Then known as the Star, he was an alien doctor named Denteen who found a spaceship containing pills which gave him a different superhuman power every five minutes.

In issue #6, Wolfman and writer Len Wein reimagined the character, now a prisoner named Kraken Roo who turns out to become the superhero Black Nova.

Years later, Wolfman (working for Marvel Comics) and artist John Romita Sr. tweaked the design of the character's uniform and created a new origin story.

[2] Wolfman intended the teenage character to be an homage to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's Spider-Man, down to his humble working-class roots and alliterative alter-ego.

[6] Nova appears in a Guardians of the Galaxy storyline running from August to October 2014, an Original Sin tie-in featuring a flashback to events immediately following The Thanos Imperative.

[7] When the last surviving member of the planet Xandar's elite Nova Corps, Rhomann Dey, is dying, he selects New York high school student Richard Rider to replace him.

Calling himself Nova, Rider becomes a superhero, fighting costumed supervillains such as the Condor, Powerhouse,[9] Diamondhead,[10] the Corruptor,[11] and the Sphinx,[12] and teaming with heroes such as Spider-Man[13] and Thor.

[14] Rider discovers Dey's spaceship orbiting Earth and uses it to journey to Xandar with Doctor Sun, Powerhouse, Comet, the Crimebuster and the Sphinx,[15] where they join the Xandarians' war against the Skrulls.

[18] With the help of Night Thrasher, Rider regains his powers and joins the New Warriors superhero team,[19] where he becomes close friends with Speedball.

[22] Assigned to Earth, Rider is confronted with the challenge of balancing dual lives as a member of both the Nova Corps and the New Warriors.

[27] Rider leaves the group when he is summoned to Xandar alongside the entire Nova Corps, which has been fully mobilized to respond to the Annihilation Wave, a force from the Negative Zone led by Annihilus.

He leads a small team into the Wave's conquered territory and eventually engages Annihilus in personal combat, killing him.

The scientists of the facility extract the Worldmind from his brain and use the supercomputer to jump-start a project known as the quantum flask, which restores Quasar to life.

[38] A Skrull warship is about to attack Project Pegasus but is destroyed by a band of alien Nova Centurions who then declare their allegiance to Rider.

Ego is removed as a Centurion and Rider regains his Nova Prime status, but not before most of the new recruits are slaughtered by the Shi'ar Imperial Guard.

[44] Shortly after this mission, Nova is called away to deal with the events of The Thanos Imperative and Steve Rogers confirms he has left the team.

[48] Catching up to the alternate Quasar, Rider returns to the Fault to see the Universal Church of Truth rip it wide open.

Rider charges the Cube with the Nova Force to create a doorway for Star-Lord, intending to remain behind and keep Thanos from escaping too.

Using the Nova Force, Rider manages to escape the Cancerverse, returns to Earth to visit his mother,[53] and learns that his father has died.

In addition, the uniform has a built-in life support function that can sustain Rider under the most extreme environmental conditions, including acting as a life-support suit by locking off the mouth and eyes of the helmet.

Among these features are an electromagnetic discharge that can nullify gravity and an interface to stargates that allow him to enter hyperspace, where he can move at velocities exceeding the speed of light.

With the Worldmind and the Nova Force, Rider possesses tremendously augmented strength and durability as well as nearly limitless quantities of energy.

[64] The Worldmind consists of the entire culture and history of Xandar as well as the individual minds of thousands of years of dead Xandarians.

The consensus voice of the Worldmind can speak directly to Rider, helping him to control the Nova Force, fight enemies, sense energy, interface with electronics, and protect against psionic abilities.

Unable to overcome his fear and horror of the slaughter occurring around him, Nova fails to act in his own defense when Spider-Man attacks him.

Nova panics further when Nick Fury formulates a desperate last stand defense, citing that this was nothing like previous global threats; and that the world was as good as dead.

[volume & issue needed] As a zombie, he participates in a failed attack on Doctor Doom's castle, in an effort to get at the humans inside.

His attitude toward Spider-Girl is often arrogant and dismissive, bordering on the contemptuous; but later he becomes impressed by her, after her surviving a battle against the Avengers' enemy Seth.

[82] Nova appears as the sole Caucasian member of a team of Avengers from a parallel reality where the Middle East is the dominant superpower.

In March 2022, Marvel Studios was revealed to be developing a project featuring Richard Rider / Nova with Sabir Pirzada as writer.