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Featuring the following heroine!
Namorita
Real name: Well, in a way it's Namora since she's a clone of her "mother," but she usually goes by Prentiss when she's on dry land. The name was adopted from her land-dwelling mentor (and former Namor flame) Betty Dean Prentiss; like most comic-book mentors (and most Namor flames, former or otherwise), Betty's eventual fate was to be murdered by a super-villain.
AKA: Nita. Little Barracuda (that's an affectionate term, believe it or not.) Kymaera.
First appearance: Sub-Mariner 50
Favorite quote: "Why did Terrax scream like that? And why did that punk risk suicide
by calling me 'babe' ?" (New Warriors 1. Battling for her life against a former herald of
Galactus, Namorita still has time to ponder the deeper questions in the cosmos.
The "punk," incidentally, was teammate Kid Nova).
Team affiliation: Namorita was forced by Byrrah, attempting to usurp the throne
of Atlantis, to seek out and betray her kinsman Namor. Deciding after several
adventures that the undersea life wasn't for her, she retreated to the surface world
and tried to live as a normal air-breathing teenager. Somehow, she couldn't avoid
getting tangled up with super-types like the Avengers and Ms. Marvel; giving in to
the inevitable like so many I-wanna-be-normal heroines, she became a founding
member of the New Warriors, where she eventually became involved with teammate
Nova. As well as her continuing membership with the New Warriors, Nita had a
long-lasting (and largely simultaneous) side-kick role in Namor's most recent series.
You had your choice of Namoritas while both series were running; you could pick up New
Warriors and read about no-nonsense, blunt, kick-fin Namorita; or you could peruse Namor
and see meek, deferential, thinks-Namor-kicks-too-much-fin Namorita. Two characters for the price of one! (Or one very schizophrenic character for the price of two magazines).
Powers: The clone of a cross-breed (or "halfling," as Atlanteans referred to the offspring born between surface dwellers and Homo mermaidus), Namorita inherited the Atlantean strength of her "mother," Namora, and like all Atlanteans, the ability to absorb massive doses of electricity. Further genetic engineering expressed Namora's latent mutant genes in her "offspring", which manifested in Namorita as ankle wings.
Favorite storyline: I'm not sure "favorite" is the word, but the disturbing tale presented in New Warriors 29-30 stands out. Traveling to Trans-Sabal to put an end to the bloody civil war, Nita and the New Warriors discover there are no correct choices, and why it is that other super-teams stay out of such conflicts.
Least favorite storyline: Oh, the whole "My Mother, Myself" clone business, which apparently came about because someone decided that offspring between humans and Atlanteans were sterile, which meant Namorita couldn't be Namora's daughter and an alternate origin had to be whipped up for Nita post-haste. Somewhere along the line Namorita's clone metabolism became unstable, turned her blue, gave her webbed hands and pupil-less eyes, and led her to adopt "Kymaera" as her new code name. Not learning from one cloning mistake, Marvel later went on to make a doozy with the whole Spider-clone mess...
