RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Comic Books Marvel's newest heroes: "Snowflake" and "Safespace."

Not a joke, not a South Park parody: Introducing the New 'New Warriors'

• SCREENTIME
  
  
  A Meme-Obsessed super teen whose brain became connected to the internet after becoming exposed to his grandfather’s “experimental internet gas.”
  
  
  Now he can see augmented reality and real-time maps, and can instantly Google any fact. Does this make him effectively a genius? He sure acts like it does.
  
  "I wanted to have teen characters who felt as "now" as the New Warriors did in 1990,” explains Kibblesmith. “The New Warriors have been zeitgeist characters from the beginning, you get edgy skateboarding Night Thrasher in the '90s and the Reality TV team in the 2000s, and now in 2020, we have New Warriors who have never grown up without the Internet, and one character who appears to essentially live inside it.
  
  “The word ’screen time’ is only ever used in a sort of restrictive sense, and because we’re doing a story about teenage rebels, a lot of the names are about teens fighting against labels that are put on them. So with Screentime, we liked the idea that he has infinite screen time.”
  
  SNOWFLAKE AND SAFESPACE
  
  Snowflake, a cryokinetic, can materialize snowflake-shaped shuriken projectiles for throwing.
  
  Safespace can materialize pink forcefields, but he can’t inhabit them himself, the reflex only works if he’s protecting others. They’re hyper aware of modern culture and optics, and they see their Super Heroics as “a post-ironic meditation on using violence to combat bullying.” They're probably streaming this.
  
  "Safespace is a big, burly, sort of stereotypical jock. He can create forcefields, but he can only trigger them if he's protecting somebody else. Snowflake is non-binary and goes by they/them, and has the power to generate individual crystalized snowflake-shaped shurikens. The connotations of the word 'snowflake' in our culture right now are something fragile, and this is a character who is turning it into something sharp.
  
  
  
  
  B-NEGATIVE
  
  A teen “living vampire” exposed to Michael Morbius’s blood as a child in a rogue, but life-saving medical procedure. He still ages like a regular kid, but has all the abilities of Morbius. He’s also obsessed with all the music and attitude of “classic” long-past decades like the '90s, and the '00s. “The world is a vampire…and so am I.”
  
  
  
  
  TRAILBLAZER
  
  A regular kid scooped up into the world of teenage Super Heroing. Her “magic backpack” is actually a pocket dimension with seemingly infinite space, from which she can pull out useful or random objects—it’s not always under her control. She claims to get her power from god, but “not the god you’re thinking of.”
  
  
  

The reception online is...not great from both the left and the right. The right's reaction is pretty much what you'd expect. The left's reaction is that this is terrible pandering to the point of perpetuating stereotypes.

And who thought hiring another "TV comedy writer" was a good idea after the complete disaster that was Ron Zimmerman?

That's hilarious!

I don't know how good the stories are, but I love the concept.

Just to clarify: This isn't a parody.

Unintentional comedy, but funny nonetheless.
Like the liberalism that spawned it. They don't even realize how laughably absurd their ideas are to the rest of us.

What the fuck is Internet gas? Is that what you call it when someone farts during a video conference? I've been exposed to that many times. Where's my powers?

I’m starting to think this is marvels way to punish fans who complain about taking existing heroes and replacing them with “diversity hires with the same names” (female Thor, Black Capt America, Black Female Iron Man, Black Gay Spidey, etc.) instead of creating new concepts to showcase diversity,

The fart heard round the world!

Truly a fart to be reckoned with.

And his sidekick HIV-PLUS !

Interesting concept obviously not geared for the older conservative crowd. Actually not for older me either I think but for a much younger crowd. Could this be like the 60’s Teen Titans with their hip and cool words that writers thought kids were using back than? Or attempts like Prez and Brother Power?

PREZ by Joe Simon was, despite its best efforts to exploit the times, delightfully un-hip.
BROTHER POWER THE GEEK, GREEN TEAM, THE OUTSIDERS (the latter two in FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL), and PREZ were all delightfully out of touch with their 1970's audience. I saw Simon as kind of the opposite of Kirby. Where Kirby was completely on the pulse of his audience in the 1960's and 1970's, Simon's return to comics in that era was a complete failure to connect.

I think TEEN TITANS by Nick Cardy and others did a much better job of marketing to readers of that era. Toward the end in 1971-1973, TEEN TITANS stories had almost a Scooby Doo feel to them, investigating mysteries that often involved the supernatural, and for my money, were good reading. In collaboration with a lot of other writers, pencillers and inkers, Nick Cardy gave the book a very consistent look.

I was thinking that Ditko's HAWK AND THE DOVE was a 1968-1969 attempt to similarly tap into the times back then.

Some might not realize that series far preceded the O'Neil/Adams GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW series. O'Neil and Adams get all the acclaim for bringing relevance to comics. But it was actually Ditko who first tried the concept of a dialogue between conservative and liberal heroes.

I think you nailed it. Based on the response I've seen so far, the potential audience on both the left and right is viewing this as pandering and/or perpetuating stereotypes.

Isn't that what got Alex Alonso fired as editor-in-chief at Marvel? An anti-American version of CAPTAIN AMERICA that generated a huge backlash, and a heavy-handed explosion of minority/multicultural characters?

Ah, the "woke" Left. Even when it blows up in their faces, they just can't help themselves!

Well if I did it would be by accident, lol. I have really no idea what’s going on in comics after a couple of years of just buying older collections of material. The one exception is the new Legion series. I do remember enjoying the original New Warriors. It reminded me of DC’s New Teen Titans without the Pérez art.