I pride myself on being someone who can pick obscure characters out of crowd shots, but the group of bad guys that recently debuted in the pages of New Avengers may take the cake for the most obscure deep cuts resurrected for the modern age. Assembled by The Maker --- Reed Richards of Earth 1610 --- The New Revengers highlight how gloriously bizarre superhero comics can be, and the team contains two characters that even I have never heard of.

The team first showed up briefly in New Avengers #7 by Al Ewing and J. Cassara, but got more of a spotlight in this week's New Avengers #10 by Ewing and Paco Medina where the characters were given handy nameplates, which meant I could do some digging and get you all up to speed on the hottest new team of bad guys in comics.

Asti is apparently a minor Doctor Strange villain with four appearances to its name prior to New Avengers, and is mostly a minion for a bigger bad, Dormammu. Skar is traditionally a Killraven foe, an android created by the Martians who goes around in a thirty-foot tripod known as the Devil’s Marauder. Killraven’s adventures are generally depicted in an alternate universe, and there is a 616 version of Skar created by Mark Gruenwald who looks exactly the same with no ties to the red planet, but the caption here specifies “Weapon of Mars,” so I’m inclined to lean into the former.

Also on the team is Paibok The Power Skrull, an enemy of the Fantastic Four who is fairly self-explanatory. Angar The Screamer is a '70s-looking social activist with augmented vocal chords capable of reaching “hypersound,” and Vermin is a Spider-Man villain that was mutated into a humanoid rat and lives in the sewers. Those three, bizarrely, are probably among the team's bigger names.

Fans of Daredevil in the mid-2000s might recognise Angela Del Toro, AKA White Tiger, as a hero, but she was killed and resurrected by The Hand during the Shadowland crossover and recently stole the power of The White Tiger back from her teenage aunt Aya. OMNITRONICUS is the latest incarnation of The Maker’s AI, formerly known as City, and stands for Organo-Mechanic Nexus-Iterated Techno-Radical Organizational Networked Intelligent Computer Unit System.

The New Revengers certainly seem like a fierce and formidable team, but keep in mind that the New Avengers have Squirrel Girl as a member, so I don’t see the eventual clash of teams going the way of the bad guys.