NINO #30 Review & PC Op-ed

An Opinion-Editorial Oriented Review Decrying Political Correctness in Comic Books

Duggan, like Bendis, has no real understanding of science-fiction.   They both just rip-off plot and action elements from popular cinema and televised science-fiction and science-fantasy.  This issue, Duggan copies some elements from Babylon 5 and Deep Impact to make yet another thoroughly insipid and totally implausible NINO storyline.

Duggan admits he copies teen Spiderman plot elements from the past, and he likes to take to twitter to talk about what a brave, filled-to-the-brim with integrity kind of guy he is because he resists the harsh criticism leveled at him about NINO and keeps churning out NINO trash.  Hey Duggan, that doesn’t make you brave or full of integrity.   Re-packaging well-worn tropes from comics, cinema, and TV just makes you a hack.

The eye-rolling and stomach-churning moments go hand-in-hand in this issue with Duggan having NINO take on an ultra-powerful and ultra-experienced trained warrior – and of course, totally implausibly winning.  Stupid.  Unbelievable (in a bad way).

Of course, NINO predictably continues to screw up and his screw-ups result in Earth being put in incredible danger from multiple sources including a storm of asteroids heading straight for Earth.  Also, predictably, NINO (just like all the other current cosmic characters) has the Avengers on speed dial to call to save the day because cosmic characters are such buffoons under Bendys, Duggan, Loeb, Brevoort, and Alonso – that all cosmic characters can do is screw-up and place Earth in danger.  They can’t save Earth (or anything else).  Cosmic characters can no longer effectively single-handedly deal with cosmic threats.  They just trigger cosmic threats.  Then they’ve got to call The Avengers or The X-Men for help.  How dumb is that?  Pretty dumb.  But what else do you expect from Bendys, Duggan, Loeb, Brevoort, and Alonso?  They wanted to reduce cosmic to bathroom humor level buffoonery and they succeeded.

The art continues to decline on this deplorable book.  NINO continues to look thoroughly stupid in a poorly designed manga-ish military uniform he never earned in the first place.   It’s actually painful to look at the little idiot.

With sales under 20K despite all the marketing hype, a regular cartoon appearance, and shoehorning the little idiot into every major event, Marvel needs to wake up and declare this trash the failure that it so obviously is.  But that would make too much sense.  Instead, they decided to double-down on the failed formula and do an even more politically correct version of NINO, a PC-NINO-ette as it were.  Out with the half-alien/half-Hispanic male kid and in with the black female kid.  I guess the reasoning was, “If it worked for Ms. Marvel, maybe it’ll work for NINO.”

If you’re a true fan of the original Nova concepts and you’d like to see Rich Rider back in his rightful place, its past time to take action.  Boycott, NINO and PC-NINO-ette.  Send Marvel a clear message that they need to stop replacing beloved classic characters just for the sake of appealing to political correctness in the general population.  The general population could care less about comic books. 

That being said, despite all evidence to the contrary, if Marvel thinks that there really is an enormous demographic of buyers out there just dying to buy books about female, racial minority, religious minority, and sexual orientation-minority characters – then by all means please create such NEW characters from scratch and give them a book.  Let’s have a book about a super-powered, bi-sexual, female, half-Gypsy/half-Pygmy, wheelchair-bound, Shinto priestess who’s seriously considering sex change surgery.   Sounds hilarious.   I might even buy the first issue.  This ultimately PC character would certainly please the “small but vocal” PC crowd (and their PC police force who frequently shoot the rest of us in the back as we try to flee this PC nonsense).  But please, don’t use that ultimate PC character as a replacement for Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Nova, etc.   Live up to your name as the “House of Ideas,” do the courageous/non-lazy thing, and create a brand new character with the demographics you want to capture.