f13.net

Nextwave is an elite superman task force organized by the government agency known as H.A.T.E. (Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort). Their mission was to stop superhuman terrorists, but when they find out their own organization is the one behind a conspiracy aiding villains in taking out small towns in rural states where heroes never venture, they have to stop it.

H.A.T.E. has the best drugs. Because H.A.T.E. loves me.

And I love H.A.T.E.

Just got finished reading the first issue. If you liked Transmet's sense of humor at all, get this book. It's fucking hysterical.

Machine Man has been recast without the old purple exoskin as a robot who calls humans "Fleshy ones." The old female Capt. Marvel from the Avengers has been given some badassitude. Boom Boom from New Mutants/X-Force is here as well. The other characters I don't recognize. They fight against FIN FANG FOOM, a giant Chinese dragon who is wearing purple underpants.

It's almost totally nonsensical and just damned funny. Read it.

“The Captain is every generic Marvel superhero with the prefix Captain ever. There's loads of them. Captain Kerosene. Captain Rectitude. Captain Avalon. Captain Avenger. I'm making none of these up. He was all of them. He changed names every few months. One of his names was so obscene that Captain America beat him up for it.”

New Universe was pretty damn awful. I don't think the world really needs Kickers and DP7 again.

Tabitha! Quickly to me, my X-bait!

Help me lift my GUN! Techno-organic prolapse iminent!

God, this book has such quotable lines.

There's no accounting for taste.

Ellis brought up the fact that after creating New Avengers and reinventing the idea of superhero teams, Brian Bendis was disappointed that no one else had stepped up to the bat and tried to reinvent team comics as well. That sentiment helped fuel the creation of Nextwave. "How can I really horrify Bendis?" said Ellis. "What could I do that would just scare the s--- out of him and make him utterly regret saying that. So I took The Authority and I stripped out all the plots, logic, character and sanity. I just cut everything back until I was left with pure superhero comics."

For those who were waiting, the Hardcover just released Wednesday.

NEXTWAVE: AGENTS OF H.A.T.E. #12
Written by WARREN ELLIS
Pencils and Cover by
STUART IMMONEN
To all those who HAVEN’T been buying NEXTWAVE– Thanks a lot, jerks! This is the last issue! To all those who HAVE been buying NEXTWAVE– YOU RULE!! Do not miss this pulse-pounding conclusion to the greatest work of western literature EVER! Hamlet? Horrible. War and Peace? What-a-joke! The Great Gatsby? The Great Lame-by, maybe. Those works are going to be moved to the Bad Section of your local bookstores after this issue comes out. Don't miss this or you won’t know what your children’s children are reading in school.
32 PGS./Parental Advisory …$2.99

Okay. I just this second got the go-ahead from Nick Lowe to talk about this. So here we go:

Sales on the singles are okay, if not great. Sales on the first collection have apparently been terrific.

We were on such a roll with NEXTWAVE that I was actually into the idea of doing a second year, which is highly unusual for me and work-for-hire properties. So Marvel sat down and looked at the numbers, as they wanted to do a second year too.

What they found was that, at our current sales levels, they could afford for me to write it, but not for Stuart to draw it. Stuart, as a Marvel-exclusive artist, commands a fee commensurate with his astonishing talent. I’m WFH-exclusive too, but they just send me whisky and loose women and I’m fine. So, basically, I could continue to write NEXTWAVE, but we’d need to find another artist. This, to me, was just wrong. I mean, Stuart would obviously be given a far better job that had actual readers attached to it, but it still seemed a bit like the numbers were conspiring to fire him for doing his job too well. Everyone at Marvel pitched in to try and make it work, but the numbers were just against us.

So NEXTWAVE #12 will be the final issue of the ongoing series.

(To clear up a common misconception: NEXTWAVE was always pitched as an ongoing series. However, my original intent was to do 12 and then pass it on to someone else. This got garbled, somewhere down the chain of communication, and so the first issue or two got solicited as “part xxx of 12″.)

However. The numbers game changes when you posit things in terms of limited series.

NEXTWAVE #12 will be the last issue of the ongoing series: but there will be more NEXTWAVE to come, presented as a sequence of limited series.

This was all worked out some months ago, so I had plenty of time to work the final NEXTWAVE sequence into a conclusion of sorts. #11 even features a twelve-page spread that you’ll have to buy six copies of the comic to assemble into its full splendour. Everyone wishes I’d thought of that eight or nine months ago.

That was the news. Return to your duties.

– W

(feel free to copy and spread far and wide, thereby saving me the job.)

Is this supposed to be a remake of the "new universe" books marvel did in the early 90s? (?)

Seems very much the same. Normal earth-people get special powers due to the "white light" event. Is this supposed to be an official re-imagining, an homage, or sly wink and nod or what?

I've probably written this several times before, but I really liked FabNic's (can't spell his real name, heh) work on Psi-Force. I can only assume that the asian girl in the book was one of the members of Psi Force, so I may be forced to relocate my local comic shop.  :-P

I don't know who started Justice, but iirc Peter David  wrote a lot of the later stuff.

It’s a sad, horrible and strangely endless day in the history of the universe. In some ways, every day will now be Death Of NEXTWAVE Day. For as long as you live. Whether you know what I’m talking about or not. Something will always be missing from your heart, and that constant incompleteness will drain the joy from every single moment of your existence until you lay on your death bed, listening to your pulse stutter and stop, knowing that somehow, someway you failed at life.

Knowing that nothing in the world had been right since Death Of NEXTWAVE Day.