It's another very quiet week, so we might as well check in on the Annihilation crossover, now up to part four.  This time, it's Nova, wheeled out for yet another relaunch.

Here's the thing about Nova.  He's not very interesting.  He has a loyal fanbase who happened to enjoy his 1970s series at the time, and another one who enjoyed his long run in New Warriors.  But really, there's not much to the character.  His powers are generic.  His origin story - dying alien crashes on earth and gives out superpowers so random bystander can take his place in the Nova Corps - is a shameless lift from Green Lantern.  Even the boy-next-door schtick of his 1970s series is basically a stock superhero character type, done much more successfully by early Spider-Man.

When you get down to it, Nova is an bunch of stock genre elements held together with staples.  True enough, decent stories have been done with him in the past, but that doesn't actually make him into a particularly compelling or original concept.  The world doesn't need a Nova comic.  The world doesn't really need Nova.  We've got a hundred more just like him.

But hey, he's in the back catalogue, and he's got a fanbase of sorts, so Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning land the assignment of revamping him once again.  The rest of the Nova Corps were mercifully killed off in Annihilation: Prologue - I say "mercifully" because they had become an embarrassingly blatant clone of the Green Lantern Corps - leaving Nova with a relatively fresh start.  However, this story still has to deal with everyone else getting killed, so it's basically an issue of Nova being appalled, and having to rescue the Xandarian Worldmind.

The basic concept is that Nova ends up with the powers of all the Nova Corps, since nobody else is using them, and he can draw on all the power himself. But the power is driving him mad, so he randomly attacks a few villains.  It's evidently not a permanent status quo change and I have a sinking feeling that I see where this is heading: a new Nova Corps, leaving us back where we started only with a modicum of tinkering.  I really hope that isn't what they have in mind, because Nova really calls for more of a ground up rewrite.  But we're not exactly distancing ourselves from the core idea here.  There's an extra-spiky revamp of the costume, but it's really just tweaked to make it slightly more ugly.

Judged purely as a throwaway story, it's actually alright; the creators do a good job selling the destruction of Xandar as a massive event and playing Nova as appropriately traumatised, while still getting to the point in the course of the first issue.  It's perfectly entertaining so far as it goes.  It just doesn't really come across as a fresh start for the character.

Rating: B

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