On March 17, the Marvel Entertainment YouTube channel shared a trailer for their new comic run of the New Warriors with new characters that were met with extreme hate. It currently has 182,000 dislikes as of right now and only 3,800 likes. If you look through YouTube you can see many content creators commenting on the new characters.

Unfortunately, the New Warriors design and characters are terrible from a design standpoint and seem very baity for brownie points for ‘representation.’ 

The first character we are introduced to is Trailblazer. She is a foster kid who has a magical backpack that opens into a pocket dimension that brings out items of need or just random objects. That’s it! No other abilities, compared to the other characters.

Her design is better than others, but she doesn’t look like a superhero from first glance. When I look at her I see a normal teenager. Trailblazer is literally wearing only a hoodie while everyone else is wearing superhero costumes. She looks like dora but older. 

The second character introduced is Screentime, who is the creator’s, honestly, sad attempt to make the ‘modern’ teen. “A Meme-Obsessed super teen,” the official bio on Marvel’s website said. “Whose brain became connected to the internet after becoming exposed to his grandfather’s “experimental internet gas.” Internet gas, what even is that?

Even his superhero name is trying to comment on something with the bio saying that screentime as a word is restrictive, but Screentime has unlimited time!

He feels like a person of an older generation trying to make what they believe is someone from a Z-generation (1997-2012), and his design looks like a Cyclops(member of the X-Men who has red visors) and a Ben 10 rip off. 

The main characters that are causing the most controversy are two characters who are superhero twins named Snowflake and Safespace! May I repeat, Snowflake and Safespace, and this was intentional. On their bio on the official Marvel website it says “They’re hyper aware of modern culture and optics, and they see their Super Heroics as “a post-ironic meditation on using violence to combat bullying.”

For those who don’t know, a Snowflake in pop culture is someone who is sensitive and easily triggered who also believes that they deserve special treatment for their ‘unique’ characteristics.  A Safespace means is somewhere a person or a category of people who feel safe in a place that isn’t exposed to discrimination, criticism, etc.  

Snowflake is non-binary with the power of ice shurikens, and Safespace has the power to create shields to protect other people and not himself. These two have an array of problems, not to mention that their respective bright blue and pink color schemes are sore for the eyes and they just look like recolors of each other. 

The last hero mentioned in the trailer was B-Negative who is, in my opinion, the best character, design and character wise, even though the bar is set pretty low. Apparently, B-Negative had a blood transfusion from Michael Morbius, Marvel’s vampiric like Anti-Hero, and started to develop powers like Morbius and his appearance changed to be more vampiric. B-Negative’s character and what he does is shrouded in mystery, but he likes music and stuff from the 90s and 2000s. 

Design-wise, his color scheme actually works, unlike other characters. And, the balance between what looks like fuschia pink and black works well. The only problem I have is that the design is definitely pandering to the edgy and goth crowd, just like how the other characters are pandering to their own crowds. 

Though representation is very important in any kind of media, instead of making multi-dimensional characters Marvel makes ones that have one character trait. They assign them to a race, gender, sexuality and body type but do not develop them any further. From just the design and descriptions of these characters it is very obvious that Marvel is trying to make everyone ‘happy.’

Even though the comic book industry is starting to die fast, Marvel is not coming up with good ideas to try to make up profit. I can hope that this comic surprises me, but right now the future of Marvel comics is not looking good.