Meet Snowflake and Safespace, Marvel’s New ‘Woke’ Superheroes of the OK Boomer Age

A bunch of new superheroes have entered the fray to save the Marvel Universe, and the internet is confused, to say the least.

Marvel’s reboot of the New Heroes series has a pretty diverse cast: Screentime, an incel boy patched permanently into the world wide web; Trailblazer, a girl with a magical backpack, and B-Negative, a music-obsessed living vampire.

And then there are two characters that have stunned comic fans – and these people have seen a lot of weird stuff.

They are Snowflake and Safespace (those are real names and not ridicule). Snowflake is apparently a genderfluid whose preferred pronouns are “they/them”. *They* wield crystallised snowlake-shaped shurikens, while *their* twin brother Safespace, described as a “stereotypical jock”, is able to create force fields – but only when he’s protecting somebody else.

The psychic twins are “hyper aware of modern culture and optics”, and use their powers as “a post-ironic meditation on using violence to combat bullying”, Marvel explained.

The new New Warriors are “teens fighting against labels that have been put on them,” said writer Daniel Kibblesmith, who created the line-up together with artist Luciano Vecchio. “It’s this idea that these are terms that get thrown around on the internet that they don’t see as derogatory to take those words and wear them as badges of honour.”

“Every New Warriors comic has always felt like a reflection of the year that it came out. And I don’t think we’re worried about being dated.”

However woke the new superheroes may be, they’ve caused some unflattering chatter on the internet, including in the LGBTQ+ community.

“I thought this was a parody at first,” mused games journalist Ian Miles Cheong.

“Marvel has officially turned into a parody of themselves,” lamented another commenter. “Marvel knows comics are circling the drain, so they figured they might as well go all in.”

One cartoonist proposed a pair of satirical cisgender superheroes for Snowflake and Safespace: Privilege and Essentia.

This might not Marvel’s only contribution to much-sought diversity in comics. In January, the company announced it would feature a transgender hero in an upcoming movie.