Brand Echh: THE NEW UNIVERSE

The New Universe was a bit of an epic fiasco in the history of Marvel Comics. it had been conceived as a way to mark the company’s 25th Anniversary as a popular publisher. Instead, it turned out to be an almost-instantly stillborn blemish, a complete creative misfire that was reviled and derided by the fans of that era. And yet, looking back at it, especially in the context of what came thereafter, it’s easy to see the potential that existed there for something pretty novel. There were some good bones in the New Universe, even if they never quite reached the point of being a skeleton that could support a publishing venture. So over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to be taking a look at the eight New Universe launch titles and seeing what can be discerned from them.

The New Universe was the brainchild of Marvel Editor in Chief Jim Shooter. And in fact, in certain circles, it was referred to as the Shooter Universe. Having stepped into the job of spearheading Marvel Comics in the late 1970s, Jim had spent a bunch of years reversing Marvel’s fortunes. He created an editorial structure that allowed for meaningful management of the workload, began to institute stronger emphasis on the fundamentals of storytelling, and expanded Marvel into the direct market in a meaningful way. But having set the ship aright, Jim was increasingly becoming disheartened by aspects of the realm over which he had jurisdiction. There were any number of aspects of the Marvel Universe that he felt were implausible or downright silly. he believed in an ordered universe, and so he strove to get rid of those elements that weren’t to his liking. At his direction, Roger Stern produced stories that eliminated all vampires from the Marvel Universe, for example, and another in which the Savage Land was destroyed. But this was like putting a band-aid on a gut wound. So when conversations rolled around to what the company should do for its impending 25th Anniversary, Jim suggested that they end the current publishing line, bring all of the storylines to a conclusion, and then for the anniversary re-launch the entire Universe again at square one. Only this time, with all of the elements that he didn’t favor left by the wayside. This initiative was internally referred to as the Big Bang. In these days of constant relaunches and continuity reboots and alternate Ultimate and Absolute Universes, the Big Bang doesn’t seem all that provocative. But at the time, it was a radical idea.

The problem with the Big Bang initiative was that Shooter had done his job too well. The Marvel line was insanely profitable, and the powers-that-be saw nothing but risk in the prospect of shutting it all down and restarting it anew. Additionally, there were several key creators and editors who weren’t keen on this plan, and they took their complaints (overtly or not) to the fan press of the day, who made a meal of Shooter’s plan. So the Big Bang wasn’t going to be a thing, and yet an Anniversary initiative was still called for. Stymied to a certain degree, Shooter suggested that he and his team do the next best thing: produce an entirely new universe of new titles and concepts, one that would be more in keeping with the rigid storytelling logic that he was after. A bunch of rules were outlined for the new effort to guide creators in coming up with properties for it. The New Universe was intended to be “The World Outside Your Window” as the tagline put it, a more realistic venture that was meant to be taking place within the real world. Accordingly, there wouldn’t be any sorcery, no alien life forms, no alternate dimensions, nothing implausible. There would be a single source for all of the change that happened in the world, the “White Event” in which the entire planet was mysteriously enshrouded in bright, white light for a minute, after which beings with superhuman powers would begin to emerge. Even skin-tight super hero costumes were frowned upon; any distinctive garb that the characters would wear had to feel like something that a person in the actual world might be able to put together. The line would also function in real time, just like the lives of its readers, meaning that in practice a month would go by for the characters in-between every issue. And at least at the outset, nobody was allowed to do anything so massive in their storytelling that it would change the state of the world, so any superhuman activity had to stay below-the-radar and not show up on news broadcasts and the like. Most of these guidelines would be bent if not outright broken as the line got started, but in the development stage they felt a bit like a straitjacket to some of the creators who were approached to do work on the new books.

There were other problems as well. for one thing, by the mid-1980s, the battle for creator rights had been going on for a while, and most creators were well aware that anything they created for Marvel under these circumstances would become the property of the company. Most of the more popular creators were unwilling to relinquish their rights to any characters that might prove to be successful. Additionally, the incentive system that Shooter had helped institute meant that those working on popular titles made a ton of extra money in sales incentives. The new titles were untested and untried, so it made more sense for popular creators to remain on X-MEN and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and the like, where their ancillary income was assured. what this amounted to is that, while the New Universe project was embarked upon with visions of top SF authors coming on board to craft a fully-plausible alternative speculative fiction universe, in practice the New Universe books wound up largely being the creations of editors working on staff (some of whom didn’t even directly write or illustrate the ideas they had come up with.) Creatively, it proved to be difficult to get creators to sign on board, which meant that the launch was fielded by mostly a collection of competent journeymen who weren’t especially popular in the Direct Sales marketplace as well as those who were just starting out and were willing to work on just about anything. The development time had eaten up a ton of lead time as well, for varying reasons, so the books all wound up operating under the gun. Pretty much every title was forced to rely on fill-in creative teams to one degree or another within their initial spate of issues.

Additionally, this was 1986, considered a seminal year in the history of comics, and for good reason. Over at the competition, DC was fielding CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING by Alan Moore, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, WATCHMEN and John Byrne’s MAN OF STEEL Superman relaunch in this selfsame year. And the alternative press was also pushing the boundaries with exciting and more adult-reader-oriented titles such as AMERICAN FLAGG, LOVE AND ROCKETS, GRENDEL, CONCRETE and many others. And MAUS, the first volume collecting Art Spiegelman’s account of his father’s time in a Nazi concentration camp, was helping to redefine just what the medium of comic books was capable of, going on to win the coveted Pulitzer Prize. By comparison, the New Universe titles, steeped very much in Shooter’s approach regarding absolute clarity of storytelling at all times, felt staid and out of step with the industry. Even other Marvel releases of the year, such as Miller and Mazzuchelli’s’ DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN or Walt Simonson’s THOR, made the New Universe seem quaint and old-fashioned. Shooter had been trained in making comic books for relatively young readers and it’s an approach that he held to throughout his career, even as the audience for comics grew progressively older and more sophisticated. The New Universe wasn’t targeting older fans, it was attempting to connect with a new generation of young readers. Unfortunately, most of those young readers were more attracted to the tried-and-true Marvel titles that Shooter and his team were putting out, leaving the New Universe out in teh cold.

Ultimately, the New Universe failed to catch on with readers and with retailers, and it began to suffer from weak sales almost instantly. It became a bit of a black eye for the controversial Shooter, who was already under fire in the fan press for other matters. Within a year’s time, Shooter would be relieved of his editorial duties and fired from the company over which he’d presided, and the New Universe would pass into the control of other hands, primarily those of executive editor Mark Gruenwald. Half of the titles were given the axe, while Gruenwald and editors such as Howard Mackie tried to turn around the fortunes of the rest. It was a losing battle, and by the early part of 1990, the New Universe was no more.

The thing is, while he may have become overly didactic about what he wanted and he was never entirely able to get those creators and editors working on the titles to embrace what he was trying to do, the New Universe really does feel like a trial run for the companies and lines that Shooter would create after his time at Marvel. In particular, the Valiant line under Shooter feels like a version of the New Universe done properly–a consistent science-based shared universe in which a variety of characters have grounded, realistic adventures in a story-driven setting that eschews many of the trappings of typical super hero comics. And after his falling out with Valliant’s ownership, Shooter’s later efforts in building the Defiant Universe and the Broadway Comics Universe employ similar approaches. What this says to me is that the New Universe wasn’t intrinsically a bad idea, it simply didn’t come together properly as it might have done under different circumstances. There’s a world where it might have been able to make a go of it and become a success. And there are definitely some interesting ideas buried inside its old, forgotten pages. So while none of these comics is particularly great, they are all pretty interesting–as we’ll see over the course of the next couple of weeks as we essay them.