REVIEW: Nova #16 (1977)

Writer: Marv Wolfman Artists: Carmine Infantino & Tom Palmer Review: Will Dubbeld

Ah, vintage comics. That musty newsprint, the slight trace of ink left on the fingertips . . . I love it. New comics are great, with varying results, but old comics are almost across the board amazing. Not necessarily due to superior writing or art, but because of a hefty dose of heart, nostalgia, and snapshots of a less corporate-driven industry. This crusty old issue of Nova is no exception. I've never been a Nova fan, only barely warming up to the character after he tore Annihilus' guts out through his mouth in the climax of Annihilation. That was pretty boss. That said, I do have a small collection of Nova books from the days of yore, not due to love of the character, but due to a love of dollar boxes full of vintage books. Nova #16 finds our hero, Richard Rider, in the throes of teen angst like so much early Spider-Man but without the engaging supporting cast. Sure, he's got ciphers for Liz Allan and Flash Thompson, but the creative team doesn't quite capture that lightning in a bottle Lee/Ditko dynamic. Beset by woes both at school and at home, Richard gets a reprieve from his domestic turmoil in the form of a phone call from Nick Fury. At home. Because the head of super-spy organization S.H.I.E.L.D. will just ring you up on a random afternoon to help save the world. At least he waited until school was let out . . . Nova ditches his familial obligations to go tear-assing around the country with Fury in order to defeat the villainy of Yellow Claw, and I'd like to pause for a moment here and talk about this guy. Yellow Claw first appeared in the mid-1950s in the throes of the post-WWII Red Scare. He's an archetypical Mandarin Chinese stereotype right out of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu books and is one of the most hilariously racist characters I've ever seen. The Yellow Peril propaganda just drips off of this guy. Yellow-skinned with talons and a whip-thin mustache, this guy would have been right at home getting socked in the kisser by Captain America in the '40s. Buy war bonds! It wouldn't surprise me if he had fangs in his early appearances, not due to demonic influence, but simply because he was Heathen Chinee. In all honesty, I can't even be mad. I'm not race-baiting or acting as an apologist for the writers, and I grant it's easy to take this stance from high atop my White Privilege, but these portrayals were a sign of the times and are engrained in the history of the comics medium. Characters like Wonder Woman's foe Egg Fu, The Spirit's Ebony White (Ebony White, for fucks sake . . .), and even Li’l Abner portray a race/ class/what-have-you in a cringey manner but are part of the whole and should not be swept under the rug or ignored. These characters hold the same status as 19th century minstrel shows and nearly every Hollywood Indian to hit the Silver Screen, not to be praised but remembered and learned from as a look at history, society, and in cases like Yellow Claw, xenophobia. What does shock me about Yellow Claw is that writers kept unabashedly using him in stories well after the 50s, up into the early 2000s when there was an attempt to redeem the character in the (phenomenal) Agents of Atlas books. Villainous, cackling racial stereotypes aside, Nova and Nick Fury wage epic battle with the seemingly endless tide of Yellow Claw goons until they finally are defeated and taken as prisoners to the Yellow Claw's SECRET UNDERSEA LAIR. Because you're goddamn right Yellow Claw has a secret undersea lair. Claw and his accomplice, a Nazi war criminal (OF COURSE), tie Nova and Fury to a rocket set to collide with a government spy satellite that Yellow Claw needs out of the way if his "thousand-year reign!" is to be victorious. The issue ends on a cliffhanger as Our Heroes hurtle towards their doom, the rocket diverted from its flight plan by a mysterious figure and headed straight for our nation's capitol. Also, there's a one-pager featuring Spider-Man defeating the monstrous criminal Legal Eagle with the creamed filling and moist devil's food cake of Hostess Cup Cakes. Obviously a highlight of the book. Nearly any comic from the '70s-'80s is a guaranteed winner in my eyes, and this goofy-ass Nova book is no exception. I wallow in too much dopey nostalgia to take any of these books for granted, and I do earnestly believe these comics hearken to a more idyllic era, at least from a readership standpoint. I certainly won't be searching high and low for the follow up issues. I'm pretty sure Nova and Nick Fury make it out of the situation . . . If I happen to stumble across more Nova in a quarter bin, or perhaps at a flea market or garage sale, we all know damn well what'll happen though. Make Mine Marvel, suckah . . .