Marvel's New Universe: what went wrong?

Cafe Society
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Been thinking about posting this for a while and seeing as how it was actually referenced in another thread today now seemed like a good time.

The New Universe was an experiment by Marvel about 15 years ago, the premise of which was “what if superheroes suddenly came into being in the real world?” Originally the books were going to run in real time (but that went by the wayside pretty quickly in the face of the idea of no multi-issue stories). The timing and the implication of the NU cover graphic was that the NU was created in the wake of Secret Wars II but I think that was later disproven. Someone also mentioned to me at the time that the books were meant as pastiches of various DC titles, but I have no idea if that’s true. There are parallels to some DC titles but not every NU title seemed to have a direct DC doppelganger. The kickoff event of the NU was “The White Event,” an insanely bright flash of light which illuminated the entire world at once and apparently triggered about one of every thousand or so people to become “paranormals” (think mutants but without the genetic component).

If I’m remembering all the titles, they included:

Star Brand: a mechanic is given the Star Brand by a dying alien. The Star Brand is the most powerful weapon in the universe. Obvious Green Lantern connotations.

DP7: “DP” stood for “displaced paranormals.” A clinic for treating paranormals is the initial setting. Seven of them band together and flee the clinic, but I can’t remember exactly why. Someone told me this was a Doom Patrol pastiche but beyond some visual similarities between a couple of the characters (the negative energy being and a character’s “antibodies” for example) I didn’t see it.

Psi-Force: A Native American FBI agent is tracking and assembling psychic paranormals. Agents of a foreign power have the same list. The agent is killed and several of the psychics discover they can merge their abilities to form the “Psi-Hawk,” who looks like a Native American warrior and can wield the powers of each of the component psychics. DC counterpart unknown.

Mark Hazzard: Merc: Later shortened to just “Merc,” a standard guns for hire title. Supposedly counterparted by DC’s various war titles (Sgt Rock, etc.).

Nightmask: A young man discovers he has the power to enter the dreams of another. Initially he uses this ability at a clinic for therapeutic purposes but eventually gets all superhero. Think Dennis Quaid in “Dreamscape.” Supposedly planned initially as a Batman pastiche but changed, perhaps for legal reasons.

Kickers, Inc.: The QB of a professional football team gets slightly paranormalized and leads the team to victory, and also they solve crimes. Ugh. Without question the worst of the NU titles. DC equivalent unknown.

Spitfire and the Troubleshooters: Young female scientist’s father is working on some sort of armored robot fighting suit. He’s killed and she dons the suit to bring his killers to justice and continue his work. The Troubleshooters are her graduate students. DC equivalent unknown.

Justice: An enigmatic figure roams the streets dispensing justice. His weapons are his “sword,” and energy spike projected from one hand and his “shield,” square energy fields projected from the other. No apparent DC comparison.

IIRC, Merc, Spitfire, Kickers, Inc. and Nightmask were all cancelled after a year. The other titles continued for a year or two after, and there were some limited series (The Pitt and The War are the ones I remember) to wrap things up.

The titles that made it past the one year mark were, I thought, at least as good as some of the stuff Marvel and DC were otherwise publishing. DP7 and Justice in particular I thought were strong premises and decently executed. They were sure as hell more entertaining than some of the masturbatory crap that was coming out under the various X brands at the time. Yet almost uniformly the comics intelligencia seemed to loathe NU from the moment of its introduction (and before, if I remember some of the reviews I read at the time).

Anyone else read any of the NU titles? Thoughts, comments, opinions? Or did I just spend 20 minutes typing out this OP to have it sink like the universe that inspired it?

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I remember the New Universe. Somewhat.

The problem, for me as a reader, was that it represented an entire new continuity - with no attachments to the Marvel and DC Universes that I knew and loved - and it didn’t have any interesting hook to draw me in, to lure me into picking up some issues.

And obviously, If I don’t buy an issue, I can’t be impressed with the writing.

One of the most interesting things they did with the New Universe was a few years later, when Quasar of the mainstream MU got displaced to there - and inherited the Starbrand. Since the conclusion of that storyline, I’m unware of any further references to it.

3

A couple of other new universes that failed:

!mpact - titles included the excellent Black Hood.

Marvel 2099 - the Spiderman 2099 title was one of my faves.

4

Because it sucked.

Intelligencia or not, there was nothing in the NU to spark ongoing serious interest in an entire universe. The same thing can be said of any number of things in the history of comics. The Atlas Comics of the 70s, for example, had a lot better creative talent than the NU, but they just produced more of the same that was already offered by Marvel and DC, and no one cared. There was no there there.

DP7 was good, but when your best title is a Mark Gruenwald title, you’re in trouble. I love MG’s work, but he’s no Alan Moore.

Anyone who proposes something like Kickers Inc. with a straight face deserves to be stoned for eternity.

I read that NU’s creative budget was slashed by Marvel higher ups (Higher than Shooter) and that a lot of the new titles were thrown together by the editorial staff at the last minute. They were creating something like 8 new titles and offered no special compensation or creative rights to the writers and artists, so there was no incentive to create anything beyond derivative work.

You offer a bunch of lukewarm derivative work and promote it like the second coming, what do you expect? In the defense of Marvel’s editorial staff, they may have been forced into the position of being unable to do anything else.

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Ah, yes, the New Universe. I was at an academic camp at Western Kentucky University when that was being rolled out. I checked the campus bookstores constantly for the latest issues.

Psi-Force was the one title that was really disappointing to see cancelled, because I liked it and it seemed to be strong enough to survive. DP7 probably could have gone the distance, too, but I didn’t like it as much.

I kind of took a liking to Nightmask, but I kind of had a feeling it was dead meat. I remember Nightmask had a great issue about a guy who was going to testify against the mob, but his entire family was killed (he was also supposed to be killed, but avoided the explosion due to sheer luck). He wound up in a coma, and it turned out that he was refusing to wake up because he had created a comfortable dreamworld where he was able to save his family. So Nightmask had to go in and disrupt that fantasy to bring him back to the real world.

I really wanted to like Spitfire, since I liked Iron Man quite a bit, but it just didn’t do anything for me.

Just thinking about Kickers Inc. gives me the shivers because of its incredible shittiness. How did it ever manage to get made? Of course, it would be kind of funny if the title existed today – with all of the controversy about steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs in sports, how would it be received to tell the story about a professional football player using special powers to cheat?

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Jvstice- IIRC there were two connected series. The first involved a man named John Tensen gaining superpowers and going out and executing judgement on other paranormals. The second was about Tensen, a justice knifght from another dimension (IIRC the realm of summer) engaged in war against the evil and corrupt land of winter.

Re Impact

That was just the latest incarnation of the Archie superheroes. The Fly, Cheetah, Shield etc have been around for a very long time. Though, the characters were changed greatly for the Impact titles.
Wasn’t there also an M2 universe? I have hazy memories of titles involving the future Avengers and a few others. The Spider Girl title is the only survivor of this line.

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There was only one actual book. IIRC the Realm of Summer/Realm of Winter storyline (which ran for about the first year) turned out to be a hallucination created by Tensen as a response to some trauma. I have this vague memory of a Justice/Nightmask crossover in which Nightmask goes into the hallucination but I could be completely wrong. Tensen was a cop or perhaps a DoJ agent. Unless it turned out that was the hallucination. I can’t remember and somehow all of my NU titles have vanished out of my collection.

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Not quite. The whole Summer/Winter thing was revealed as the creation of the King Of Winter, actually a paranormal man the White Event had given the power to literally make his dreams into reality.

9

I think the NU only got interesting when they decided to chuck it all and screw with it.

The Pitt one shot by Mark Gruenwald was amazing. It dealt with the immediate aftermath of the disintegration of Pittsburgh by the Star Brand. That may be the only effective use of Spitfire; that scene with her and the family in the Volkswagen still runs a little chill up my spine.

The Draft and the War specials later on were still interesting but not as good.

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I couldn’t connect with any of the characters.

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I’ve got to mark the failure of the New Universe as simply low quality work. I recall reading somewhere that it was a very unpopular idea around the Marvel office and essentially became a ghetto. No one wanted to work on it and it got the bottom rung of creators as a result.

I agree with the statement that the idea only really clicked when they threw the whole thing out the window and decided to just screw up the world as much as they could. I don’t recall any real world major city in US comics getting destroyed, for example, and certainly none since with such dramatic effect as The Pitt. It was all too little too late to save the line, though.

(For the uninitiated, the Starbrand character could transfer his power between individuals and it showed up as a star shaped tatoo on the person with the power. The guy who had it wasn’t a particularly great human being and in one issue where he was feeling particularly down he decided to commit suicide by flying a few miles above his hometown of Pittsberg and transfering his power into a small dumbell. That triggered an explosion that vaporized everything within fifteen miles with all the extremely severe effects that you’d expect from a 15 mile across hole in the world where there used to be something. It turned out that the initial white event that started everything was the previous holder of the brand doing the exact same thing except to an asteroid in space.)

12

Don’t forget the Valiant line. From that, I really liked Archer & Armstrong and Eternal Warrior.

13

And as I understand, there was only one Starbrand owner- somehow, he went back into the past and gave the brand to himself (after going a bit nuts when he destroyed Pittsburg. Sort of a causality loop kinda thing.

14

To Hell with New Universes.
I prefer the Original Universe–as embodied by Golden Age Reprints and JSA: Strange Adventures.

Ah. World War 2–when superheroes were really super! :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

15

Didn’t Armstrong later get out of the superhero business and go into professional cycling?

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I think he said something like “I’d give my left nut to quit this superhero crap…”

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Jim Shooter

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#1) The intelligencia hated it 'cause that’s what they do. They don’t like anything that even vaguely smacks of super-heroes. Case in point-At a convention in the mid '90s, Gary (THE COMICS JOURNAL) Groth was asked why TCJ hadn’t done anything about Neil Gainman’s SANDMAN series. Groth, in front of a number of witnesses said that he’d never bothered to read it, and wasn’t it that super-hero book from DC? He didn’t read super-heroes. :rolleyes: (Dave Sim reported it, but others have corroborated)

#1a) Also there was a deep and lingering resentment among a bunch of fans about it. The New Universe was created as a last-ditch emergency escape route* if Jack Kirby’s lawsuit against Marvel went completely bad for them. Worse-case-scenario was that Kirby would be awarded complete rights to all characters he’d had a hand in creating–in which case The New Universe would leave Marvel with something to publish. The VAST majority of fans were on Kirby’s side and those who knew it was an “escape route” didn’t really approve. I don’t know that anyone didn’t buy it on that basis, but certainly it lost Marvel the “Eh…it’s only the first issue…maybe it’ll get better. I’ll give 'em through issue 4 to wow me” factor that fans tend to have.

#2) The one thing that did seem cool was the premise: (“It was the Earth outside your window…until NOW!”), but it was ignored in more than half the books starting with their first issue. DP7 and STARBRAND followed the rules. But…there’s no working Iron Man suits right now, even in prototype form (like SPITFIRE). There’s no time travelling mercenaries (like in JVSTICE**) etc. The New Universe wasn’t the “world outside my door”, it was a slightly less comic-booky comic book universe. And I’d seen * that* before.

#3) With the exception of DP7 (Which was wonderful, but Guenwald usually was) and JVSTICE once David took it over, the writing was ran the gamut from barely competent to atrocious. Jim Shooter, who had one really stellar run in him (his Legion of Super-Heroes are usually considered to be one of the top 3 or 4 runs in their 40+ year history) and one competent one that petered out at the end (his first AVENGERS run) wrote possibly the worst work of his career (except for that HULK story where a mincing, lisping street gang of gay guys tried to rape Bruce Banner***)

#4) In the same vein, most of the characters were either bland or loathesome. In STARBRAND, for example, Starbrand has a retarded (really. Retarded. Mental age about 10. Says “Quack” when she gets flustered. Mentally handicapped) girl-friend who he abuses mentally and takes advantage of physically and emotionally. Lovely guy.

#5) No one seemed to know what to do with the characters. There really aren’t super-villians in “The world outside your window” so the characters didn’t have a lot to do. This didn’t make for good storytelling. There was another line that came out at the same time–I can’t remember the company–but 120 (or however many) people on a streetcar got hit by an energy bolt from outer space. THEY got super-powers. No-one else did. What was cool is they did a 3 or 4 page spread of the streetcar and apparently in the office numbered all the people and once they were gone, they were gone. (I think it was The Ultraverse)–that used the same concept to better effect.

I thought it was very mean-spirited but also very funny when Byrne had Shooter (who Byrne loathed) show up in the LEGENDS series dressed in Starbrand’s outfit screaming about how “I have the POWER to CREATE A WHOLE NEW UNIVERSE” before he tussled with Guy Gardner and blew his own hand off.

And I really enjoyed Byrne and Gruenwald’s complete deconstruction of the New Universe in THE PIT and later series that completely ditched the whole “World outside your door” premise. It’s a kinda sad statement when the books don’t become interesting until their original premise is disgarded.

Fenris

*Their next-to-worst line of defense was based on the idea that Kirby would be awarded the “look” of the characters–the costumes, names and secret identities. That’s why Spidey got the black costume (Kirby designed the classic red-n-blue one), Tony stopped being Iron Man and Rhodey was all prepared to become Force Works (or whatever the hell the name was), Thor became Thunderstrike, Steve Rodgers became The Captain and Whatshisname (now USAGENT) became Captain America (if needed), all the original X-Men left to become X-Force (so that X-Men would be untouched if needed), and the FF became The Human Torch (not Kirby’s character), The Thing got a seriously new look (and a She-Thing was created) and Crystal (who was considered easily replacable) etc.

** :wink:

***But that wasn’t bigoted, 'cause that really happened to Shooter who fought 'em all off single-handedly. Really. :rolleyes:

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There were two Valiant lines–they kinda had a reboot somewhere in the middle–in the original line, I liked Doctor Solar (or whatever it was called) and Archer and Armstrong (by Barry Winsor Smith?) and one other that I can’t remember, but in the reboot-, Ninjak was a ton o’ fun.

20

heh. What a load of self-serving horseshit. I’m no big fan of Tom DeFalco (who, if you’ll remember ended up following Shooter as Editor-in-Chief and apparently was partly responsible for the vast majority of Marvel’s creators giving an “It’s him or us” ultimatum to the Marvel Board of Directors, so Shooter has a reason to resent him) but if there’s anything DeFalco isn’t, it’s unmotivated.*

*Incompetent, perhaps–the complete trashing of FF, X-Men and worst of all, the Spider-Clone thing happened during his watch, but he produced a ton of books. Generally crap books, to be sure, but he’s not the sort to sit around