Sphinx gets (another) rematch against The New Warriors in an event that ties together the team’s main series and two of its characters’ solo books. It starts in New Warriors #47, where we find Sphinx determined to get his Ka Stone back from the new Sphinx. And he puts on a decidedly mid-’90s outfit to do it.
There are also some check-ins with the team: Speedball and Girl Turbo are now dating, for one thing, but more interesting is that Night Thrasher wants to create two New Warriors teams.
Someone should give him some back issues of Avengers West Coast to read. (Shiver.)
Anyway, Sphinx’s big plan to get the New Warriors out of the way is to scatter them across time, so Thrasher finds himself getting lynched as a runaway slave…
Silhouette is back in Cambodia
The Sphinx reclaims half the power of the Ka Stone back from Lady Sphinx and uses it to split the New Warriors up by sending them through time:
Night Thrasher finds himself up against the Ku Klux Klan. Rage is a slave. Silhouette finds herself in Cambodia with Tai. Namorita meets Attuma’s ancestor. It’s a good way to tell stories about each member during a big “event.” Nova goes forward in time to an apocalyptic future (what other kind is there). While there, Nova 0:0 tells him all the bad stuff that happened.
Robert Rider teaches Nova how to maximize his powers–and Nova will use those lessons in New Warriors #50, which will conclude this epic.
Firestar is back in Salem for the witch trials, where she meets Agatha Harkness. Most of these are good stories but Justice meets his dad as a kid and finds out he was (a) gay and (b) bullied so, I think, we as readers are supposed to feel sorry for him and excuse the abuse he heaped on Justice, which then caused Justice to murder him many issues ago. That was one of Fabian Nicieza’s best storylines, and this seems to undermine it a bit.
While the team is split up, Hindsight Lad decides the only solution to this problem is to assemble a new New Warriors team to take on Sphinx, who is absorbing his powers back from Sphinx 2.
The team includes Alex Power, who now has the powers of all his siblings and calls himself Power Pax. Early on, I decided to group tag Power Pack to make my life easier. Now there’s just one of them. I’m not going back to fix my short-sightedness because that feels like work and this is a hobby. It’s supposed to be fun (notwithstanding the fact that I’m reading the ugh-fest that was ’90s Marvel).
What I am going to do is tag Powerpax.
The new team fights Sphinx.
While the new New Warriors are fighting Sphinx, the old New Warriors return and everyone goes nuts on Sphinx, who eventually merges with Sphinx 2 and the threat is over (for philosophical reasons that kind of left me confused–Nicieza is a great writer, but he’s not Jim Starlin and cosmic ponderings are not his strong suit).
When it’s all over, we don’t learn that the Speedball that came back is a different one. He’s a clone from the future timeline that Robbie Baldwin ventured off to.
But he is not the same Speedball. We won’t officially know that for over a year. Interesting that Nicieza planted that seed now, when he was leaving the series (see below).
Interestingly, Nicieza leaves the next creative team with a huge cast and a lot to clean up–but in a fun way that will enable an organic “rebirth” (or reboot) of the series. Every new creator has to do that when they pick up something someone else created–and Nicieza was on this book for a very long time after conceiving and creating it. I think this was a very generous thing for him to do.
Anyway, on the letters pages, he says goodbye to both New Warriors and Night Thrasher, two books he’s been writing since their respective issue #1s.
