I know I promised that in the next post I would go back to good old Earth-616 and the “real” Marvel Universe, but then I realized I couldn’t let go of the New U without talking a bit more about D.P. 7. Hence this sub-bullet (b) addendum to the previous post. If nothing else, this blog is best characterized as a series of loosely connected digressions, so of course this long-form series about my personal history with marvel Comics is going to have its share of going off into the weeds.
You might not know it from reading the previous post, but I actually loved D.P. 7. Not merely “well out of all of these very mediocre series in this conceptually flawed standalone continuity, I guess this one is at the top of the list” but active, devoted love. To this day I still have copies of every single issue, including the annual and the one-shot from a Return to the New U event many years later. And a lot of those issues I bought in real time from the newsstand, but a lot of them I had to hunt down after the fact. The failures of the New U became apparent pretty early on and even as it limped through its second year and into its third, retailers were more and more skeptical and less and less likely to order and stock the issues.
But D.P. 7 deserved better. It was extremely akin to X-Men, spiritually (which makes this a worthwhile transitional post because I am definitely going to talk about X-Men a lot in installment 9), at a time when X-Men had gotten really, solidly, consistently good, but right before it absolutely blew up and became the most insanely popular comic EVAR. Both were team books, very heavy on the soap opera and the pathos, and taking the point of view that normal people would be distrustful of others with powers, fearing, hating and hunting them.
One big difference was that the seven protagonists (the rest of the title was an abbreviation of Displaced Paranormals, no mutants in the NU) didn’t have a wealthy patron like Professor X or a place to hide away from the outside world like Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. They spent most of their time on the run, so it was kind of like a hybrid of X-Men and Hulk, with our heroes doing good where they could, almost by accident, while staying one step ahead of the authorities.
But on the other hand another similarity with X-Men was the near-constant raising of the question, “Are these powers a blessing or a curse?” In the Marvel U, no matter what your powerset that question must be asked because simply having powers brands you as a mutant, target of Sentinels, object of fear and loathing to the public at large. But at the same time, as many people have pointed out over the years, most mutants can pretty easily hide what they are, so long as they wear their ruby quartz glasses or keep their bone claws sheathed.
D.P. 7 doubled down by making almost every paranormal’s powerset a kind of monkey’s paw. The set-up starts as a buddy story when Randy meets Dave. Randy is an ER doc and Dave is brought in on a gurney having some kind of episode. Also Dave is over seven feet tall and hundreds of pounds of pure muscle. Dave freaks out and is trashing the place but Randy helps subdue and sedate him, with a partial assist from ghostly black arms that pop out of Randy’s chest. OK, so, Dave is the brick, but his powers are a curse because he used to be a normal-looking 5’11” guy and then he started rapidly growing, which was physically painful to the point of freaking out as above. He’s like the Thing or the Hulk except, of course, more “realistic”, though still plenty attention-grabbingly ugly within the context of the New U. He’s gone bald but has a foot-long beard, his body is hairy (and most clothes don’t fit him) and he’s big as the broadside of a barn. Randy has not just arms but an entire ghostly manifestation that lives inside him but can come out, fly around, phase through stuff but also interact with stuff, and then transfer what it sees to Randy’s mind when it returns. How is this a curse? Eh, it really isn’t, it’s just weird, although as the series goes on it turns out Randy has multiple black ghosts inside him with slightly different personalities, and one of them has no compunctions about straight up murdering people who threaten Randy, which bothers the good doctor. Also if anyone at the hospital found out Randy was a paranormal he might lose his job. So classic X-Men “mutant burden” stuff really.
(Notice the writing credit on page 1 up there, by the way - Mark Gruenwald, the same scribe who wrote Squadron Supreme. Gru was awesome.)
Anyway Dave and Randy hear about a place called The Clinic that claims to cure paranormals and Dave definitely wants to be cured, because it’s nice to be strong but he feels like a freak. And Randy would just as soon not have to worry about his ghost(s) popping out at inopportune moments. So they go to the Clinic and become part of a therapy group of seven, so we meet Dennis (Scuzz), Charlotte (Charlie), Jeff, Lenore and Stephanie.
Scuzz is just a kid of 15, a burnout who literally burns things. His body constantly secretes a substance that disintegrates matter, so his clothes have holes in them with wisps of smoke. When he concentrates he can disintegrate specific things faster. Obviously this power is kind of a bummer, and it gets worse later when Scuzz has a girlfriend for a hot minute until she realizes being intimate with him is physically painful.
Charlie is a dancer who can manipulate friction, making surfaces more sticky or more slippery. The biggest bummer is that she hasn’t learned to control this power, and that makes it hard for her to dance in an ensemble where the other dancers might slip and break their necks if she inadvertently turns off the friction on stage.
Jeff has super speed. He vibrates constantly and looks blurry. He needs to eat almost constantly (a downside to superspeed other superhero comics have also explored). Bit of a mixed bag.
Lenore is an elderly woman whose skin glows constantly with a white light that puts people to sleep. She tests it on Jeff in the group session and he simply stops vibrating. As the series goes in it turns out this is an energy transfer, giving Lenore temporary strength and also de-aging her. But in the early going she feels compelled to wear long dresses, gloves, hats, veils, etc. to block the light and avoid inadvertently putting people under.
Steph is an attractive housewife with four kids. She can heal people by touch, or if they aren’t sick or injured, she can rev up their energy and metabolism. Much like Lenore temporarily helps Jeff, Steph temporarily helps Dave, easing his muscular growing pains. Dave immediately falls in love with Steph, but as mentioned she’s married. And her power really doesn’t have a downside! But her husband, who of course is a jerk, still thinks she’s abnormal and demands she not come home until she’s cured.
Once again, you can see the heavy-handed New U adherence to “realism” at play, but I think because it’s an ensemble cast it works a little better. One character with a single power which is either (a) uncontrollable (b) harmlessly useless (c) as much curse as blessing or (d) all of the above can get real old real fast, but when you put seven characters like that together, they compliment each other, and you can get closer to some of the big propulsive comic book action that I, age eleven, was really interested in. Plus Gruenwald created some pretty likable characters. Dave was fascinating, basically a sweet guy who used to be easygoing but is Not Handling Well At All the weirdness his life has turned into. Scuzz was also intriguing, deeply unlikable but with some depth that came out eventually. Randy was the responsible one, Jeff was the jokester, Lenore was the surprisingly hip old lady. I was ride or die with the Displaced Paranormals, who were basically doing a riff on the Fugitive once they realized the Clinic wanted to “use” them (in a nefarious master plan never really fully articulated) and went on the run, only to be hunted down by other paranormals working for the Clinic.
The first year or so of the series was solidly great, as far as I was concerned, and had an interesting arc from the seven escaping the clinic, trying to hang together as a team, then breaking apart and getting picked off by hunters one by one, taken back to the Clinic and brainwashed. It wasn’t perfect, and it still managed to rankle with some telltale New U bits. At one point while they’re on the lam, Scuzz suggests they use codenames for each other because you never know who might overhear them and call in a tip to the Clinic. Dave would be Mastadon, Randy would be Antibody, Jeff/Blur, Charlie/Friction, Lenore/Twilight, Steph/Glitter (she glowed a little when she used her healing power), and Scuzz dubbed himself the Duke of Disintegration. The others basically laughed at him and said that was dumb comic book kid stuff. Again, the mind boggles that Jim Shooter thought 25 years of Marvel superhero comics should be celebrated by creating an imprint that left out or pointedly insulted most of the tropes of Marvel superhero comics. It’s entirely possible (he said, with hindsight) that this was a tipping point, the beginning of the shift from making comics for kids - precocious kids who could decode $2 words and keep track of tons of continuity and character minutiae, but still kids - and making comics for adult lifelong fans. If you were eight years old when FF#1 came out, now you’re 33, so here, have some comics about adult responsibilities and disillusionment with a sprinkling of Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown, for the discerning mature reader, Not For Babies. Which is probably the most damning thing you could say about the ol’ New U, in retrospect.
Anyway, end of the first year-long arc, Dave is the last one standing, goes back to the Clinic to help bust everyone else out, teams up with Randy to confront the man who ran the place. And … they won? So it kind of reset the premise, now instead of the Clinic being a hostile enemy it became a refuge for paranormals and a breeding ground for more soapy drama. The new twist was that, without an authoritarian in charge, the Clinic degenerated into cliques and gangs carving out little fiefdoms and squabbling with each other. And this very well could have been an interesting avenue to explore long-term, heck almost anything tension-heightening is interesting in a character-driven story where you dig the characters. But, as usual, editorial micromanagement and behind-the-scenes shenanigans did a number on the New Universe. I mentioned last time that the whole thing was Jim Shooter’s baby and Star Brand was his avatar? Yeah, Shooter got pushed out and in a weirdly petty bit of creative salt in the wound, they turned Star Brand into the ultimate villain and he vaporized Pittsburgh, which precipitated a war, where they drafted paranormals specifically? D.P. 7 had no choice but to go along with this event-driven storytelling even though it was way out of line with the series’ overall vibe. And it never really recovered.
There are comics, from Green Lantern to Avengers to Justice League to Exiles, which I have faithfully collected for 10+ years at a stretch, so the fact that I own all 34 issues of D.P. 7 ever published is barely noteworthy. But I do wish I’d had the opportunity to read that title for 10+ years. Oh what might have been.
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