Marvel’s teen books, from 1983’s New Mutants to 2005’s Young Avengers and beyond, have a history of pooling together a handful of characters with varying degrees of staying power. Never as popular as their mainstay adult counterparts in the X-Men or Avengers, teen teams seem only to hope for perennial popularity at best. The New Mutants – arguably the company’s most popular young group with 100 issues of their original series under their belt – still struggle to find spotlight roles in the ongoing Marvel Universe decades after the peak of their popularity.
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The New Champions feels like a team engineered toward obsolescence. It isn’t that the characters don’t seem cool, or that they don’t have an interesting team dynamic; it’s that their book never manages to define any of the characters or their relationships. What made New Mutants and Young Avengers – hell, what made the last incarnation of the Champions – so compelling is that the teenage melodrama of their lives influenced the story nearly as much as the superheroic shenanigans.
Change is Coming, which collects all eight issues of Steve Foxe, Ivan Fiorelli, and Ruairí Coleman’s book, doesn’t skimp on the superheroics: every issue introduces a new and exciting mini-adventure for the team. There are Big Bads who are unique to the team, and these villains create satisfying arcs that should, in theory, lead our characters to growth and nuance.
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Those characters are certainly interesting. Like the New Avengers, they play on the homage aspects of sidekick characters. There’s a mini Moon Knight and a mini Ghost Rider; the team is led by a girl with a star on her chest, calling herself Liberty – a clear nod to Captain America. All of this is promising, at least from a design perspective; the trouble is that their entire character and power set is defined by these homage trappings. Outside of costume, they have little substance as people.
Originally introduced as bit players over in Foxe’s Spider-Woman, that sort of two-dimensional aspect could be explained away by their minimal role in the story. Here, however, their lack of depth makes it hard to understand their goals, relationships, or even their powers (which have a tendency of getting explained after they’re used; you wouldn’t know that Moon Squire had the ability to project darkness except that a Super Skrull copied that power).
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For all these complaints, the book remains fun – there is rarely a moment when our characters stand still, and they are usually in opposition of a unique or hilarious threat. Fiorelli and Coleman’s artwork fuel the book’s non-stop energy, infusing the characters with an animated essence.
The New Champions are unlikely to find their way forward in the way that other teen team members have, but their brief time in the spotlight never lacked for excitement. Change is Coming is fun enough to make their likely future obscurity sting. If only we could know them better.
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