'Champions' by Waid/Ramos

The series, revealed at Entertainment Weekly, comes from writer Mark Waid and artist Humberto Ramos; Alex Ross turned in a variant cover for the series. The new team book will star former "All-New, All-Different Avengers" characters Nova, Ms. Marvel and Spider-Man. Joining them is Amadeus Cho, the star of "Totally Awesome Hulk," as well as the teen Cyclops (previously seen in "All-New X-Men") and Vision's daughter Viv, who comes to the team from the synthezoid's series.

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ew.com/article/2016/07/05/marvel-champions
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>It’s a strange time to be a young person. Even as old social and political institutions get rocked by unexpected outcomes from the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, youth movements and start-ups are reshaping the landscape of business, technology, activism, and entertainment. Things aren’t any less chaotic in the Marvel Universe. In the wake of huge conflicts like Secret Wars and Civil War II, faith in traditional superheroes has been somewhat shaken.

>The new series Champions, from writer Mark Waid and artist Humberto Ramos, features a group of young Marvel heroes - Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel, Miles Morales/Spider-Man, Sam Alexander/Nova, Amadeus Cho/The Hulk, Viv Vision, and a younger version of Scott Summers/Cyclops - splitting off from their Avengers forebears in order to change the world themselves. Although there will still be villains to fight and problems to solve with superpowers, Waid and Marvel say this team of Champions will channel more youthful activist energy than Marvel’s traditional superhero teams. Below, Waid and editor Tom Brevoort tell EW about the formation of the team, their unique goals, and whether they’re bracing for backlash similar to the recent Captain America controversy.

>ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How does it change the dynamic of a group to identify more as a youth group than a standard Avengers-style team?

>MARK WAID: 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. 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.

>You have some of Marvel’s buzziest characters here, like Kamala Khan and Miles Morales. How did you decide the lineup, and what is Scott Summers doing here?
>WAID: The first three (Ms. Marvel, Spider-Man, Nova) are the kids who quit the Avengers proper. That was an easy get. Those three, in and of themselves, form a nice little subteam. Their dynamic is great. They all show up in each other’s books, and even though they have their arguments and stress points, clearly they’re good together. That was the starting point. Tom, I believe it was you who suggested Amadeus Cho.

>TOM BREVOORT: The Amadeus Cho Hulk worked for me because one, it’s a very primary character. The Hulk is a very core Marvel Universe character and that kind of gives a little more legitimacy to what you’re doing. And anytime you have a Hulk in a group situation, it’s a more volatile situation, even if it’s an upbeat happy Hulk. We thought that was pretty good for potential drama and interest.

So basically Marvel Teen Titans or another incarnation of Young Avengers but with a different name. Looks like the ANAD experiment is over. I wonder how hard this title will be pushed. Without "Avengers" on the cover, I can't see this selling more than 30k. I assume something respectable at least.

>waid
>ramos

Oh dear.

>Ramos

>Cyke free of the benis.
Can he just get rid of the x logo?

>WAID: I think Viv Vision was also Tom’s suggestion, but that was a no-brainer because I love what Tom King has been doing in the Vision book. It’s my favorite Marvel comic. So the moment that suggestion was thrown out there, it was a lock for us. And man, I’m in that tiny sliver of people who think Scott Summers is the best X-Man there is. I’ve loved Scott Summers ever since I first started reading X-Men comics back in the mid-60s. So I campaigned quite heavily to get young Scott Summers on that team. My primary goal was for the doubters: By the end of issue 1, I can make you love Scott Summers.

>BREVOORT: This is the young Scott Summers pulled from the past. In my head, he’s kind of the first challenge the group faces. 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.

>How did you settle on the name Champions?

>Viv manages to survive past The Vision
color me amazed.

>BREVOORT: 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.

>Marvel comics always feel at least somewhat in-tune with youth feelings and movements. How does this fit into that tradition?
>WAID: The trick is that Marvel has always been to a large extent the world around us. It has to be evocative of the world around us, the feelings people are feeling. At the same time, it’s a superhero comic, so you take real-world concerns and you put a Marvel face on it.

>BREVOORT: The one we always point to is the first Civil War, which was clearly very much about the world in the wake of 9/11 and the issues that were on the minds of people about security verses the need for personal privacy, and turned that into a superhero story that was all about the superheroes and their concerns, but told in such a way that you got the metaphor and the analogy. We try to do that in just about everything we do and get to the heart of stuff that our readers care about and are invested in.

>With such real-world political context to this book, and in the wake of the Captain America controversy, are you worried about any kind of internet backlash?
>BREVOORT: I don’t think we were braced for the size of the reaction to the Captain America thing. We knew there’d be a reaction, but we thought it would be a comic reader reaction. I think we underestimated how much that was gonna carry out to a wider audience, particularly to an audience that wasn’t reading the material but was familiar with Cap from the films. So it leapfrogged from “Captain America is a secret operative of Hydra” to “Captain America is a Nazi” to “Captain America is an anti-Semite.” I don’t think we anticipated the specific bounds of that trajectory. Sometimes that happens, you put the material out in the world and people respond to it, and maybe not the reaction you expected.

>WAID: The tightrope is always trying to say something while never making anyone in your audience feel excluded. That’s a harder tightrope than you think sometimes, especially as you come across elaborate socio-political-gender issues. You’re running a tightrope there. I would rather err on the side of “let’s tell a good story,” and as long as we are keeping the integrity of the character straight, as long as we are not doing anything that deliberately belittles anyone of genuine beliefs or genuine faiths and instead look at these problems with a clear eye, that’s all we can do.

>What’s the fun part about playing around with such new, young characters?

>Vision's daughter isn't scrap metal
Color me surprised.
>no new costumes
Bah.

Wait, aren't Iceman, Angel, Hercules, Black Widow, and Ghost Rider still alive? The only dead Champion from the original team is Darkstar.

I like the team but i'm not quite fond with the writer, artist, title, logo or anything else.

>VIVIAN SURVIVES
YESSSSSS
We might get Nova taking her to the prom after all!

>Ramos
>champions

>WAID: Younger characters are just much more emotional. When you’re a kid, regardless of the age you grew up, everything is high opera. With hormones raging, you have to fight external and internal battles that you’ve never had to deal with before. Unlike Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, who have seen it all and been through it all, everything heightens the drama. I couldn’t have a better partner in crime in this than Humberto Ramos, with whom I did Impulse. If you need evidence that Humberto knows a little something about teenage superheroes, you don’t have to look very far. The two of us have a pretty unique handle on what makes teenage superheroes work. Again, it’s high emotion. No one in a Humberto panel, even if they’re in the background, no one is just standing there not doing anything. Somebody’s got their mouth wide enough to eat a banana sideways, and somebody else looks like they’re gonna explode from rage, and that’s just the way Humberto draws people. It’s awesome.

Original Source: ew.com/article/2016/07/05/marvel-champions


>Sam×Viv was teased for long

>bringing back The Champions name after having lost the rights for decades
>Viv is SOMEHOW surviving Vision (thanks for the spoiler)
>dat team roster
Well shit, this actually seems pretty great. OH WAIT
>Ramos on art
FUCKING WHY. REEEEEEEEE!

Btw, Champions is name of some other Marvel team/comic, right?

The "C" logo is pretty sweet if they put it on a costume.

Wait a second, if a robot can inpregnate a female.

Can a male inpregnate a female robot ?

Also Tyke x Vivían team here

So basically this the Marvel's answer to DC's Teen Titans but with legacy heroes?

Yeah, I believe they were a rebranded West Coast Avengers but I could be remembering that wrong

>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.
Last I checked the mutants weren't the ones doing the gassing.

I expected the new Wasp to join. Is she getting a solo? Because that wouldn't last more than 6 issues.

>Champions will channel more youthful activist energy than Marvel’s traditional superhero teams
>written by a middle-aged white man whose greatest work is literally "fuck what kids are into, classic superheroes will always be better" written 20 years ago.

Haha ok. I mean, this is basically the book that I WISH ANAD Avengers was so I'll probably be checking it out regardless. But man, I hope Waid sticks more to standard superheroing rather than "youth activism."

She's probably sticking with the Avengers

So what, did the trademark lapse on the Champions RPG or something? The last time Marvel tried to relaunch the Champions brand they ended up having to rename it The Order.

>Vision's psycho family is now part of the "cool" team-ups

This doesn't feel right

>It’s a strange time to be a young person
Oh god, is this going to be EAT IT, GRANDPA all over again?

>And man, I’m in that tiny sliver of people who think Scott Summers is the best X-Man there is. I’ve loved Scott Summers ever since I first started reading X-Men comics back in the mid-60s. So I campaigned quite heavily to get young Scott Summers on that team. My primary goal was for the doubters: By the end of issue 1, I can make you love Scott Summers.
GOD BLESS YOU WAID

Geez Kamala, who pissed in your cereal?

why doesn't ramos get a better colorist

See That other publisher is Heroic Publishing.

Wanda impregnated herself using magic

Marvel is committed to making sure they have the worst art for every book possible. Just look at New Avengers

...

i like sandoval, fuck you.

>Viv survives
Or maybe there's been a lack of communication between King and editors. I hope it's the latter.

>By the end of issue 1, I can make you love Scott Summers.

Well, good luck with that...

In the latest issue of The Vision Vin's fucked.

>implying editors will give single fuck about King's story now that he's DC

I haven't followed Marvel in a few years
Why is Scott a child now?

time travel shenanigans, rightclops is dead.

In the beginning, Agatha narrates that Viv won't survive.

>Teen O5 aren't gone yet

The Champions were a team from the 70s that was basically "let's take a bunch of c-listers we're not doing anything with and through them together for no rhyme or reason." After the book got cancelled, another publisher picked up the trademark which meant that Marvel could no longer use the name Champions (the same situation as to why Marvel can use Captain Marvel but DC can't). Apparently they've come to an agreement to share the trademark or something.

Weird cover. They all look like they're levitating.
Or holograms. WHERE ARE THEIR SHADOWS

>Waid
Eh
>Ramos
Into the trash
I'd have loved if Spencer Hastings did this desu.

So they're probably quitting because Tony's gone and Carol's taking the Avengers name with Steve, yeah?

I just want Rogue & Carol on the same team book.

But New Avengers has fantastic art.

Fuck off, this poster spoils the fuck out of Vision. Fuck you Marlel.

Based Waid!
Also I wanna see Tykeclops smashing some robo pussy, he's never tried robots before

Matt Fraction's summary of the Champions seems about right.

I think this is a good idea for a book though. The kids were by far the best part of ANAD Avengers and the adults were by far the worst part. Put Waid on the stuff he's good at.

What was wrong with young avengers? It has more selling power than Champions.

If people didn't buy it...
That's team with Hercules, Hulk and Angel, right? I dimly remember something about three of them in World War Hulk.

This kind of spoils Civil War II, doesn't it? We now know whoever wins basically does something to disenfranchise them with the younger generation, that or the kids realize both sides are fucking idiots and go "FUCK THIS NOISE"

Apparently the addition of Viv was Tom's idea

More like they won't give a shit about his story after issue 12 because he's leaving

>Mark Waid
>writing activist teenagers

It was:
>Hercules
>Iceman
>Black Widow
>Ghost Rider
>Angel

He caught the SJW bug, many writers at Marvel caught it.

Why is Marvel trying to push teen Cyclops?

>Wait, aren't Iceman, Angel, Hercules, Black Widow, and Ghost Rider still alive? The only dead Champion from the original team is Darkstar.
Pshh they are a bunch of old hacks. I MEAN look at them
> WHITE MALE FAGGOT
> WHITE MALE WEALTHY
> WHITE MALE PRIVILEGED RAPIST
> WHITE female CULTURAL APPROPRIATING MSMAN
> WHITE MALE RACIST/SEXIST/HOMOPHOBE/ISLAMIPHOPE (his stare burns your soul for your sins and doesn't take into account and weigh privilege si he's a PoS)

See the old group is filled with disgusting racsists. That is why we need this new cool activist team to show us the way to think so we can be cool progressives. Get with the time grandpa!

Weird lineup.

Man I love Ramos's art. Its cool to see that he's working on a Teen Titansesque book.

You should be going
>Mark Waid
>writing
Hang up your pen already dude

Is it just me, or Waid hasn't written a great team book, except for FF? But FF are like a single entity anyway. His JLA was just okay and with ANAD avengers being mediocre, why did they let him continue with another team book?

He did it before with his LOSH threeboot run years ago

TYKE Vivian for OTP, tyke'll be like :
>Screw flesh I've got metal now

Because the point is them going "fuck the Avengers." Using an Avengers name would defeat the point.

Also the Young Avengers aren't really a catch-all team name for a young team of Avengers. The Young Avengers are a very specific team. If you're not at least 50% made-up of the original roster then you're not the Young Avengers. It'd be like calling these guys The Runaways or New Warriors. If you don't have any of the actual runaways or new warriors on the team, then you're not the runaways or new warriors.

Remove Miles and I would love the fuck out of this line up.

They want their readers to forget the truth

>I love Ramos's art

Oh good, wasting no time shitting all over the Visions.

Didn't they do a Runaways team during SW that had nothing in common with the original team

What? didn't marvel lost the copyright to Champions? Still, better champions than shitvengers

Waid wanted to write him, breevort put viví and chulk

Waid is at his worst writing teenagers or social justice stuff, though. His Archie and current Avengers stuff is the worst and we don't even bring up Strange Fruit anymore it's just too embarrassing for everyone.

Secret Wars was alt-universe weirdness where they could do whatever they want.

Also, it still had Molly (a Runaway) and Cloak & Dagger (Runaway supporting characters) in it so it was at least not completely different. Molly was the only 616 person on the team, too.

Tom Breevoot, not Tom King.

VIV LIVES
I
V

L
I
V
E
S

Because most of the popular writers are concentrating on their own stuff right now.

Waid is pals with Quesada and Brevoort and he's not particularly good at creator-owned comics so they can give him assignments and know he'll turn out something decent, if rarely (if it's a team book anyway) great.

Well, Avengers sell like shit, so it doesn't matter.
As a matter of fact, this not being avengers book makes me more interested in supporting it.

Wrong Tom, they meant Brevoort not King.

One, the copyright on Champions has apparently lapsed so of course Marvel was going to scoop it back up

Two, if the book fails, it'll be easier to cancel and pin the blame on the brand rather than the creative team or characters

>Tyke
>no ángel or ice-man

I dislike the O5 but come on, what a wasted opportunity

...

I’m surprised Viv makes it through Vision. I was so sure all of them were going to die except for Vision

ALL ABORD HYPE TRAIN


Beyond excited for this book

Intradesting.
A Mutant, a Hulk, an Inhuman, a Nova and an Android. All of them sort of junior versions in some fashion to a predecessor. All of them very volatile entities but working together.

Cho has the brains and the muscle, Scott could have the leadership, Nova and Viv the potent and multiple use powers sets and whatever Miles and Kamala bring that isn't dwarfed by the others yes, yes, aside from sales and popularity. Close the reply box..

Color me interested.

Because whether they like it or not, X-men is still a valuable asset to Marvel. So they will take pieces and put them on teams while dissecting the franchise slowly. Same thing they did with F4. Johnny with the Inhumans, Ben with GotG and Reed and Sue and the FF off having multiverse adventures that are so unbelievably awesome, there's no comic series to portray it.

I like it too, and I think it would work better in a teen book (or someting with monsters) so I'm all for him in this.

This actually sounds pretty good. I'm looking forward to it.

>Kid Hitler
KEK

Oh, so it's comedy? Think I'll look to read it. Thanks senpai.

>Reed and Sue and the FF off having multiverse adventures that are so unbelievably awesome, there's no comic series to portray it.
I kinda thought that was gonna be a part of Ultimates to some extent, but clearly that's not the case.

welcome to corporate comics

>this not being avengers book makes me more interested in supporting it
Yeah, weirdly enough, I'm actually getting really hype for this while I couldn't give less of a fuck about ANAD Avengers.

Notice lack of Miles. Thank god

That's actually from Iceman's first mini-series.

>Android
She's a fucking SYNTHEZOID you biggoted cunt.

You like shit? Well Marvel is totally not going to disappoint you!