Nova Week: Learning to love Richard Rider

I’ll be honest — for a long time I couldn’t figure out why everybody loved Nova so much.

They didn’t love him like Wolverine or Spider-Man. Those were easy characters to love, mostly because everybody else already like them and they were (and still are) EVERYWHERE.

But in the comic shop, it never took too long to hear somebody pipe up about their favorite character, the human rocket, Nova. And I thought they were morons.

“Oh, he can fly and he’s strong and there’s a Nova Corps? Kind of sounds like a rip-off of Green Lantern,” I’d say, watching their eyes bug out and beads of sweat form over their ever-reddening skin. “Besides, any member of the New Warriors is lame.”

Nobody ever took a swing at me because of my opinions, but I know a few people who considered bludgeoning me with a plus-2 mace. The truth was, they pitied me, and rightfully so. I just didn’t know the real Nova.

And I wouldn’t until Marvel came up with a smart way to use all those outer-space characters that were just floating in the cosmic void — “Annihilation.”