Richard Rider is just your average teenager. Not smart enough to get in with that crowd, not athletic enough to get in with the jocks, and not confident enough to accept things as they are. His inferiority complex starts to get to him, but then a dying alien selects him as successor to the Nova legacy, turning him into a superhero. In his first battle, he faces Zorr, a planetary conqueror who looks to restore his own world after it was consumed by Galactus.