Review: NINO #29

When will this waste of paper be over? 

The annual sold about 18K.  That would be cancellation time for most any Marvel book – but Marvel keeps this trash on life support?  To chase a demographic of 7-12-year-old buyers that doesn’t really exist?

Hey Brevoort – you’ve got 18K of buyers with the mentality of 7-12-year-olds, but that’s about it.  Few to no actual 7-12 year olds buying comic books.  Psssst – here’s a secret:  They’re too busy playing video games. 

Despite a near unprecedented marketing campaign, a cartoon series, and shoehorning the “little idiot” (Loeb’s own description of this character) into every event – the best you’ve got is 18K for a NINO annual?  To quote NINO himself, “Epic fail!”

And Duggan, you can keep underlining Rider’s death and insulting Rider fans as much as you like in your book and on forums, but most of us will NEVER accept or embrace your NINO or your upcoming “Politically Correct NINO-ette.”  And we’ll never forgive you or Loeb for mangling the Nova mythos with this puerile garbage or for your continued disrespect for fans of the true Nova, Rich Rider.

Fact is, Duggan, like Bendis and Loeb, has no idea how to write a true cosmic story.  He writes farce.  That’s it.  The space setting is incidental, and the aliens are around purely for comic relief.   Substitute any city – New York, Mayberry, Los Angeles – literally anywhere for the space setting and change the aliens to doofus humans, and the story would read exactly the same.  Duggan even alludes to this himself when he has NINO dress up like Deadpool in this painfully bad issue.  He’s basically writing a less hypomanic Deadpool, throwing in some stars and aliens, and calling it “Nova.”  That’s pretty much what passes for “cosmic” at Marvel these days – forgettable, farcical, hackneyed stories aimed at the lowest common denominator.

The cover art looks like graphics from a bad manga-inspired video game, and the interior art is even worse with NINO looking even more ridiculously scrawny than usual wearing his dad’s uniform.  That’s not a superhero or a soldier/police officer.  NINO literally looks like what he is – a child playing dress-up. 

Tell me, NINO fans, how do you conveniently overlook the fact that NINO’s mother allows her minor child, NINO, to go off into space alone for the foreseeable future?  How is that decision even remotely plausible for anyone other than an unfit parent?

Tell me, Avengers fans, is it even remotely plausible that the real Captain America, a responsible adult in every other comic but this one, would be supportive of a minor child wielding powers of mass destruction and going into space alone risking his life and perhaps endangering the Earth with his actions (as actually happened in this issue)?

I guess NINO fans and Avenger-zombies have a low bar for plausibility.

So NINO goes looking for his dad, screws things up along the way, Beta Ray Bill and a few others have a few head-slapping “Doh!” moments as they observe his teen antic screw-ups, and the 18K of zombies who buy this clichéd nonsense will take to comic book forums and insist that it’s brilliant and original.  It’s like P.T. Barnum said, “There is a sucker born every minute.”  If you’re buying NINO, you’re one of those suckers.