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!

THE NEW UNIVERSE AT 40: A LOOK BACK AT MARVEL’S UNWANTED RELATIVE Part 1

 

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

PART 1: EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

INTRODUCTION

Marvel’s imprint the New Universe celebrates its 40^th anniversary this year as we approach June 24th, the date on which the first New Universe comics – Star Brand #1 and Spitfire and the Troubleshooters #1 – were released. It’s also the date upon which a mysterious flash of light in the sky – “the White Event” – established the creation of paranormals, one of the building blocks of the New Universe.

Yet Marvel, known for any flimsy excuse to celebrate an anniversary, is unlikely to produce much by way of celebratory material this year. Although the New Universe had – and maintains – its devotees, it was largely maligned at the time it began. However, recent appraisals of the imprint have been kind; you may be surprised to learn which comics were influenced by the New Universe’s brief lifespan!

According to Jim Shooter, the New Universe originated from an early 1985 meeting with Marvel’s publisher Jim Galton, who wanted to do something special to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of the publication of Fantastic Four #1 in 1986 (although Marvel had been publishing comics since 1939, the debut of the Fantastic Four was considered the beginning of the Marvel Universe). Recalling these events in a 2000 interview, Shooter remembered suggesting, “You could start everything over from number one, like the Marvel universe reborn. Like the anniversary in May or June, all the titles wrap up the month before and start again the next month. Sort of like Marvel, 2nd edition, do it right and really make that spectacular.” Galton balked at cancelling the entire line.

Shooter moved on to his second idea, claiming in retrospect that it was his actual intent all along: “Then let's celebrate the birth of a universe with the birth of another universe.” From that came the New Universe.

Shooter claimed he was given a $120,000 budget to develop the New Universe and turned it over to his executive editor, Tom DeFalco. When he checked up on DeFalco months later, he found little work had been done and what had been developed wasn’t what he’d envisioned. Shooter wrested back control over the project, but claimed his original sky-high budget was clawed back, limiting what they could afford to do with the imprint; Marvel’s corporate owners had taken the company private and were preparing to sell it off; they still wanted the New Universe to be published, but they wanted to do it as cheaply as possible.

There were apparently some calls to freelancers to contribute ideas for the New Universe; Peter B. Gillis developed his concept Strikeforce: Morituri for the New Universe, but it was ultimately published outside the imprint. Another of Gillis’ proposals, Chrome, he published with the independent publisher Hot Comics during the same summer as the New Universe launch. Apparently, another concept that DeFalco had considered was Steve Ditko’s Speedball, but it was omitted from the New Universe and wouldn’t see publication until after Jim Shooter had left Marvel.

It fell to Marvel staffers to flesh out the New Universe under Shooter’s directions. Shooter placed Eliot R. Brown in charge as editor. “He couldn’t hire a brand-new editor and he was promising from within,” Brown told Back Issue, “Which apparently is different.” Brown recalled he, Shooter, DeFalco, assistant editor John Morelli, Epic Comics editor Archie Goodwin and editor Mark Gruenwald met together in November 1985 at the Roosevelt Hotel on Park Avenue. Brown remembered even the title ‘New Universe’ “was not favored at the beginning, but after trying other ideas, it was finally settled upon.”

Brown and Morelli brought the concept for what became Spitfire and the Troubleshooters. Shooter also accepted one of DeFalco’s ideas, which became Kickers, Inc. Gruenwald contributed D.P.7. Goodwin brought the ideas for what would become Mark Hazzard: Merc, Nightmask, Psi-Force and Justice; designs for the latter two books were drawn by Goodwin’s friend Walter Simonson. Finally, Shooter contributed Star Brand (although Gruenwald claimed Star Brand was the result of ideas Goodwin and Shooter had combined). Strangely, when Shooter recalled the origins of the New Universe in 2000, he omitted any mention of John Morelli or Mark Gruenwald.

Yet Mark Gruenwald had made a vital contribution to that initial meeting: ‘the White Event,’ a sudden flash of white light that would appear on July 22^nd, 1986. Thereafter, people around the Earth would begin to exhibit superhuman abilities; these would be dubbed ‘paranormals’ (one of Gruenwald’s original titles for D.P.7 was ‘Displaced Paranormals’). Gruenwald later shared he’d borrowed the idea of the White Event “from an unpublished ‘visual novel’ I wrote back in high school.”

Speaking of the White Event to Comics Interview, Goodwin seemed to chuckle:

“This thing called the ‘White Event’ which is an astronomical phenomena – a flash of white light that lasts 1.3 seconds. That’s Mark Gruenwald’s contribution. You’d expect someone who does the MARVEL UNIVERSE HANDBOOK would know to the microsecond how long something like this happens.”

More seriously, Goodwin noted, “The White Event is the starting point of the New Universe. I guess it would be comparable to a science-fiction novel which will extrapolate from one given event. Then, you try to proceed as realistically as possible from that given event.”

Comparing the New Universe to the Marvel Universe, Mark Gruenwald wrote:

“The Marvel Universe, the greatest fictional reality in all literature, is, shall we say, a bit complicated. To understand the nature of reality in the Marvel Universe, you need to accept the existence of time travel, highly advanced technologies that do not affect everyday lifestyles, other dimensions, true magic, benign radical mutation, untold numbers of mostly humanoid extraterrestrial races, a handful of humanoid races that branched off from Homo Sapiens, the survival of dinosaurs, literal god-like beings from mythology, and abstract quasi-omnipotent entities never heard of in Earth's mythologies, to name but the major ones.

With the New Universe, you needed to accept just one basic premise, the White Event, an unexplained form of energy that caused benign radical mutations in random persons.”

Gruenwald liked the common origin point of the White Event, noting that so many super-heroes lived unusual and exciting lives prior to obtaining superpowers:

“With the White Event, however, anyone could acquire super-powers, no matter how ordinary you may be, no matter how old you may be, no matter anything. You don't need to be a brilliant scientist, you don't need to be a test pilot, surgeon, circus performer, or computer whiz. You could be just plain you and whoops! The White Event energy activates some super-power in you. The common origin phenomenon of the New Universe was the best premise for super hero reader identification ever invented-- it discriminated against no one. Everyone had an equal chance to become paranormal. For an equal opportunity kind of guy like me, this was a very appealing fantasy. And for the most part, the New Universe heroes were pretty darn ordinary people before becoming paranormal.”

Gruenwald also, famously, did not like super-hero origin stories. “I’ve always thought that origin issues were among the worst ones in any comic series – the hardest ones to accept and get past,” Gruenwald told Amazing Heroes. “Tony Stark, out in the jungles of Viet Nam, creates this terrific suit of armor. Yeah – out of what? Garbage cans? So I thought, ‘If I ever do a new book from scratch, I won’t do an origin… I’ll make it so the heroes never know.’”

Archie Goodwin believed the New Universe was an appropriate way to celebrate Marvel’s 25^th:

“To my knowledge, no one has just sat down and worked out a whole comics line in celebration of what they’ve accomplished with their main line. I think that this is very fitting. It is a way of acknowledging that the Marvel Universe has become so big and so all-inclusive that to just do a new title is not going to be that much of an event. The Marvel Universe is just too vast and too all-encompassing. To make any kind of impact we had to do something like this. That’s why I find it a fascinating idea.”

EIGHT IS ENOUGH?

The initial eight titles and their creative teams were:

D.P.7 (Mark Gruenwald, Paul Ryan & Romeo Tanghal): The story of seven paranormals in Wisconsin – super-strong factory worker David Landers, the acid-secreting teenager Dennis “Scuzz” Cuzinski, friction-manipulating dancer Charlotte Beck, super fast fast food manager Jeff Walters, housewife Stephanie Harrington who generates bursts of life-giving energy, medical intern Randy O’Brien who releases a shadowy “Anti-Body” from his body, and elderly Lenore Fenzl whose skin projects a paralyzing light - who check in to the Clinic for Paranormal Research to receive therapy in the hopes of coping with their new abilities; when they learn the Clinic has ulterior motives, they go on the run.

Justice (Archie Goodwin & Geof Isherwood): Tensen, a ‘Justice Warrior’ from the Land of Spring crosses between dimensions to wage war against his enemies who are hiding on Earth, chiefly Damon Conquest and Daedalus Darquill, who have become the heads of a narcotics ring. Justice’s left hand contains his “shield” (a force screen) and his right hand his “sword” (a destructive energy blast). With the ability to “see” good and evil in others, he purses his mission single-mindedly.

Kickers, Inc. (Tom DeFalco, Ron Frenz & Sal Buscema): Football player Jack Magniconte of the New York Smashers obtains superhuman strength and convinces three of his fellow players (Beauford “Brick” Wohl, Thomas “Suicide” Smythe & “Dasher” Dallas Corbin) plus Jack’s wife Darlene to become freelance agents, taking unorthodox jobs for money.

Mark Hazzard: Merc (Peter David & Gray Morrow): Mark Hazzard is a Vietnam War veteran who turns to mercenary work while paying child support. His missions take him to Latin America, the Middle East and sometimes U.S. soil.

Nightmask (Archie Goodwin, Tony Salmons & Bret Blevins): Keith Remsen is awakened from a coma by the White Event, then discovers he can enter people’s dreams. Using his sister Teddy as his psychic anchor, he works for a dream clinic and tries to solve people’s psychological problems by interacting with their dreams.

Psi-Force (Stephen Perry, Mark Texeira & Kyle Baker): C.I.A. agent Emmett Proudhawk discovers he has psychic abilities. Gathering five teenagers (psychic Wayne Tucker, astral projector Tyrone Jessup, telekinetic Kathy Ling, psychokinetic Michael Crawley & healer Anastasia Inyushin) with gifts similar to his at the Sanctuary youth hostel in San Francisco, Proudhawk dies before he can properly mentor the five teens, but they discover by joining their powers they can summon the Psi-Hawk, a psychic construct based on Proudhawk who exhibits all of their powers.

Spitfire and the Troubleshooters (Gerry Conway, Herb Trimpe & Joe Sinnott): After her father is killed by a defense contractor, MIT professor Jenny “Spitfire” Swensen takes his M.A.X. armored battlesuit to keep it out of the wrong hands; Jenny’s brightest students, ‘the Troubleshooters,’ assist her.

Star Brand (Jim Shooter, John Romita Jr. & Al Williamson): Pittsburgh garage mechanic Ken Connell meets ‘the Old Man,’ who grants him a tattoo that grants him unbelievable cosmic power, but only when Ken concentrates on using it. Ken struggles with how to properly wield this power.

BEYOND THE EDGE OF YOUR IMAGINATION BEGINS A… NEW UNIVERSE

According to the Comics Journal, Marvel began sharing information about the New Universe with the comics press in January 1986 (just two months after Shooter, Brown, Morelli, Goodwin, DeFalco and Gruenwald began developing their ideas), but refused to share any details about the concepts, characters or creative teams. According to the Comics Journal, Marvel’s direct sales manager Carol Kalish had told one retailer, “Marvel wanted to give the New Universe a promotional push that advance information could deflate.”

The first promotional image for the New Universe appeared in Marvel comics published in April 1986. The illustration depicted a small light beginning to shine upon what seemed to be the planet Saturn. The text read, “1961 – The Marvel Universe. 1986 – The New Universe! It All Begins This Summer.”

That same month at the Victoria International Cartoon Festival (April 11-13), Marvel released the first details about the eight New Universe titles. The first printed announcement of the eight New Universe titles appeared on the Newsflashes page of Amazing Heroes #94, less than two months before the first titles were released. 

The second promotional image was released in May and depicted the planet Earth with a pink bolt of lightning striking it. “Expect the Unexpected,” read the text. There were still no details advertised about the concepts, titles or creators. 

In June when Star Brand and Spitfire and the Troubleshooters launched, a third advertisement was shown in Marvel comics, depicting a close-up of the pink lightning striking the Earth. “Beyond the Edge of Your Imagination Begins a… New Universe,” read the text.

The promotions department were left out of the decision making, recalled Fabian Nicieza, then a 25-year-old staffer: “We were not being given any real material to sell or promote it.” When Marvel began publishing the promotional materials, Nicieza noted, “I didn’t have a say in those ads. That was Shooter.” Nicieza said he and the other promotional staff felt, “We’re wasting five, six months of selling and preparing a publishing program with a lightning bolt getting closer to Earth. Like, what is that? It’s not doing anything for anyone.”

Even Marvel’s in-house promotional magazine Marvel Age didn’t release any concrete information on the New Universe until Marvel Age Annual #2, released merely 3 weeks before Star Brand #1 and Spitfire and the Troubleshooters #1; there were no advance solicitations for these two comics, suggesting they were rushed to the market.

Marvel finally published a promotional image featuring the casts of all eight titles with their books listed beneath the text, “New Heroes, New Legends.” It didn’t manifest until August 1986, when most of the titles were on their 2^nd issues. That month also saw the release of a Bill Sienkiewicz promotional poster to direct sales comic shops to help advertise the titles.

The other oddity of the promotions surrounding the New Universe launch is that none of the advance material mentioned the White Event, which Gruenwald considered so crucial to the New Universe, and which seemed to be what the pink lightning bolt in the promotional images had depicted. The earliest mention of the White Event outside of the comics appears to be the aforementioned issue of Comics Interview where Archie Goodwin described the phenomena; it was only after the comics had already launched that the New Universe’s writers and editors began talking up the White Event to the comics press.

THE TROUBLESHOOTERS

Looking back on the New Universe’s origins, Fabian Nicieza opined that, “This was an internally developed project. And as a result, from the very beginning, it had far too rigid a set of controls.” From his vantage in the promotions department, Fabian saw, “Half the people in the office had no clue what was being done because so much of it was being internalized and kept secret and hidden.” Looking back with the benefit of his own publishing experiences, Fabian said, “The best way, if you want to internally develop a publishing program is to set up off-site meeting and bring in freelance writing talent, freelance art talent, and editorial talent, get everyone in a room together and work on it.”

“This was really a Jim Shooter creation,” Fabian continued, “managed and controlled almost 90% by Jim Shooter. As a result, a lot of people didn’t want to work on it.”

Psi-Force editor Bob Budiansky recalled in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story that Shooter “started pulling creative teams together and forcing certain people on books that the editors might not have liked. … A lot of the editorial decisions weren’t met with agreement by the editors.”

Just making space on Marvel’s publishing roster caused ill feelings; among the titles Marvel cancelled for the New Universe were the Thing, Dazzler and Power Man & Iron Fist; in the latter series, editor Denny O’Neil instructed writer Christopher Priest to kill off Iron Fist as an act of spite against Shooter.

The only big-name artist brought in for the New Universe was John Romita Jr., who had left Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men to draw Star Brand under Al Williamson’s inking; Romita’s unplanned exit would leave Claremont without a regular artist on Uncanny X-Men for most of the subsequent year. In Shooter’s memory, “They volunteered. They came to me and said, we want to work with you.”

But John Romita Jr. remembered it differently: “He really blew smoke up my butt,” Romita told Wizard magazine. “I got to work with Al Williamson, so how bad could it be?” According to Eliot R. Brown, Romita disliked Star Brand so much that he tried to force Brown to fire him from the assignment; Brown refused.

Five weeks before Star Brand #1 shipped, Eliot R. Brown was relieved of his duties as editor at Marvel Comics; he was also removed as the writer of Spitfire and the Troubleshooters, which was to have been his debut as a writer. Ultimately, Eliot R. Brown’s only published credit in the New Universe titles was on the first page of Spitfire and the Troubleshooters #1, where he and John Morelli were credited with the plot. Brown told the Comics Journal he wasn’t certain exactly why he was fired but it was possibly because he “let things slip too close to the shipping date. But really, nobody [on the New Universe books] was fast enough.”

Michael Higgins took over Brown’s editing duties on Justice, Kickers, Inc., Nightmask and Star Brand; for the others, editor Bob Budiansky had Psi-Force; Bob Harras had Spitfire and the Troubleshooters; Ralph Macchio had D.P.7; and Christopher Priest (then Jim Owsley) had Mark Hazzard: Merc.

“THE WORLD OUTSIDE YOUR WINDOW.”

In an editorial that appeared in Star Brand #1 on the ‘Universe News’ page (the New Universe equivalent of ‘Bullpen Bulletins’) Shooter described to the readers his hopes to create greater realism in super-hero comics:

“During the summer of 1986, Archie Goodwin, Tom DeFalco, a number of other people at Marvel Comics and I created the New Universe. Or, more correctly, we simply decided to put to use a universe hitherto unused in comics. Our own. The one we live in. Real pipes. Real people. Real bathrooms. No mer-people. No repulsors. No unstable molecules. In fact, no fantasy or fantastic elements at all except for the very few we introduce. Carefully. Does it make sense? You bet. As much as the universe outside your window does. A universe where time passes and things change, and… well, you know. You live in it.

Startling.”

A letter printed in Marvel Age #50 suggested the New Universe was the same “new universe” created on the final page of Secret Wars II #9 by death of the Beyonder in the conclusion of Jim Shooter’s own storyline, published about one month after Shooter’s first meetings with DeFalco, Brown, Morelli, Goodwin and Gruenwald. Indeed, when the Beyonder died in that comic, there was a white flash of light identical to depictions of the White Event. However, this idea was rejected with the response, “The official word (from Big Jim Shooter, himself, and he should know!) on the topic of the Beyonder and the New Universe is that the two events are completely unrelated. The New Universe is just that – a NEW Universe, having nothing whatever to do with the original Marvel Universe.” Similar letters would pop up in the years to follow. In retrospect, it is odd that Shooter didn’t deliberately use his Secret Wars II event as a means to promote the upcoming New Universe (although the critical drubbing Secret Wars II received might not have helped).

The ‘Universe News’ for books dated June 1987 featured editors answering what they saw as the “essential difference between the Marvel Universe and the New Universe.” Among the responses, Mark Gruenwald claimed, “The New Universe is the world outside your window. The Marvel Universe is the world outside your temporal-spatial displacement aperture.”

Speaking to Marvel Age, Jim Shooter identified one aspect of the New Universe that would separate it from the Marvel Universe and encourage greater realism was “it will take place in real time. Now it may not be directly even with the calendar, because sometimes a story that takes two issues to tell will not have lasted two months, but by the end of the year, everything will have advanced a year.” This would eventually result in a regular feature on later installments of Universe News dubbed “The Official Timeline of the New Universe” which attempted to place an exact date on the events of every story set in the New Universe.

The New Universe’s original 1986-1989 run certainly provides a snapshot of that era; President Ronald Reagan was frequently referenced in stories and would appear himself in the line’s second year. In an early issue of D.P.7 where the cast observed all their powers appeared after the White Event, one of them scoffed: “So? They all came out after Ronald Reagan was re-elected, too. Is he responsible, maybe?”

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (which began in 1979) was frequently referenced and even provided a setting for several stories, notably in Star Brand and Mark Hazzard: Merc; the Persian Gulf War between Iran and Iraq (since displaced in popular culture by a different Persian Gulf War) likewise appeared in Mark Hazzard: Merc.

In Star Brand, Jim Shooter set the series in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his own hometown, and filled his scripts with references to actual people and places in the city. This included references to TV station KDKA and its broadcasters. This wasn’t lost on KDKA, who reciprocated with an advertisement in Variety shortly after the New Universe’s launch in which they featured Star Brand’s hero Ken Connell.

NEW HEROES. NEW LEGENDS.

With D.P.7, Mark Gruenwald saw an opportunity to explore superhuman powers with a more realistic bend than was possible in the Marvel Universe. Describing the book’s super fast Jeff Walters, Gruenwald told Comics Interview, “It always bothered me that these super-speedsters did not seem to be eating as much as I know athletes eat in order to be able to accomplish their great feats. So, I gave him an eating problem, and that has since become the norm for super-speedsters.” Indeed, DC Comics’ the Flash adopted the same vast appetite starting in comics published post-D.P.7.

With D.P.7, Gruenwald found “I just didn’t have any reason for them to do anything heroic. I just couldn’t contrive a situation that would warrant these normal people with these paranormal powers to want to do something heroic. This is contrary to the comic book tradition, in which once a character gets through his origin story, he knows the right thing to try to do, with his great power.”

Gruenwald said:

“My whole intention with D.P.7 was to do a group book that was not like any group book that I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot since group books have always been my favorite comics to read. I said, ‘There must be something that can still be done with a bunch of super-powered guys hanging around.’ I think I’ve found it, but unfortunately I may have found it to an extent that is so far away from what you might expect of a super-group, that you don’t get what you read group books for. I said, “Alright, most super-groups get together and fight crime, these guys won’t.’ Most heroes in groups are about the same age, so I put in a 15-year-old and a 66-year-old. Most groups have a headquarters. They don’t; they ride around. Most groups have an unlimited operational budget; they’ll be broke. So, I’ve got it in my notes somewhere, I made an analysis of 13 or 14 superhero groups, all the ones that I could think of, and how they compared in terms of membership, origin, purpose, budget, procedures – all of these things. I then decided I would do none of those. As a result, I got a group book that I certainly found interesting, and it was and is the best or the second best seller in the New Universe line.”

In the 2^nd issue of D.P.7, the team’s teenaged member Dennis “Scuzz” Cuzinski convinced the other six protagonists to begin using codenames, “so no one catches on who we really are.” The codenames would find use on the covers and in other promotional materials, but otherwise the characters seldom ever used codenames. Similarly, the cast of Psi-Force received a series of codenames but never used them in stories (nor did the teens of Psi-Force call themselves “Psi-Force”). The only New Universe protagonists who used codenames were Jenny Swensen (“Spitfire” – but only when wearing her armor), Justice (usually called “the Justice Killer” by others) and Keith Remsen (who used his “Nightmask” alias and costume in dreams, not in the waking world).

“Mark absolutely believed in the New Universe and especially the cast of D.P.7,” Paul Ryan told Back Issue. “We talked about them as if they were real people we knew and care about. We brought many of our real-life experiences, both positive and negative, to the series. We loved our characters.”

“I think that D.P.7 is the most literate and the most interesting of the New Universe line,” Eliot R. Brown told Back Issue. “I found those stories very readable and those characters very engaging.”

Archie Goodwin only wrote the first issue of Justice, turning it over to Steve Englehart with issue #2; Goodwin compared Englehart’s take on Justice to the writer’s prose novel the Point Man. “I like to say that Justice is ‘Bambi Meets Godzilla’ all in the same person,” said Englehart. Englehart saw potential in the concept because “The differences between the nature of good and evil in his [Tensen’s] world and ours create problems for him. He can read auras and tell who’s good and who’s bad. I haven’t had to deal with that too much, because he knows who’s good and bad in the current plotline – but still, people do things that are not evil in their own mind, and that confuses him since he can only read their auras. They do things that don’t fit within his preconceived ideas.” Artist Geof Isherwood was then still relatively new to comics, yet he wound up writing 2 issues of Justice during Englehart’s run. 

Archie Goodwin wrote 3 of the first 4 issues of Nightmask, then left that series as well – exiting on a cliffhanger that his successors (Roy & Dann Thomas) would not pick up. Goodwin lasted as long as he did on Nightmask because, he said, “I felt that, of the four [New Universe titles] I created, it was probably the biggest challenge and the easiest book to go wrong with. If somebody has to go wrong with it, then, why not me, since I’m the one who wished it on the world in the first place?” 

Kickers, Inc. didn’t turn out in the way Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz had intended; as Frenz explained to Back Issue, they had wanted to create a broad adventure book similar to DC’s Challengers of the Unknown. “Tom wanted to do very tongue-in-cheek, seat-of-your-pants adventures. The characters were going to be off-season football players, but he was seeing something much broader. When Tom saw that Shooter wanted things more grounded in realism, he tried to take the strip back. But Jim wanted a sports book. Tom tried to tell him it wasn’t a sports book, but Shooter told Tom, ‘Trust me, it’ll be great. I want it for New Universe.’” Ron Frenz lasted just 3 issues on Kickers, Inc. before leaving; Tom DeFalco supplied plots up to issue #5, then exited with his friend. Kickers, Inc. had always been an odd fit for the New Universe; DeFalco & Frenz had originally developed it without Shooter’s input, then had to retrofit their concepts into what Shooter wanted the New Universe to be. Kickers, Inc. would receive the bulk of negative reviews by confused critics who judged it by the standards of ‘realism’ that Shooter had promoted.

Editor Christopher Priest had originally wanted his friend and mentor Larry Hama to write Mark Hazzard: Merc, but Hama was busy, and it went to Peter David. David only wrote the first four issues before he and Priest were gone; Madeleine Blaustein (then called Adam Blaustein) became editor and Doug Murray (best-known for the ‘Nam) became the writer. Gray Morrow remained attached to the series but after delivering detailed art on the first two issues his contributions shifted; the book’s fourth issue (Priest and David’s last) was drawn by five different artists under a pseudonym, and the lack of quality control was reflected in the poor continuity on the printed page. Eventually, Gray Morrow was inked by Vince Colletta, which no doubt helped the book keep to its schedule, but left Morrow’s art (at best) serviceable. 

Writer Stephen Perry left Psi-Force after its second issue, although Mark Texeira remained as artist through the first year (Bob Hall was a regular fill-in artist). Danny Fingeroth became the new writer. In Fingeroth’s stories, the five teenage runaways used their powers reluctantly, usually because someone was bullying them or was attempting to blackmail them into using their powers on their behalf. Fingeroth also introduced Psi-Force’s recurring foe Thomas Boyd, a teenager who could leech psychic energy. “The characters were well-conceived and designed,” Fingeroth told Back Issue. “As individuals and as a team, they worked very well in an X-Men-ish kind of way. Like an X-Men series, Psi-Force was about a team of ‘hunted and hounded’ superpowered young people who didn’t always get along, but when push came to shove were always there for each other. Those qualities may have been what readers found most familiar and relatable about them.” 

Gerry Conway had left Marvel on poor terms in 1977, clashing with Shooter’s editorial vision; his return to write Spitfire and the Troubleshooters surprised the comics press, who had imagined his differences with Shooter were irreconcilable. Although the initial stories featured hero Jenny Swensen donning her Spitfire armor to combat rogue military and corporate forces, by the book’s 4^th issue the armor had been wrecked and it was destroyed in the 5^th. 

Jim Shooter told Amazing Heroes that in Star Brand:

“I’m exploring the consequences, the ramifications of power on a world-shaking scale. If there were a Superman, there wouldn’t have been a Falklands crisis – or, if there had been, and he had intervened, it would have had enormous ramifications. Even if he did nothing, that would be the focus of all attention. If there were a Superman in the United States, the Soviet Union would do nothing but worry about him. The U.S. government would smile a lot, and work on something to use [against him] if he ever went bad.”

Star Brand’s hero Ken Connell spent most of Shooter’s run pondering how best to wield his power. The series was frequently a slice-of-life look at a struggling mechanic secretly dating two women on the sly and looking to his therapist friend Myron for help coping with his listlessness. Yet it also featured Connell unleashing his power against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, terrorists on the open sea and a military base in Libya.

Eliot R. Brown admired that in Star Brand, “the entire story was told from the main character’s point of view. Nothing happened that he did not directly experience and relate. That was different. [Usually,] there are always editorial asides and captions, but Jim had none of that. This was all directly told by the main character, Ken Connell. [Connell] was a thinly veiled version of Jim himself. He was drawing upon his own experiences growing up in Pittsburgh and he drew quite a lot of story from what he knew.”

Mark Gruenwald also reflected kindly on Star Brand: “Jim Shooter depicted this basically unlikeable guy, coping with great power, and how he finally realizes that he’s got to do something good with it.”

Continued in Part 2: Retailers and critics weigh in on the New Universe! The imprint struggles through its first year, loses Shooter, then blows up Pittsburgh!