Marvel Announces New Champions Series

After a decades-long absence, Marvel Comics is revitalizing the Champions. Originally a Los Angeles-based group of seemingly disparate Marvel heroes (Hercules, Black Widow, Angel, Iceman, and Ghost Rider), the new Champions are a team of young heroes looking to take a different, more activist route to changing the world.

The team consists of Ms. Marvel, Spider-Man (Miles Morales), and Nova, the three junior members of the All-New, All-Different Avengers who quit the team. They're joined by the "Totally Awesome" Hulk (Amadeus Cho), Viv Vision, synthetic daughter of the Avengers' Vision, and – continuing the Champion's mutant tradition alive – the time-displaced young Cyclops from the All-New X-Men.

The series' creative team is writer Mark Waid and artist Humberto Ramos, who previously worked together on Impulse for DC Comics. Waid says that he and Ramos, as we well as the Champions themselves, are looking to really distinguish the team from the Avengers.

"You'll know we've failed if by issue 5 the Masters of Evil show up and there's a fight with the Absorbing Man," Waid tells Entertainment Weekly. "Clearly, at that point, we will have been a victim of mission creep. Tom and I talked about how there's been a very interesting generational shift in the last 15 years. When we were growing up, the general perception was it takes adults to fix the world. Kids can do little things, but basically, you have to wait till you grow up to make the big choices and the big decisions. Well, Mark Zuckerberg would disagree with you. Some of the other young trend-breaking scientists that are coming to light, online especially, would beg to differ with you. Those are the inspirations, as much as anybody else, for the idea that we don't have to wait until we grow up to be Tony Stark or Captain America to make a difference in this world. We'll find our way, and we'll find our own way."

Young Scott Summers is arguably the most controversial addition to the team, given his role as an iconic X-Man and the recent history of his adult self. Editor Tom Brevoort explains that young Scott is looking to build a better future for himself.

"This is the young Scott Summers pulled from the past. In my head, he's kind of the first challenge the group faces," Brevoort explains.
"Which is to say that when they get together and start to do this, what they're doing is not just putting together a superhero team, they're more like activists. They're making an inclusive statement that they mean to be for all members of their generation: it's time to get together and stand up and fix the world. This is a message that goes out and people come in response to it. Cyclops shows up and goes, "Boy I love what you're putting down, I'd like to be a part of it." It's kind of like Kid Hitler showing up at the door. The older Cyclops has done some stuff. He's a hugely divisive figure in the Marvel universe, so the first question these kids have to answer for themselves is, should we let him be a part of this? Is his very presence going to taint what we're doing? His older self became a radical and a revolutionary and did awful things, but is it the same guy? And that's kind of why he's there I think. He wants to go down a different road than his older self did."

The new Champions series also marks the end of a long copyright standoff between Marvel and Heroic Publishing, who launched a tabletop RPG called Champions in the 1980s, after the original Champions Marvel series had been cancelled. That game grew into its own comic book series and the Champions Online video game. When Marvel sought to revive the series, Heroic challenged them and a court ruled in Heroic's favor. The planned 2007 Champions series was renamed The Order. However, Brevoort explains that Marvel and Heroic have come to terms.

"Champions is sort of like the great lost Marvel team name. We published Champions in the '70s and haven't been able to publish it since. We've now come to an agreement with the people who held the mark before, which allows us to publish it and they keep doing the things they were doing. So basically it's like this name, that I think of as a fundamentally Marvel name, is coming back home. It feels good in that, when we first started talking about names for this group, we tended to go for 'something something Avengers.' That always seemed off-mission for me. If they're cutting the cord, if they're going off on their own to establish themselves as a thing onto themselves, they kind of need their own name. They are ultimately very socially conscious, very activist-minded, and very positive about being superheroes, so the name had to feel like a really upbeat superhero name."

Champions #1 goes on sale this fall. Check out the Humberto Ramos cover and Alex Ross variant cover below.