from this world thwart their plans, and so they’re taking the ULTIMATE NULLIFIER on a test drive. In fact, the redundancy seems crucial to the point: the Chitauri are just sick of these motherfucking  earthings in this motherfucking universe. So, like snakes on some kind of plane, they have us marked for extinction.

But obviously, they only matter insomuch as they matter to Sam. Drew, I think you’re right to call out the first issue for its overuse of cliche. I almost did a double take when I saw that the name of Sam’s town was “Carefree.” It’s almost as groan inducing as “Smallville,” but with none of the weighty legacy behind it that lets us ignore how damn cheesy it is. Fortunately, Sam himself takes a second to register how silly it is.

I love Sam’s comment here: “The universe has a sense of humor…” Whenever you’re reading fiction and someone says that either “god” or “the universe” has a sense of humor, it’s hard not to extend that playfulness to the creators. Loeb may be playing it safe with a series of high school cliches before dropping into a near text-book retelling of the Hero’s Journey, but what keeps drawing me back to this title is the prevalent sense of “fun” in it’s pages. For a book that so frequently asserts that someone is the Earth’s “last best chance,” Nova is surprisingly light. The series’ visual sense of humor is particularly sharp, and it feels like veteran artist Ed McGuinness takes every opportunity he can get to stage funny little moments in these three issues. Here’s a good example from issue two: the Nova suit shuts down its jets while Sam’s hovering over a parking lot.

It’s basically the same panel, but with the street of blue Nova-light replaced with the sound-effect of car alarms. It’s simple and it’s graphic, like most of the best storytelling in this series. McGuinness does it a lot and it’s satisfying every time, giving the series a tangible sense of cause and effect. That, along with inker Dexter Vines’ simple lines make for some of the more lucid visual storytelling I’m reading right now. As a fun side note, at the end of issue 2, Sam zips by a truck with an “EdEx” logo, which is the cheeky little portmanteau McGuinness and Vines use to sign their covers.

Also, I don’t know what it is, but I am a sucker for star fields. This series is full of these graphic, dramatic starscapes that immediately evoke a sense of wonder and adventure about the universe. Both here and in Guardians of the Galaxy 0.1, the series starts with a spread of just star fields. They’re not quite done up in the style of the rest of the issue — they look more photorealistic to my eyes — but that only serves to add a little extra novelty to the whole “cosmic” experience. It’s so full of wistful adventure that I can’t help but he drawn in.

For a complete list of what we’re reading, head on over to our Pull List page.  Whenever possible, buy your comics from your local mom and pop comic bookstore.  If you want to rock digital copies, head on over to DC’s website and download issues there.  There’s no need to pirate, right?