Last month a universe died. The New Universe, that is. True, this fictional habitat is about to be spotlighted next month in the bookshelf format THE WAR, and will be appearing in upscale one-shots sporadically thereafter. But as far as making regular monthly visits into your living room, the New Universe is dead, Jim. And more's the pity. I am definitely biased, having been one of the creators who toiled the New Universe fields from its very origin to its very demise, but still all and all, I thought the New Universe was a brilliant concept for a universe and I will miss it greatly.
I have my own theories about why it ultimately failed to catch on any bigger than it did, and since I also have my own column about comics every month, I'm going to share them with you. But that's going to be my topic next month. This month I want to praise the glories of the New Universe, in a quixotic attempt to convince the doubtful among you the magnificence you might have missed.
So what was so neat about the New Universe? Well, for starters, there's the fundamental simplicity of a one-premise universe. 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. No magic, no aliens (the Old Man in STARBRAND turned out to be human), no other dimensions (the one in JUSTICE turned out to be somebody's dream), no gods, no super-technology, no hidden races of pseudo-human beings, no alternate history. The New Universe was identical to the world we readers lived in, until July 22, 1986, when the Earth began to change. To get into the New U, you did not have to know Earth's alternate history since the dawn of the planet-- it didn't have an alternate history. It was the same as our history. If the simplicity of the New Universe premise was unclear to you, it's because some of the New U writers were not in sync with the initial premise, a factor that led to its demise, as I'll explore in detail next month.
What else did the New Universe have going for it? Why, the glory of a truly democratic -if not random- heroic fantasy. Most of the super heroes the comics medium has given us to date were special to begin with, long before they ever got their costumes and super-powers. Consider Marvel's great scientists, Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Henry Pym, and T'Challa. Even if these guys had never donned tights, they'd have been movers and shakers in the Marvel Universe by virtue of their awesome intelligence. If a reader weren't a genius, it would be pretty hard to relate to what these folks do. Even the ever-lovable Peter Parker, champion of the ordinary man with ordinary hang-ups, had the extraordinary ability to concoct web-fluid, web-shooters, and spider-tracers, using smarts that had nothing to do with the bite of the radioactive spider. Name a Marvel hero, and chances are, there's something special about him or her, before he or she acquires super-power. For example, the Thing was an accomplished test pilot. Dr. Strange a brilliant surgeron, the Invisible Woman a high-class fashion model. If you were just an ordinary person, even getting to be these things was fantasy, let alone getting super-powers to boot.
How about mutants then? Anybody can be a mutant, right? Not all of them were cosmonauts' brothers, African priestesses, circus performers, computer whizzes, or pop singers before they manifested their mutant powers. Some of them were just plain folk that we just plain readers could relate to, right? Yes...but by adolescence every reader knows if he or she's a mutant or not, because that's when one's latent powers emerge. If you're older than early-teens and you sill haven't developed any mutant power, face it, Charlie, it's not going to happen for you. You missed the boat. You're not a mutant.
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, surgeron, 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.
This is the third great virtue of the New Universe-- a slew of really interesting characters whose problems were even more reader-relatable than those faced by the usual costumed crimefighter. I know if I got super-powers, one of the last things I'd do is put on a funny costume to advertise the fact. And sure enough, the majority of the New U heroes made the same decision. It was refreshing to see comic book heroes break time-honored traditions.
And finally, the New Universe had real time going for it. One year's worth of comics added up to one year of elapsed time for the characters. As a consequence, characters had the capacity for growth and change. If the books had lasted half as long as the Marvel Universe did, Stephanie's children would be thirty-something, and Justice would be as old as the Equalizer.
So those are all the features about the New Universe that I personally saw as new and exciting. None of the above is to say that I find the Marvel Universe old and unexciting, but the M.U., however revolutionary it was at its inception, has in its nearly 28 years of existence become the industry standard by which all other universes must be measured. But now the innovations of the New U are to be no more, at least on a monthly basis. Next time, I'll tell you my theory why the innovations failed to take hold of the public imagination.
-- Mark Gruenwald
Last month in this space, I extolled the virtues of the now-dearly departed New Universe line of titles. Well, this month, I come to bury the New U, not to praise it.
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. True, not every single title Marvel ever published was set in the Marvel U (notably, licensed titles), but the New U was the most concerted allegiance to its mainstream mythos. Yes, there were good reasons to start fresh, many of which I expounded upon in great detail last go around, but still, it must have been confusing for a reader to hear that the New U was the greatest thing to ever come down the pike-- then what did that make the Marvel U, chopped liver? Asking readers to love two universes may have been too much to ask.
The second reason why I think the New U ultimately failed is that some of the original creators did not quite grasp the elegant simplicity of the New Universe's groundbreaking basic concept, namely, the White Event as the sole divergent factor for everything. Let's face it, for a world that was supposed to be exactly like the real world up until the moment of the White Event, a lot of pre-White Event and non-White Event phenomena did their best to creep in to dilute the New U's uniqueness and to confuse readers. Such as...Justice's fairy tale-like dimension of origin (later explained away), the aliens in early STARBRAND stories (later explained away), the better-than-real-world-state-of-the-art technology in SPITFIRE (oops), and so on. Had everyone involved more scrupulously stuck to the main concept of the New U, the critical first year of the New U wouldn't have been so uneven.
The third factor in the New U's downfall, I believe, was that various titles were stifled by their creative teams' strict adherence to a mistaken notion that the New Universe was and had to remain the "world outside your window." What this notorious expression meant was that the New U was identical to the real world-- the world that presumably lies outside each of the readers' windows, and inside it too, for that matter-- up until the instant of the White Event, after which all bets were off. Many creative teams believed that it meant that the New U had to remain "the world outside your window", and thus nothing too earth-shaking could be allowed to happen for fear of having that reader-recognizable world become different. Face it, once paranormals were known to exist by the public, you'd have on significant difference between the New U and the Real U, and the New U would no longer be the world outside your window. This misunderstanding stifled the scope of the New U stories right up until The Pitt happened, giving the New U tales the feel of made-for-TV-movies while most Marvel U tales had the feel of big-budget special effects motion pictures.
After The Pitt, of course, no one could accuse the New U of shying away from big deal events, but judging from the mail, most of the readers were still harboring the misimpression the creative teams had fostered, that the New U was meant to remain "the world outside your window" forever. Many fans felt we had betrayed the New U's premise (as they understood it) when we finally started living up to it (as we now understand it).
The fifth nail in the New U's cosmic coffin may be 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.
I could mention business and economic factors that may have hurt the New U, such as altering the format of the line in midstream, making the books direct-only, and hiking the price substantially twice, but these were all steps that were taken once the New U line was already floundering. Truth to tell, these steps actually enabled the New Universe line to last as long as it did.
So, as a line of monthly titles, the great experiment known as the New Universe is dead. The characters, many of whom have gained a rabid core following, will live on in sporadic special formats. I'm really going to miss a lot of them. Sometimes I wonder how many of the New U titles might still be around today if they had been set in the Marvel Universe from the start. Some I can easily see finding a comfortable niche in the Marvel U-- Justice, Nightmask, and Kickers-- others I'm afraid would just be somewhat redundant or inconsequential in the cosmic-powered mutantocentric Marvel U-- my beloved DP7, for instance. Oh, well. It's not to be anyway. You can say a lot of things about the new Universe, but one thing you can't say is that it "sold out" and was tacked onto the outskirts of the imensely more popular Marvel Universe in a last ditch effort to save it.
-- Mark Gruenwald