Back in 2023, Marvel Comics debuted a new character to add to their already expansive array of webheads. Bailey Briggs, AKA Spider-Boy, is a young hero who was supposedly Spider-Man’s sidekick for years. But after being erased from existence and wiped from everyone’s memories, his “return” was the first time he’d ever actually appeared in the comics. He would go on to have his own line of comics where he’d team up with his mentor and Kidpool.

Spider-Boy is an example of a “legacy character.” Legacy characters refers to characters who either inherit the mantle of an existing character, or take on a new title as to have similar theming with an existing character. Take “Robin” for example: “Robin” is not a person, but rather a title given to whoever is Batman’s sidekick. Many people have donned the title of Robin, like Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake to name a few. It is a very common practice in comics, as it gives a chance to expand a character or symbol without having to necessarily replace anyone. It’s a clever way of passing the torch and allowing older characters to age up while brand new characters get a chance in the spotlight. 

Following the success of Spider-Boy, Marvel started a variant cover program in celebration of him, in which many artists imagined what it would be like if other heroes had a hypothetical,  non-canon sidekick like Spider-Boy. A year later, it was announced that a few of the characters from said cover program were being realized into full-fledged characters. Dubbed “The New Champions,” almost every member of the team comes from the program. While we don’t necessarily know how many of the characters from the program made it into the official Marvel canon, we are able to see a good number of them from the variant covers of New Champions #1.

The New Champions consist of:

• The new winged symbol of America, Liberty
• The youngest avatar of Cyttorak, Kid Juggernaut
• The new sliver of the moon, Moon Squire
• The protégé of the Scarlet Witch, Amaranth Hawlutt
• The freshest strand of the web, Spider-Boy 
• The Wakandan runaway with Midas’ touch, Gold Tiger
• The gamma-powered martial artist, Hulkette
• The derby girl Spirit of Vengeance, Fantasma
• The magnetic mystery, Magnetrix
• The card-magic connoisseur, Monte
• The magic spear-wielding warrior, Hellrune
• The planetary powerhouse, Cadet Marvel

There were plenty more characters featured in the variant cover line, such as unnamed legacy characters for Blade, The Thing, Iron Man, and Black Cat, all of which have yet to be shown in any media since their variant cover appearances. Whether or not they’ll make the jump to full comic reality or be left in the variant cover dust is currently unknown. 

A team of young heroes with parallels to existing characters, you ask? Doesn’t Marvel already have the Young Avengers and The Champions? Yes, and yes. It will be interesting to see how the teams overlap or intersect given they appear to occupy a similar space in the Marvel universe. Marvel does tend to group their characters by generations, and the young avengers are all young adults, whereas the New Champions are teenagers. Additionally, the Young Avengers are much more about being a found family and have distinct designs, whereas the New Champions are intentionally modeled off of existing characters. The Champions however, have much clearer similarities with the New Champions, as a lot of them are direct legacy characters to main avengers themselves. We can see from the cover art of New Champions #3 that there will be a direct conflict between the two champion teams. 

There was a bit of troubling news about the new line. Given that each character was created for a variant cover line, they all had different creators. The creator of Hellrune, Toni Infante, made a post on X (formerly Twitter) saying that she did not know her character became realized and was not credited in any way.

This was not good to hear, as the art industry has been dealing with an ongoing battle of big companies not valuing the work and efforts of their artists. Let’s hope this is a one off miscommunication that gets rectified and not the first step in a bad course of events. Artists like Infante deserve the recognition for the work that they put blood, sweat, and tears into.