Years before the Marvel Cinematic Universe got obscure characters mainstream attention, Marvel’s “cosmic” heroes and villains in the comics developed a cult following beyond what The X-Men or Spider-Man were up to. So, when some of these cosmic heroes got called up to the big leagues of the MCU and James Gunn started developing his Guardians Of The Galaxy movie, it seemed like just a matter of time before their colleague Richard Rider, a.k.a. Nova, a.k.a. The Human Rocket, a.k.a. Nova Prime got a chance in the spotlight as well.
And here we are, just eight breezy years later (they flew right by!), and Marvel Studios is finally doing something with Nova. That’s the good news! The bad news is that we have no idea what that something is, just that Deadline has revealed that Moon Knight writer Sabir Pirzada is involved. It could be a movie, it could be a TV show, it could be an… animated series or something. We don’t even know which Nova it might be about, since there are two equally viable options that would both make sense, given the direction the MCU is currently going in.
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The first, and arguably best, option is the aforementioned Richard Rider. In the comics, Rider was originally a member of the young super-team The New Warriors, but his star-making turn was in the first Annihilation event when he fought extra-dimensional bug monsters alongside some other space-themed characters you might have heard of like Gamora, Drax, and Peter Quill. Later, he and Peter Quill fought Thanos in a place called the Canververse where nothing could ever die, and it was very cool.
The other option is a kid named Sam Alexander, who got Nova’s powers while Richard Rider was in the Cancerverse. Like the other Nova, he has a helmet that puts him in contact with a super-intelligent computer called Worldmind and gives him the ability to fly really fast and shoot lasers from his fists. Unlike Richard Rider, he’s a kid who is still feeling his way through how to become a superhero, and perhaps most importantly, he joins a super-team called The Champions with Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan.
Considering that Kamala is now getting her own solo show and Disney+’s MCU projects have been steadily introducing various younger heroes, the Sam Alexander version of Nova might be the more obvious choice—plus, introducing him would make it easy to also introduce Richard Rider and come up with some explanation for why Richard Rider wasn’t around during the Thanos snap or any of the other big MCU events that have happened.
But whatever happens: Nova is coming! Finally!
