“ I feel that, more than anything, this is why a number of our revivals of older characters and series fail—that they get too locked into the material and minutiae of the past, and aren’t focused enough on establishing the characters and premise of the book in the present.” Interesting. I recognize it’s a very fine line to tread, but I wonder whether it can go too far. I thought part of the problem with all the New Warrior revivals (especially the one that spun out of Civil War that felt more like an House of M spinoff) was that they didn’t feel like New Warriors enough. I’m hopeful this won’t have the problem (in spite of Not Nova) but I think having some sort of touchstone like Psionex (or the Sphinx or Thinker) would be a good step toward establishing that feel. Obviously the book needs to stand on its own and have new stories, but if it’s going to use an older title’s name, it needs to have something in common with that previous title. I’d say that’s why the New Excalibur that was set on Genosha didn’t work, for example. You use the name obviously hoping to attract fans of that property but when it bears nothing in common with the original property, those fans are going to be turned off.

Well, I think every iteration needs some manner of reason for using an old popular name, but it need not mean just repeating the stories, characters and situations of the past that ultimately could not sustain themselves. In the case of something like GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, we’ve had some pretty good success re-imagining that entire concept in a way that has virtually nothing to do with the GOTG of the 60s and 70s except the name. That won’t work in every case, of course–but for all that it had a different tone and a different premise, the CIVIL WAR-era NEW WARRIORS was pretty recognizably NEW WARRIORS–if I just showed you the cover art, you’d be able to identify what it was. That it was a NEW WARRIORS that didn’t appeal to you is more a matter of individual taste (and enough other people agreed with you that it didn’t go beyond the limited series.) But to me, it feels like having the New Warriors come back and face the same old foes and situations again diminishes both them and those villains–it’s as though the Sphinx has been hanging around on street corners waiting for his old teenaged enemies to regroup before doing anything. This is one of the things that I suspect hurt the last ALPHA FLIGHT series: the mystery villain turned out to be the one guy that Alpha Flight battles every time we bring them back, the one villain that anybody really remembers from their original series. And no great effort was made to treat that character in such a way that readers who weren’t already enamored with him would become interested in him–it felt entirely like a nostalgia play. If I want to read those classic NEW WARRIORS stories, well, I’ve got a lovely Omnibus edition now. But if there is to be another New Warriors/Sphinx story, it really needs to re-think the paradigm and find something new to say, beyond, “Remember those comics that we all read years ago?”