After their unfortunate obliteration in the opening pages of Civil War #1, the New Warriors are back.  In fact, it always looked as though Marvel were leaving the door wide open for a return. 

The delapidated team that they killed off was down to four members, one of whom survived, and one of whom was Microbe.  That left only Namorita and Night Thrasher as potentially deceased major characters.  And you could always do the New Warriors without the Sub-Mariner knock-off, or the guy who fought crime on a motorised skateboard.

But the New Warriors also had a more fundamental problem.  They were a bit of a non-concept.  Although their original series had a respectably long run, it was driven mainly by affection for the individual characters, and the appeal of the stories Fabian Nicieza was telling.  There was never an especially strong concept underpinning the team.  The last New Warriors tried to address this by repositioning them as bottom-rung superheroes filming a reality TV show, which was at least a concept, but didn't catch on.

Kevin Grevioux, the latest writer to tackle the group, takes a different tack.  His New Warriors seem to be a rebel group acting as a continuing resistance to the Superhuman Registration Act.  It's still not exactly a unique selling point, since New Avengers is in rather similar territory.  But the New Warriors are presented here as more of an underground youth movement than a conventional team, and that certainly gives a distinctive feel to the book.

In fact, since it's trying so hard not to be a straightforward superhero book, it's a little surprising to see Paco Medina on art.  Medina has always struck me as somebody whose bright, open artwork would be quite at home on an eminently mainstream superhero book, but for some reason he keeps ending up on slightly odd titles such as this book and New X-Men.

And the connection to previous incarnations of the New Warriors?  Er, invisible until the final page.  I have a suspicion that they're working on the assumption that the only thing most readers really know about the New Warriors is that they blew up Stamford and everyone in the Marvel Universe hates them - but that's good enough to establish where a group reusing the name would fit in.

The first issue is really just a slow build in which our lead character is recruited by the mysterious New Warriors, and finally learns who they are at the end.  That lead character is, of all people, Sofia from New Mutants.  Presumably.  She's identified as "Sofia", and as a former X-Men student who lost her powers - although all this is explained in terms which will be impenetrable to readers who aren't familiar with Marvel continuity.  (The fact that she's an ex-mutant is "explained" simply by having the New Warriors identify her as "an M who lost the X.")

However, somewhere along the line Sofia seems to have undergone a complete personality transplant and become a sassy inner city waitress.  It's so far removed from any previous depiction of the character that I re-read the story to double check whether it was definitely meant to be her.  I can't imagine why you'd bother bringing back a character as obscure as Sofia just to change her that drastically.  Beak seems to have undergone a similarly inexplicable change - not to mention that his de-powered human form looked completely different when we last saw him in Generation M.

Perhaps Grevioux simply has a tin ear for writing other people's characters.  Mind you, he writes pretty good dialogue on the whole, and his characters feel like they have a rapport with one another.  I can't begin to imagine how a small-scale diner supports a full-time staff of five, but the place has a nice family feel to it.

It's a slow start, but the book feels like it knows where it's going.  And for all its weird, frustrating elements, it feels like the book has a story it wants to tell, which is always encouraging.  I'll give it a chance to see how it settles down.

Rating: B

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