Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Character Case File #506: Namorita

I’ve been reading the new Namor series (or mini-series…probably mini-series) over on Marvel Unlimited recently, and something occurred to me:  I haven’t seen Namor’s cousin Namorita in a while.  She was big enough in the 90s, serving as Namor’s sidekick and one of the original members of the New Warriors team.  So what happened to her?

I have a theory…

Namorita “Nita” Prentiss first appeared in Sub-Mariner #50 in June of 1972.  She was created by writer/artist Bill Everett who had, back in the Golden Age, also created Namor.  Namorita was the daughter of Namor’s first cousin Namora, sort of.  See, Namora was another Atlantean-human hybrid like Namor, but her mother was the human and her father was the Atlantean, unlike Namor.  Anyway, she and her husband were having trouble having kids, so Namora went to an exiled Atlantean scientist to see if he could clone Namora a child.  Namora, like Namor, had superhuman strength and pink skin, but unlike Namor, Namora lacked ankle wings and couldn’t fly, but the scientist managed to “fix” that in the clone daughter that Namora carried to term as a normal pregnancy and named “Namorita” because Atlanteans aren’t very creative when it comes to naming people.

Namora’s husband would die not long after Namorita’s birth, and Namora herself would die from a poisoning when she and a romantic rival with less scruples were after the same undersea prince.  Namor didn’t think he would make much of a parent and passed his cousin’s daughter–it looks like hardly anyone knew Namorita was a clone–off to an air-breathing friend, Betty Prentiss, hence Namorita’s last name.  Betty would likewise be killed later on, and Namorita would bounce around a bit, finding a minor role in the Atlantis Attacks crossover, and finally, she joined the New Warriors.

Actually, her joining the New Warriors was a bit weird.  Most of the team was made up of lesser-known or forgotten teen heroes, and Namorita (or maybe Speedball) was arguably the best-known character on the team, and she wasn’t even among the young heroes Night Thrasher was sort of blackmailing or manipulating to join his new squad.  Instead, she (and Speedball) just happened to be there at the site of the team’s first mission, and as such, she (and Speedball) ended up joining anyway.

As a New Warrior, things went pretty well for Namorita.  OK, at one point she turned blue and got a bit more fish-like, but she did establish a nice romance with teammate Nova that lasted for a while there.   She and Nova would eventually break-up when she grew some weird boils and he didn’t react the right way quickly enough–Atlantean hybrids do tend to be a wee bit temperamental–but after a shower, she returned to her original look with some new powers including a toxic secretion and the ability to turn transparent.  She and Nova would eventually become friends again, but the relationship was over.

Then she ended up dying after someone decided the New Warriors would of course host a reality show, the thing that set off the superhero Civil War, but she’d be resurrected in a later cosmic storyline when a time-displaced Nova found a time-displaced Namorita and managed to bring her to the present.  So, she’s not dead.  She’s back.  Where is she these days?

I have a theory:  she was replaced.  Sort of.

See, around 2006, Marvel released a new bunch of mini-series featuring forgotten Marvel characters from the 50s, namely the Agents of Atlas, and that team featured a character that had a pretty close relationship to Namorita, namely her supposedly dead mother Namora.

This character has been popping up in various Marvel Comics in a role that, in the past, might have gone to Namorita.  Heck, Namora was even in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as played by actress Mabel Cadena.

Basically, if Namorita is a clone, Marvel just went back to the original.

Well, maybe Nita will be back when Marvel does another New Warriors revival.