Warren Ellis on "newuniversal"

Following up on the announcement at the Marvel press conference earlier this week, Warren Ellis shared his thoughts on newuniversal, a project he'll write for Marvel next summer that will resurrect the New Universe concept from 20 years ago, via his Bad Signal email list:

Twenty years ago, Marvel tried to launch an entire secondary line of action books that straddled that sometimes-amorphous space between superhero fiction and science fiction. Despite the presence of writers like Archie Goodwin and the young Peter David, it died within two or three years. It was under-funded, generic, and really stands out as a failure of nerve and ambition. And they called it The New Universe.

In summer 2006, I'm going to be launching an ongoing title at Marvel called newuniversal. No capital N, no capital U. We refer to it in-house as NU -- and I might have called it NU, if it didn't always suggest nu-metal to me.

The central concept, these days, also looks kind of generic. Wild Cards did it, RISING STARS did it, etc etc. Something called The White Event occurs, and afterwards a handful of people are found to have been made superhuman. So far so blah. But, in looking at this stuff on a webpage one night, it occurred to me that that's not what happened. What actually happened was that there was this huge astronomical event where the skies went white all over the world for a minute, and the aftermath was that the laws of physics had been changed.

There's a sf book by a writer called Vernor Vinge where the laws of physics are radically different depending on which part of the galaxy you're in. Conventional physics' dirty little secret is that the speed of light appears to fluctuate.

There is, as I say, a whole library of science fiction about superhumanity. These are not superhero novels. Some lean closer than others, of course -- Zelazny and Saberhagen's COILS comes to mind, and SLAN was very clearly a precedent to the X-Men. But there's a lot more that speaks to, if you like, the superhuman condition. Melding that with the notion that suddenly the laws of physics can go and stay slightly nuts... In one six-hour session, I generated a bunch of notes about how and why this could happen, with some ideas from some old abandoned projects of mine (from the Loose Ideas folder) fitting themselves into it...

Sure, it's not exactly cut from whole cloth. Like I said, it's a writing challenge. Blows the cobwebs out a bit. Makes you focus on the craft a bit. Sometimes it's worth sitting down and thinking, what *does* make a Marvel character work? (Answer: tragedy.)

Tragedy and the New Universe go hand-in-hand, but not in the way that Ellis references above. For those two young to remember or who have tried to forget, the New Universe was the brainchild of Jim Shooter before he left Marvel. He wrote the flagship title, Starbrand, which featured John Romita Jr. on art, while Mark Gruenwald wrote and Paul Ryan drew D.P. 7, arguably the best New Universe title. Other debut titles include Psi-Force, Justice, Merc, Spitfire and the Troubleshooters (later renamed Codename:Spitfire), Nightmask and Kickers, Inc.

The New Universe was touted as "the world outside your window," and was supposed to be free of all the typical "fantastic" comic book plot devices, like undersea kingdoms, aliens, other dimensions, etc. Apparently not all of the writers received that memo, as other dimensions appeared in Justice, and Shooter's own Starbrand featured aliens. Many fans noted that Starbrand's "novel concept" was very similar to Green Lantern. And still others noticed that most of the books were pretty bland, especially in comparison to DC's output around that same timeframe, like Alan Moore's Watchmen, John Byrne's Superman and Frank Miller's Batman: Year One.

After Shooter left Marvel, the New Universe was trimmed back to four titles -- Starbrand, D.P. 7, Psi-Force and Justice -- and a closer continuity was introduced with the debut of The Pitt, a "prestige format" one-shot that brought the destruction of Pittsburgh and a darker tone to the titles. The Pitt was followed by The Draft and The War one-shots, which saw the New Universe hit by World War 3.

John Byrne took over Starbrand after Shooter left, which made it to issue 19, while Psi-Force, D.P. 7 and Justice each made it to issue 32 before being canceled in 1989. Since then, the New Universe has been featured in Quasar and most recently in Exiles as part of the "World Tour" storyline. A Starbrand parody also made its way into the DC Comics mini-series Legends, where a villain who looked an awful lot like Jim Shooter accidentally blew off his own foot after claiming he had the power to "create a new universe" in his hand.

Check out Wikipedia or your retailer's 25-cent boxes if you're curious to learn more. With the exception of D.P. 7 and parts of Starbrand, the early titles were fairly bad, but the post-Pitt stories in D.P. 7, Justice and Psi-Force featured some pretty good stories by Gruenwald, Peter David and Fabian Nicieza.