When Kamala’s Law goes into effect in the highly anticipated one-shot OUTLAWED this week, the former teen vigilantes Night Thrasher, Firestar, Rage, Speedball, Namorita, and Silhouette will need to step up to lead the next generation of the Marvel Universe. But will they be able to make them into heroes?
Created by Emmy-nominated writer Daniel Kibblesmith and rising superstar artist Luciano Vecchio, the classic New Warriors of the 90s will reunite to introduce the New Warriors of 2020!
“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.”
Meet the all-new team launching in New Warriors #1, on sale April 15th!
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.”
“Trailblazer wants to help people, but she doesn’t think of herself as a Super Hero (yet!),” said Kibblesmith. “The Marvel Universe is a reflection of our own, and when a new law gets put into place, it affects people in unforeseen ways.”
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.
“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: As psychic twins, 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.”
“[Snowflake and Safespace] are very similar to Screentime; it’s this idea that these are terms that get thrown around on the internet that they don’t see as derogatory. [They] take those words and kind of wear them as badges of honor…Snowflake is the person who has the more offensive power, and Safespace is the person who has the more defensive power. The idea is that they would mirror each other and complement each other.”
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 a “classic” long-past decades like the ’90s, and the ’00s. “The world is a vampire…and so am I.”
“B-Negative is the goth kid. When he was a baby he got a rogue lifesaving blood transfusion, we assume, from Michael Morbius. And now he has a very similar look, and very similar vampire powers…B-Negative ages like a regular person (or does he?) and he definitely drinks blood (or does he?), but designer/artist Luciano Vecchio took brilliant inspiration from the ’90s Spider-Man cartoon and gave B-Negative the ‘leech suckers’ that the animated version of Morbius had on his palms.”
Check out the NEW WARRIORS #1 trailer for Vecchio’s designs along with Kibblesmith’s inspirations behind this one-of-a-kind team of young heroes!
