Marvel Comics has become the first name in superheroes over the decades, taking the place of their distinguished competition. In recent years, that’s almost entirely because of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the big screen adaptations of their heroes and villains imprinting itself on the consciousness of the general public. The company started its road to dominance not when it started making superheroes back in the Golden Age of Comics, but in the 1960s, when the debuts of the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, Wasp, Spider-Man, and the X-Men kicked off the Marvel Universe that we know and love today. 1961 is the most important year in Marvel history and it’s one the company has celebrated often over the years.
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In a lot of ways, the ’80s were the second coming of the revolutionary creativity that Marvel had defined in the swinging ’60s. The Big Two were firing on all cylinders creatively, with the House of Ideas under the not-so tender auspices of editor-in-chief Jim Shooter. Shooter is a comics legend, having started his career as a teen with DC Comics, and his time at the head of Marvel is one of the most fruitful stretches in the history of the company. As 1986 dawned, the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the Marvel Universe as we know it, Shooter had an idea: if Marvel could create a new universe once, why couldn’t they again? This led the publisher to take a victory lap that would end in one of their most notorious failures.
The New Universe Was Marvel’s Victory Lap
Marvel Comics in the ’80s was doing amazing work and Shooter was a huge part of that. Dying in 2025, Jim gained something of a reputation over the years. Shooter was undoubtedly a creative genius, but he was also a tyrant. Shooter believed that creators owed readers the best stories that they could tell and held them to the highest standards possible. On the one hand, there are some Shooter horror stories out there, but on the other, the stories really were that good. He pushed creators as far as they could go, then pushed them further, and it resulted in some of the best comics ever.
Shooter wanted to show that the Marvel Comics that he built could do the same as the one that come together a quarter of a century before. At first, he wanted to reboot Marvel from the beginning, starting everything all over again in the current era. That was considered too far, so instead they made an all-new superhero universe, one with no relation whatsoever to what came before, much like Marvel had done back in 1961. He wanted it set in a more realistic setting, so there would be no hidden races, gods, mythological beings, or magic. Power levels would be limited and there would be consequences for the actions of heroes and villains. Realism was becoming a big part of comics in the ’80s and Shooter wanted to ride that wave.
Shooter was from Pittsburgh, so he made it ground zero of “the White Event”, which changed the world forever at 4:22am on July 22, 1986. It birthed a group of superpowered heroes and villains, leading to eight monthly titles – D.P.7, Nightmask, Star Brand, Justice, Kickers, Inc., Mark Hazzard: Merc, Psi-Force,and Spitfire and the Troublemakers – a combination of team and solo books. Shooter wanted to get the best creators in the industry for the books, giving them the best possible start. However, things started to go awry before the books were even published.
To start with, Shooter didn’t get the creators he wanted for the line. Marvel’s parent company at the time, Cadence Industries, was threatening to sell the company, forcing them to keep overhead and debt low. The budget was cut down to nothing, meaning that only new creators or veterans who weren’t as hot got the new titles. The stops and starts put tremendous deadline pressure on the creators. After launch, creative teams were swapped around. Shooter couldn’t give the line the attention he wanted because of problems with the higher-ups, and readers complained about the “realism” of the books, saying they weren’t getting what they were promised. Before the first year, Kickers Inc., Mark Hazzard: Merc, Spitfire and the Troublemakers, and Nightmask were all cancelled, with Star Brand being demoted to bimonthly status.
Shooter would end up leaving Marvel and the New Universe was handed to Tom DeFalco, John Byrne, Mark Gruenwald, and Howard Mackie. They did their best to save the remaining titles, but it was far too little and much too late. Other than destroying Pittsburgh in The Pitt graphic novel, nothing of any interest happened in the New Universe. Back when I first started reading comics, the library by my house had a lot of New Universe comics and they were… certainly comics I read. They weren’t bad exactly, but there was no reason to read the New Universe when the rest of Marvel (and DC and the indies) were right there.
The New Universe lasted about three years before it died and the House of Ideas honestly did a pretty good job of paving over it in the years to come. Unless you found some of the old books somewhere and talked to someone who knew, the chances of a Marvel fan in the ’90s knowing about it was nil. In the ’00s, Marvel tried to reboot it with Warren Ellis’s newuniversal,but it never really caught on. Some of the ideas of the New Universe – the White Event, Star Brand, Nightmask – have moved over to the regular Marvel Universe in the years since, but have never really been all that popular, more like Easter eggs for fans like me rather than important parts of the Marvel Universe.
Jim Shooter’s Chickens Came Home to Roost With the New Universe
Jim Shooter’s time as Marvel’s editor-in-chief is full of amazing successes, with most of the failures having been lost to history. Shooter ran the Marvel offices like a brutal emperor, and he was able to ensure that readers got some of the best comics ever. He did a fantastic job and one can see how easily hubris would have set in an situation like his. The New Universe was Shooter trying to prove that he could do what Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the other legends of Silver Age Marvel could do and many of its failures could be put down to Shooter being Shooter.
Even with the budget problems that the New Universe had in its early days, most of the creators that Shooter wanted to work on the books didn’t want to work on a project that would aggrandize him. After he left, creators like Byrne had no problem using the books to poke fun at the departing editor-in-chief. In a lot of ways, the New Universe became an example of what not to do when creating a new universe and in the years to come, Marvel was able to show that it learned its lessons. Or, looking at the history of both Ultimate Universes, some of them.
What do you think about the New Universe? Do you think that it was doomed to fail or is it a hidden gem? Sound off in the comment section below.
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