THE NEW UNIVERSE AT 40: A LOOK BACK AT MARVEL’S UNWANTED RELATIVE Part 3

 

THE NEW UNIVERSE AT 40: A LOOK BACK AT MARVEL’S UNWANTED RELATIVE

BY MICHAEL HOSKIN

PART 3: A LIMITED SERIES

In 1989, each of the four New Universe titles concluded with Marvel’s standard limited series banner: “#32 of a 32-issue limited series” on Justice, D.P.7 and Psi-Force and “#19 of a 19-issue limited series” on the Star Brand. “We did that on purpose, for fun,” recalled Fabian Nicieza. The four-issue prestige format series The War by Doug Murray and Tom Morgan followed, depicting World War III and drawing the New Universe to a conclusion.

All four New Universe writers had known the end of the imprint was near. “I think that knowing you are going to end something not only gives you the opportunity, but I believe gives you the responsibility to your audience, to give them some semblance of closure,” Fabian Nicieza said. Psi-Force #32 opened with a text piece, written as a Playboy interview with the team’s leader Wayne Tucker set in 1998. “Me being me,” Fabian explained, “I also wanted to give them a glimpse of everything they were missing, ‘you rat bastards.’”

Mackie used similar words: “We wanted to give a sense that there was a plan and we wanted to go out the way we wanted to.”

Peter David closed out Justice by placing John Tensen in the position of judge to a paranormal community. John Byrne concluded the Star Brand by revealing Ken Connell, the Old Man and Ken’s son, the Starchild, were all the same person and together were the living embodiment of the Star Brand. Mark Gruenwald and Paul Ryan (the only team intact from the New Universe’s launch) closed D.P.7 with the cast meeting a paranormal who could remove their parabilities, offering them normal lives; as a sign of the cast’s changes since the launch, most of them realized they preferred being paranormals.

Paul Ryan said of D.P.7, “Mark and I had many more stories to tell. Mark and I had discussed a D.P.7 miniseries or graphic novel. … I think the way we finished the last issue of D.P.7 was nicely done. We started the series with seven characters. In the last panel of issue #32, seven characters, united, walk into history. Thanks, Mark. It was a great run.”

The Slings & Arrows Comic Guide called Byrne’s the Star Brand, “A sad end to a potentially strong series.” Comparing Nicieza’s Psi-Force to Fingeroth’s they said it was on a “downhill direction,” saying “The kids’ streetwise maturity with their powers dissolves any charm of the earlier issues, where tentative fumblings often produced unpredictable results.” To the follow-up The War they wrote, “It’s a perfunctory series dragged on too long and published in an unnecessarily expensive format in the hope of parting the last dollars out of the few remaining New Universe fans.”

Slings & Arrows gave positive reviews to D.P.7 from start to finish; although they called Justice “A memorable disaster area,” they said the Peter David issues were “quite readable – even funny if you followed the title from the beginning. Lee Weeks and Mike Gustovich’s art is clear and dynamic.”

“For some reason,” wrote David Peattie in Amazing Heroes, “everything associated with the New Universe came to be regarded as a synonym for ‘awful,’ and I’ve never understood why.” Despite Peattie’s regard for the New Universe, he found the sudden climax of all four titles abrupt and unfulfilling. “I had grown accustomed to having events in the New U proceed at a more leisurely pace, and then taking a month or two more to sort of get used to them before the next big event was launched.” Peattie also championed the characterization in the imprint. “From the very start of the New Universe, Marvel had told us that their intent was to make these characters as real as possible, and this is one of the ways in which they frequently did so. I want to give a special mention to D.P.7 for this, as Mark Gruenwald seemed to always be more concerned with the who and why rather than the what and how of his stories.”

In reviewing the War for Amazing Heroes, Adam-Troy Castro judged the New Universe as a whole: “Marvel’s much-maligned New Universe actually wasn’t that bad an idea. Few of its creators seemed to grasp the possibilities inherent in Jim Shooter’s essential concept: seeing month-by-month how super-powered characters would actually behave (as opposed to the way readers of super-hero comics usually see them behave).” Castro spotlighted D.P.7 and Star Brand as the best of the imprint. As for the War itself, Castro singled out a scene in which the newly assigned officer Major Blizzard dressed-down Jack Magniconte for dressing in a super-hero costume and ordered him to wear a standard Army uniform. “As rarely as the New Universe worked,” Castro wrote, “it worked because of scenes like that.”

Looking back in 2013 for the AV Club, Jason Heller wrote:

“Conceptually, The New Universe was flawed from the get-go. Shooter described The New Universe glowingly as being “the world outside your window”—in other words, it was going to be utterly like the real world, only with the addition of these few choice, carefully introduced fantastical elements. Only that’s total bullshit. A phenomenon called ‘The White Event’—basically a three-second whiteout of reality that permeates the multiverse—is the point in 1986 when our universe splits from The New Universe. That wound up happening after the first three issues of these eight series, but it was never fully realized during their original runs. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had. Syncing all the titles up to real-time chronology is a terrible idea, as it severely hampers what a writer can do in an ongoing series. In the long run, a superhero who ages with his readers is not going to fly. Realism is one thing, and escapism is another—and that disconnect does not make for good superhero comics. It’s easier to suspend your disbelief when there’s a fundamental level of unreality in the background.”

“I thought the New Universe was a brilliant concept for a universe and I will miss it greatly,” Mark Gruenwald wrote in his Mark’s Remarks column:

“I think there were a number of factors that account for the New U never quite catching on with Marveldom in a big way. Let's begin with the perhaps dubious wisdom of Marvel, a company known for its unified fictional universe, coming out with a parallel cosmos at all. The birth of the New Universe was hyped to be a way to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Marvel Universe, but it must be admitted that establishing a rival cosmos is a somewhat strange way to celebrate a cosmos.”

Gruenwald also feared that:

“…the New U was too different, too off the beaten track, for its own good-- namely, appeal to a mass audience. The New U approach to super-heroic fiction was to question and rethink every single aspect of the super hero experience, from the origin of super-powers, to the way they worked, to the necessity of costumes and codenames, to the motivation to fight crime, and so on. Certain books, when grappling with these things, came up with pretty offbeat answers-- namely, no costumes, infrequent use of codenames, and crimefighting as a rare exception to the paranormal way of life. Maybe this was too revolutionary, and readers prefer costumes, codenames, and simple motivations such as ‘He’s bad, I’m good, that makes it my duty to stop him.’ Paul Ryan’s and my DP7 were probably the worst offenders of the super hero conventions. In the 32-issue run, there are but a mere handful of archetypal hero-villain face-offs. We were making stories about people with super-powers, not about super heroes. STARBRAND was equally unconventional in its own way. If you were into Good vs. Evil, the New U was not for you.”

“STUCK IN THE NEW UNIVERSE”

Mark Gruenwald and Paul Ryan went directly from D.P.7 into Quasar, their third consecutive series together. Ryan snuck cameos by women who looked remarkably like D.P.7’s Stephanie Harrington and Charlotte Beck into Quasar #4. When Ryan moved on to Avengers and Avengers West Coast, he snuck D.P.7 characters into the backgrounds of those titles as well.

Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz reunited on Thor and even included references to a Marvel Universe version of the New York Smashers, the football team from Kickers, Inc. Peter David and Lee Weeks would eventually reteam on Incredible Hulk.

Fabian Nicieza moved on to New Warriors, where he was reunited with Mark Bagley; their editor, on New Warriors? Former Psi-Force writer Danny Fingeroth. Indeed, Nicieza’s Psi-Force can be seen as a precursor to ideas that were received more successfully in New Warriors. Both were team books of young superpowered people whose idealism (bordering on naivete) results in them inadvertently causing crises. Psi-Force’s increased militarism and gradual loss of innocence can also be seen as a predecessor to Nicieza’s X-Force, with the corrupting influence of the paramilitary Medusa Web similar to that of Cable. Nicieza would also collaborate with Ron Lim again, such as on the series Cable & Deadpool.

Then there was Howard Mackie and John Byrne, who teamed together again as the co-writers of the Spider-Man franchise in 1999 – but it proved a disaster that diminished both men’s careers.

Gruenwald recalled that at the time the New Universe ceased publishing:

“There was a movement afloat at the time to simply incorporate or resurrect the best of the New U’ers in the mainstream Marvel Universe, but I was dead set against it, issuing a memo restricting all New U usage. My reasoning was that we took such pains to keep the New U discrete from the Marvel U during its lifetime – ensuring that the fundamental operating premises were so separate from one another – that it would be difficult to make a case that the two universes were in the same multiverse.”

Despite that memo, the New Universe would indeed be brought into contact with the New Universe, starting with Gruenwald himself, who sent his character Quasar there in Quasar #31, two years after the New Universe’s end. “What am I: A hypocrite, a person with one set of rules governing the rest of the world and another for myself?” Gruenwald asked rhetorically. Gruenwald took pains in that issue to establish the New Universe existed withing the Omniverse, a concept dating back to Gruenwald’s fandom days (Omniverse was also the name of his 1970s fanzine) and he insisted it was still separate from the Marvel multiverse. Indeed, Gruenwald explained in his ‘Mark’s Remarks’ column that his original concept had been for Quasar to meet the character Mighty Mouse while Marvel had the character licensed, “But by the time I was ready, MIGHTY MOUSE had been canceled and the whole thing fell through. So I was forced to think of another preposterous multiverse Quas could find himself in. That’s when I proposed the New Universe.”

Still, despite Gruenwald’s edict, Peter David was able to bring back John Tensen from Justice in the pages of Spider-Man 2099 – although he disguised him under the moniker ‘Net Prophet’ (among the more pun-tastic of David’s creations).

Jim Shooter himself eventually resurfaced as editor-in-chief of the line of Valiant comics. Shooter felt his work on Valiant was what the New Universe should have been. “In essence, we did the same thing with the Valiant universe. I took that same idea and did it there.” Indeed, Shooter’s description of the Valiant comics universe resembles his first editorial about the New Universe:

“The Valiant universe had one conceit that was not normal. There were powers of the mind that were released. Everything about that universe was powers of the mind. Nobody had any horns or wings while I was there. There was no Atlantis under the sea. It was all this world, this planet. You could go to the streets where these people lived. And done well, it worked.”

Of Jim Shooter’s work for Valiant, he and Barry Windsor-Smith’s Solar Man of the Atom certainly invited comparisons to Star Brand – not only in the lead character, a common man burdened with immense power – but a series that even included scenes of the hero struggling to navigate while flying!

Fabian Nicieza – who later became editor-in-chief of Valiant – opined that “Valiant is what he [Shooter] wanted the New Universe to be, but it was never going to work under the Marvel publishing program the way it did under Valiant.”

In 1998, Nicieza and Dan Slott co-wrote Valiant’s Troublemakers #16, in which a reporter toured from person-to-person, interviewing them about the series’ teenaged protagonists and their encounters with same. It was rather similar to Nicieza’s Psi-Force #26, in which journalist Andrew Chaser served as the point-of-view character. So similar, in fact, that Nicieza and Slott simply used Andrew Chaser, slipping the obscure New Universe character into Valiant with apparently no notice taken by Marvel!

In 1994, Gruenwald went back to the New Universe as part of a crossover set up in Quasar dubbed Starblast in which a team of extraterrestrial scavengers learn of the Star Brand and seek out the New Universe in the hopes of acquiring it for themselves. Gruenwald explained:

“That was the great paradox of the STARBRAND series. On one hand, the Starbrand was the most powerful weapon in the universe, so powerful that everybody in the universe would want it.  But it was established that there were no aliens in the New Universe – there was only the world outside your window, where aliens were just tabloid fabrications. So here was a premise that could never be brought to fruition… in the New Universe. But in the Marvel Universe – whooie!”

Unfortunately, Starblast proved a failure and even Quasar was cancelled just three months after the crossover ended.

It took another decade for Marvel to seriously acknowledge the New Universe (outside of a brief Star Brand cameo in Nicieza’s Gambit). In the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Alternate Universes 2005, the New Universe received its first appearance in Marvel’s in-house reference guide, which normally concerned itself only with the “mainstream” Marvel Universe. As the Marvel Universe was dubbed Earth-616, the New Universe was dubbed there, “Earth-148611.” It was given such a ridiculously large number to suggest it was still remote from the Marvel Multiverse.

That same year, writer Tony Bedard and artist Paul Pelletier wrote a storyline in Exiles called “World Tour” in which the characters visited a version of the New Universe; that universe’s version of Justice wound up entering an alternate 2099 timeline, in a playful reference to Peter David’s Spider-Man 2099. Marvel’s creators had remembered the New Universe existed, just in time for its 20^th anniversary.

Concluded in Part 4: The New Universe celebrates 20 years with Untold Tales and newuniversal! Jonathan Hickman brings another White Event and Squadron Supreme celebrates the 30^th anniversary by obliterating everything!