This was the last issue of the original run of NEW WARRIORS, #75, which dropped on July 31, 1996. NEW WARRIORS was a series that succeeded despite itself. I can recall that, when I was an intern, one of the offices in which I worked has the spread of the characters posted on a dart board. When introduced by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz, they were seen as goofy and of another era. Nobody expected very much from them. But the combination of a young and passionate writer in Fabian Nicieza and the developing but very classic lines of Mark Bagley (balanced by the traditional Marvel sensibilities of editor Danny Fingeroth) turned it into a hit, and one of the best Marvel titles of the period, at least for its first couple of years. Eventually, though, Bagley left to draw AMAZING SPIDER-MAN regularly, the title changed editorial hands, and a proposed line expansion that saw NIGHT THRASHER and NOVA get their own series, with a second NEW WARRIORS book lanned, turned out to be optimistic. The market began to contract, and suddenly there wasn’t enough air for additional NEW WARRIORS projects. Frustrated by a lack of support from Marvel, Fabian decided to leave the series with issue #53. And that’s just about where I come in.
I was handed editorial command of the NEW WARRIORS titles as part of the MARVELUTION reorganization that saw the Editor in Chief job divided into five independent franchises. Due to their connection with Fingeroth and the fact that the series focused on younger heroes, NEW WARRIORS ended up as part of the Spider-Man family of books—despite the fact that it had no overt connection to the wall-crawler. And so it was simple to give the three titles over to me, as the other folks within the unit would be concentrating more heavily on Spidey matters. This was to my liking, as I had really enjoyed NEW WARRIORS—though my momentary elation evaporated somewhat when I realized that Fabian was departing. (I put out his final issue, #53). Still being young and new to the ways of editing comics (I had mostly been focused on trading cards and other special projects in the prior years) I wound up doing an open call for NEW WARRIORS pitches. I got a bunch of them, most of which were not very good. (One of those pitches was from Warren Ellis, whose write-up included formative versions of some of the ideas that he’d later use in other series, such as a prototypic Jenny Sparks. It would have been a very different book had Warren taken it over at this point, but I do wonder if his presence would have been enough to keep it going.) In the end, the best pitch by far was from Evan Skolnick, who had been Fabian’s assistant editor. But this presented me with a problem. Evan was a friend of mine, going back to by internship days. I’d always hated the sort of nepotistic approach that saw Marvel editors hiring other Marvel editors to write their books, rather than talent from outside, so I was very self-conscious about putting Evan in the chair. At the end of the day, though, after a conversation with my boss Bob Budiansky about this subject, I bit the bullet and went ahead. One of the things that drew me to Evan’s pitch was that he wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. Most of the other folks who had pitched for NEW WARRIORS seemed as though they’d never read it, and attempted to turn it into something else. But Evan, it seemed, just wanted to do NEW WARRIORS.
I also got twice lucky in that, when I came aboard, NEW WARRIORS had just onboarded a new regular artist who I didn’t feel was a good match for the material. He also had strong ideas about the direction of the series—he and Fabian had been simpatico—and he wasn’t in synch with Evan at all, which led to some difficulties on that first issue, #54. It’s not all that it could have been, especially for a new creative team launch, as people were pulling in different directions. Needing a fill-in art job almost immediately to get the woefully-behind-schedule series back on track, I hired Patrick (today Patch) Zircher off of some GREEN HORNET samples he had sent to Marvel’s slush pile. Zircher was good and he was hungry, and so when the other artist decided it was best that he move on to other assignments (which kept me from having to have a very awkward conversation with him) Zircher was able to step into the breech directly. He wound up doing the entirety of the rest of the run, including two oversized issues along the way.
Bad luck and inexperience on my part caused some difficulties early on, but especially with the inclusion of the series as part of the running Spider-Man plotlines, we were able to keep it healthy and running. That involvement wasn’t to the liking of most Spider-Man fans (and personally, I didn’t really love it all the time either. For example, there was one point at which I was told to bring in Kaine, the villainous clone of Peter Parker, as a sort of Cable mentor-figure for the group.) But it was a necessary step if the series was going to make it. Ultimately, though, after MARVELUTION came MARVELCUTION a year later, in which the five editor in chief system was discarded and 40% of the staff (including my boss Bob Budiansky) were laid off. In the aftermath, newly-minted EIC Bob Harras pruned back the line to a level that could be dealt with by the reduced staff, and he chose to cancel NEW WARRIORS. The book was still profitable, but he had no particular connection to it or love for it, and so it was easier for him to just shut it down and move on. It was a bitter pill, but the company had bigger problems, and so I moved on. Bob did louse me up on NEW WARRIORS one more time a few years later. Kurt Busiek and George Perez and I had included Justice and Firestar in our AVENGERS line-up during the HEROES RETURN launch as a pair of fresh young eyes who could observe the Avengers anew. They were only intended to stick around through issue #25, at which point my plan was to spin them off into a new NEW WARRIORS relaunch using their connection to the very successful AVENGERS to give it a good launching platform. I would have treated it like another sister title, in the way THUNDERBOLTS was at that time. But shortly before this could happen, Bob greenlit editor Frank Pittarese to produce his own NEW WARRIORS project—and that scuttled my plans. Still, as one of the first titles I got to oversee, and as a book that I loved simply as a reader, I still have a soft spot for NEW WARRIORS.
Tom Brevoort on the New Warriors
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