First off, if you haven’t been following the story or ‘Original Sin‘ this is a great jumping in point to the comic.
The latest iteration of Nova has been a hit or miss on storytelling in both his own book and in the latest take on the ‘New Warriors,’ but Gerry Duggan has been shown to shine when a cosmic story has been involved. With the latest issue of ‘Nova’ dealing with the ongoing ‘Original Sin’ story line in the Marvel Universe, we see him finding The Watcher dead, dealing with the fight we’ve seen going on in New York in a previous issue, as well as seeing an original sin that “changes everything” he has known to date! How does it stack up? Well, with how much was going on in the issue, we find out surprisingly very little. Let’s take a look!
We open with Sam having a usual carefree moment with his family and deciding he wants to head off into space to make a quick visit to a certain girl who “doesn’t have a crush on him” that he feels the same way about. It almost looks like another lighthearted issue until there is a flash on the dark side of the moon that he goes to investigate. There, he finds the corpse of The Watcher. It all goes down from here. The Watcher is the one being that knows what happened to his father and the two have developed a loose friendship over the last 17 issues.
The sight hits him hard. Now there is no way he knows of to find out where his dad really ended up. The narration here is touching as we see him go through the events of ‘Original Sin,’ battling the mindless one and right up to where the first wave of secrets are revealed to the Marvel Universe. The thing is the secret revealed to him by The Orb felt like the one truly new part of the series that can push things forward. It shows him a truth about his father. Unbeknownst to Sam, he was previously a Nova.
I won’t say what it is but as this is all about Original Sin, you can bet that what Sam learns about his father was not a good thing. What we see on the panel is just enough to wet our appetites to want to know more but leaves it just open ended enough that we don’t know the full story yet. The book closes on some great dialogue about moving on from daddy issues with Iron Man who just saw a sin of his own.
My gripe here its that we now have another Nova who we are left in the dark about. (At least Richard Rider’s fate is supposed to be finally revealed in the upcoming ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ ‘Original Sin’ tie-in.)
Overall, as an issue for an ongoing story arc, we see young Sam being pushed forward into learning more about his father and not much else new. Past that, almost everything else that we get from this issue feels far too repetitive if you have been following the ‘Original Sin’ story line. If you haven’t been following it, are just jumping in, or don’t mind, then this is a great issue to move things forward. Honestly having been keeping up with the latest crossover all of the revisiting of events really felt like a yawn fest, except for the art by David Baldeon which was spectacular.
NOVA #18
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: David Baldeon
