The Marvel Universe, meaning the tapestry of interconnected superhero stories in comics, began with the publication on Fantastic Four #1 in late 1961. Yes, there were other superhero comics published by the same company under different names back in the 30’s and 40’s, and some of the characters who debuted in those WWII-era magazines (including Captain America and Namor the Sub-Mariner) would be brought back and incorporated into the Marvel Universe in the 60’s, which might complicate the reckoning of a proper ‘beginning’. Meanwhile Spider-Man, Marvel’s flagship character, wouldn’t debut in Amazing Fantasy until 1962 and wouldn’t get his own ongoing title until 1963. If you talk about other stalwarts of the MCU like Thor and Iron Man, they too were not present at first, technically. But nonetheless, FF #1 was the launch of the modern superhero phase of Marvel Comics, if for no other reason than Marvel Comics themselves always referred to it that way. The Fantastic Four was the first family, the progenitors of superheroes as we know them. The Marvel Universe began in 1961.
So quick math will tell you that the 25th anniversary of Marvel Comics was 1986, and if you think they were going to let that pass without acknowledgement, you don’t fully appreciate what a relentless hype machine Marvel Comics, the company, always had been and was perfected into by the Reagan Years. In my memory there were two big markers of the anniversary which were readily apparent to my young eyes. One was a special format for the covers of all the ongoing superhero titles in the summer of ‘86. I remember buying several of these off the newsstand at the time.
Extreme close-ups of the title character (or a representative character for a team book), a border showcasing the biggest superhero stars of the time, and the 25th anniversary logo in the upper left - what’s not to love?
The other way Marvel decided to commemorate the occasion of 25 years since FF#1 was … by creating an entirely new, separate, fictional superhero universe. They promoted for months and months that they were going to be launching not one but several new titles, interconnected to each other but with no connection to Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, etc. The name for this bold new storytelling imprint was “New Universe” and in 1986 if you were into Marvel comics like I was, it was inescapable. I totally had this promo poster hung up in my childhood bedroom:
As I said in the previous post, some part of me enjoyed the challenge of catching up on the Marvel Universe’s twenty-plus years of continuity as a young fan in the 80’s, but another part of me longed to have been there from the beginning. I cannot possibly have been alone in feeling this way. Marvel was banking that lots of kids my age would be super stoked to be able to pick up new #1 issues at the dawning of a brand new comics world, to position themselves to be veteran fans who had been there from day one. I was eleven-almost-twelve, this made tons of sense to me! I was on board!
So much so that I made a momentous decision: for the first time in my young life I was going to subscribe to a comic book. Every Marvel comic in the 80’s had a house ad for the ongoing series that you could have delivered to your door every month, at discount rates. I had never availed myself of this before but I reasoned there was no better time to jump in with both feet than on the cusp of this New Universe. But of the eight titles being offered, which one would I choose?
The poster up above shows the eight titles in the New U, which I will now briefly explain:
D.P.7 - seven strangers who develop powers meet each other when they all come to The Clinic in hopes of curing their new conditions. When they find out The Clinic has nefarious plans for them, they escape and go on the run.
JUSTICE - A newcomer to Earth from another realm (planet? dimension?) hunts monsters that have also crossed over to Earth.
KICKERS, INC. - Four football players and the quarterback’s girlfriend become private investigators after a medical experiment gives the QB heightened physical abilities.
STAR BRAND - A normal guy receives an artifact of immense power from an alien and tries to figure out how to use it for good.
NIGHTMASK - A young man with the psychic ability to enter other people’s dreams uses his gift to help people.
SPITFIRE AND THE TROUBLESHOOTERS - A young woman’s father is killed by people who want to use his construction/rescue exoskeleton as a weapon; she teams up with some fellow techie nerds to keep the suit out of their hands.
MERC - Soldier of Fortune, the comic book.
PSI-FORCE - Five teenagers, each with different psychic abilities, are gathered by a former spook who wants to keep the kids out of the government’s hands. He is killed but together the five kids can psychically summon his ghost, Psi-Hawk.
How much would each of these books have appealed to 11/12 year old me? D.P. 7, Nightmask and Psi-Force would be in the top tier. Kickers, Inc. and Justice would be solidly second tier. Spitfire and Star Brand would be third tier “meh”. And Merc is the kind of comic I have always actively disliked - no super powers, no costumes, nothing sci-fi or fantasy at all, just weapons-and-vehicles fetishization. (Not that I knew what a fetish was when I was 11. But Marvel already had the Punisher and I never saw the appeal there, either.)
I ended up sampling all of the New U titles, eventually. I mean why not? They were 75 cents a pop, and I’m sure they doled those #1s out over four, maybe six weeks that summer. My allowance covered the full spread. But the time to sign up for a subscription, of course, was before anything had been released, and New U was very much treated as a “secret project”. The house ads for subscriptions in X-Factor and West Coast Avengers looked like this:
Underneath which was a coupon with the list of titles, unexplained, where you could check boxes to subscribe to one or more, and a form to fill in your address. All of which I dutifully did, even though there wasn't much (any) info to go on. And so, totally blind, I selected my one title … MERC. Blugh.
See, I didn’t realize at the time that Merc was short for “mercenary”. I thought it was short for … Mercury? I thought it would be the New U version of The Flash, and that idea intrigued me. Sign me up for the speedster, I thought. Then the issues started showing up in the mailbox and it didn’t take long for buyer’s remorse to set in. Not only was it a 100% superhero-free comic, but it was bleak. Mark Hazzard, the titular mercenary, was a jerk. I’m sure there was a nuanced and ironic exploration of PTSD or something buried under the gunplay and explosions, but I was a kid who wanted to see demigods in spandex perform miracles and make the world a better place, not thrill to the exploits of a middle-aged divorcee who would murder Sandinistas for a paycheck. So my first (and last) experience with a direct mail subscription from Marvel Comics was not an altogether fun one, but I chalked it up to a learning experience: check something out for yourself before committing to paying for a year’s worth up front.
What’s wild is how my personal experience with the New U is in its way a microcosm of everything that went wrong with the New U. Or maybe I should say the most extreme, egregious example of what went wrong. For go wrong it very much did. The next bold leap forward in sequential storytelling of modern fantasy, to ring in the 25th anniversary of the Marvel U, lasted less than three years. Most of the titles got cancelled before hitting 25 issues, let alone 25 years. Whereas that was 35 years ago now, and the main Marvel U is still kicking along happily while the New U is just a funny footnote.
Many people have done post-mortems on the New U in the decades since, but to vastly oversimplify: they took the wrong lessons from the Marvel U. The prevailing wisdom in the mid-80’s, which still more or less holds up today, was that Marvel Comics really did do superheroes in a way they had never been done before. They kept the costumes and outlandish personas, the physics-defying superpowers, the larger-than-life battles between good and evil, and then in addition they layered in other elements of pathos. (Not my theory, but I plug it every chance I get: DC Comics, Superman and Batman etc., grew out of the pulps, and they are about archetypes. Marvel Comics, the FF and Spider-Man etc., grew out of monster comics and romance comics, and they are about human psychology.) The Fantastic Four was a family with all the messy interpersonal dynamics that entailed. Spider-Man and the Hulk were outsiders, at odds with the world. Iron Man had deadly shrapnel lodged in his chest close to his heart. The X-Men were caught in endless cycles of unrequited love, inconsolable grief, guilt and shame and every other flavor of self-doubt and self-loathing. All of which made those superheroes, radioactive blood and adamantium claws and all, seem more human and feel more real. On top of that, the ongoing storylines incorporated failure alongside the successes, and consequences which complicated every action, again all with the explicit aim of giving the stories and characters a veneer of verisimilitude.
And not for nothing, but Superman and Batman were from the fictional cities of Metropolis and Gotham, which are (again) archetypal urban centers. The FF and Spider-Man hung out in the “real” New York City. Marvel Comics, ergo, were supposed to take place in the “real” world. Which sounds great, full stop. I totally buy into all of this, for what it’s worth, and I did when I was eleven even if I couldn’t have articulated it at length. Balancing out the guy who can stretch and the gal who can turn invisible with concerns about public perception and finances is just smart, appealing storytelling. But at the end of the day, it was a way to put a dash of realism into a stew of modern myth-making. As Marvel Comics evolved over 25 years, they piled on the unreal ingredients: more alien races, magical dimensions, impossible science, fake countries, hidden civilizations, lost pantheons, and a sarcastic, cigar-chomping duck named Howard. Once you’ve had the sorcerer supreme meet the personification of time and space itself, or let one of the X-Men’s cosmically powerful children from a future timeline come back and join the team, or established numerous galactic empires and at least three subterranean kingdoms, well, how much of a claim do you have on these comics taking place in the real world?
It’s hard, even now, for me to wrap my head around the fact that someone looked at the Marvel Universe as it stood in 1986 and thought that losing that specific facet - not that the comics had a realistic take on their characters’ psychologies, but that they nominally could exist in the real world - was a huge problem. And that the guiding principle for a new universe should be that it was “the world outside your window” requiring as little suspension of disbelief as possible. And yet, that was the elevator pitch for the New Universe.
To reframe the eight New U titles a bit more: two were about psychic powers (Nightmask and Psi-Force) which some people believe might possibly exist in our world; two were about low-end science fiction technology (Spitfire and Kickers) like robotics and human enhancement, which are arguably plausible; and two were about aliens (Star Brand and Justice) which, again, some people believe exist. One, deep sigh, had no fantastical elements whatsoever (Merc, of course) and really only one had something like the anarchic bonkers anything-goes spirit of traditional superhero comics (D.P. 7, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be my favorite of the bunch and clearly was the one I should have subscribed to).
And of the three that were the most outre, each had its own guard rails. The superpowers in D.P. 7, such as they were, were all very humble. One character was the brick, but he was only remarkably strong and tough, not an invulnerable Hercules. One was a healer, but only for minor injuries. One could disintegrate things, but only by directly touching the thing and secreting a kind of bio-acid. Powers as they might manifest while still obeying most of the laws of physics and biology, in other words. Justice (which I never read beyond sampling one issue) turned out to not be about aliens after all, because the main character wasn’t from another world, he had been brainwashed into believing a delusional fantasy about monsters and the knights who hunted them. I think some evil corporation did the brainwashing, it was the 80s, lots of stories went down like that.
Star Brand, one could argue, was as traditional comic-booky as D.P. 7 or maybe moreso. This was the central Superman figure of the New U. With his gift from aliens (literally a brand in the shape of a star on his palm) Ken Connell gained phenomenal powers - he could fly, he was superstrong, he could release tremendous energy. To offset this in the overall spirit of the New U, Ken was as everyman as could be. As tragically pathos-filled as the original Marvel Comics heroes could be, it’s worth noting that they were all pretty close to the classic hero molds all the same. Heart shrapnel or no, Tony Stark was still a child of privilege, CEO of a successful company, wealthy and handsome. Reed Richards was also independently wealthy, and a genius, before taking off in his doomed rocket, and Sue Storm was a gorgeous socialite. Even Peter Parker was a genius, from a humble home but with easy access to New York City’s best schools and science demonstrations. Ken Connell, to fit into the New U, was a nobody. Tall, lanky, not particularly handsome. Worked as a mechanic in some forgotten suburb of Pittsburgh. Solidly lower middle class. Directionless. Was hung up on a local hot/mean girl who wasn’t interested in him, and had a less-attractive female friend who was clearly interested in him but he didn’t reciprocate. Put a pin in this and we’ll come back to it in a moment.
Anyway, so there’s this continuum from no powers to exotic gadgets to psychic abilities to vaguely superheroic powers, and right from the get-go there’s a line in the sand that can’t be crossed. The New Universe was never supposed to get too far away from that baseline realism. So all the bad guys were straight out of generic mid-budget 80’s action movies: terrorists with suitcase nukes, unscrupulous corporations, Communist soldiers (both renegade and state-sanctioned), unethical scientists, yuppie scum. Whereas the Marvel Universe started out of the gate with Monster Island and Doctor Doom, and escalated quickly to Galactus the Devourer of Worlds and Ego the Living Planet, the New Universe was determined to keep things grounded. I suppose they succeeded, but you also might call it failure to launch and not be wrong, at that.
Surprise, surprise, as it turns out, people (especially kids) don’t read comics for the realism! Making “as realistic as possible” the guiding principle for a comics universe is like finding out a kid likes french fries and handing them a salt shaker and expecting them to not just be satisfied but thrilled. A little pathos goes a long way, but it’s the gonzo storytelling about extraterrestrial armadas and mystical pantheons that keeps the burning heart of superhero comics beating. Arguably the creators of the New U wanted to appeal to a different, broader audience than the die hard superhero fan kids, but even if that were the case, all that meant was they were entering into direct competition with those aforementioned mid-budget 80’s action movies. Every story tells the same story, and when you want to do so on film with live actors but not spend a hundred million dollars, you make a version of the story with human protagonists and antagonists, fake guns and a few explosions. The secret weapon of comics has always been that it costs the same to produce a two-dimensional color picture of Captain America and the Fantastic Four teaming up to fend off an invasion of New York by Antimatter Nazi Hyper-Wolves as it would cost for a two-dimensional color picture of an average schmoe riding the bus in Cleveland and thinking about which parts of werewolf lore might be real. So with budget being a non-factor, why would you ever choose the latter over the former?
To stand out in an already crowded field, I guess? To be more nuanced, more sophisticated? Maybe. But then why tie it specifically to Marvel Comics’ 25th Anniversary? Why look at the undeniable success of Spider-Man and the X-Men and say “Let’s get rid of everything that inspires the imagination, and focus almost exclusively on a single component of the secret sauce, and repackage and sell that!” But that’s what they did, for a little while. They thought the Marvel Universe had lost its way by getting too overstuffed with nonsense, and they offered a severely heavy-handed overcorrection that nobody else was asking for. Ironically, the imprint line went away and some of the characters much later became supporting cast in the regular Marvel Universe, traversing the multiverse to get to the true home of superheroes after all.
I was there, I saw it go down, and it’s easy for me now to play hindsight visionary and say that it could have worked, if all the new titles had been as unashamedly super-hero-y as D.P. 7 and Psi-Force at minimum, and if there had been room to grow into the crazy cosmic stuff organically, and if relative realism had been an accessory feature, not absolute realism the be-all-end-all point of the whole thing. Then again, maybe not. Maybe Fantastic Four #1 and those wild times in the 60’s caught lightning in a bottle in an ineffably unique way.
Quick return to Star Brand: it’s well-known lore on the interwebs at this point that Ken Connell was based on Jim Shooter, then-EiC of Marvel whose brainchild the New U was, and who wrote the Star Brand series at first. And a lot of the details of Star Brand’s supporting cast were pulled directly from Shooter’s life. I don’t mean to slag the man for injecting autobiographical realism into Star Brand. But the results speak for themselves, as Star Brand did not become an iconic classic. The problem with Superman is not that he’s Cary Grant handsome, or that he has a prestigious job as a reporter for a major metropolitan paper. There actually is no problem with Superman, which is why he’s still around. People don’t put up with the nonsense attached to superheroes - be that the bullet-proof powers OR the diabolical nightmarish foes OR the unlikely handsomeness and wealth and fame etc. - because they want the imperfect humanity buried underneath it all. They actively love the nonsense, every bit of it, and some imperfect humanity highlights and contrasts that nonsense in ways that makes it even better. That’s the lesson.
Also, obligatory Stay Woke call-out: although the New U came into being twenty years after Black Panther was introduced in Fantastic Four #52, guess how many New U headliners were people of color? Did you guess zero? Ding ding ding! Ken Connell was white (as is Jim Shooter), and so was Justice, and so was Nightmask, and so was the woman who operated Spitfire, and so was Mark Hazzard. Of the five Psi-Force kids, three were definitely white, one was an Asian girl, and one was a black boy. Their mentor was Native American. Of the Kickers, Inc. the one who got quasi-powers was white, as was his girlfriend and one of the others, with the remaining two one black guy and one Hispanic guy. D.P. 7 broke down as three white dudes, two white ladies, a black dude and a black lady. For a “bold leap forward” it was a lot of the same old, same old in that regard.
NEXT POST: Back to the Marvel comics proper, as I finally reach the obsessive point of no return ...
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