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See, I don’t know if I buy that.
That is: I don’t know how much of that stuff was conscious auctorial intent, and how of it was—well, Marvel in the 1980s.
The New Universe stands, for me, as a testimony to wasted potential—and as a monument to the shortcomings of the top-down, editor-driven creative process in place at the Big Two. New Universe was wholly Jim Shooter’s baby. He wanted to do an SF-style “superhumans in a realistic world” line, and that was the mandate handed down to the creative teams from on high. But these were Marvel journeymen, and although they were very good at their jobs, their skills lay primarily within the peculiar demands of Marvel Universe storytelling.
New Universe ultimately failed on an aesthetic level because the hearts of the creators simply weren’t in it. Guys who came up drawing Doombots and Ultimate Nullifiers and the moons of Zenn-La found themselves stuck drawing an endless succession of flannel shirts, cop cars, and Midwestern landscapes. You could see it chafing. You could see it in the way that Paul Ryan kept contriving to draw the cast of DP7 in color-coded spandex workout gear, or to reduce their wardrobes to a single set of clothes—a costume, a uniform—and to shoehorn in more fight scenes. You had guys who came up writing grand cosmos-spanning sagas of valor and destruction stuck writing about failing marriages and abusive parents, and you could see them pushing against it—giving everybody a codename within two issues, piling on the over-the-top soap opera plot twists and reversals, retreating to familiar territory (bringing on the CIA recruiters and turn DP7 into a superhero-team book!), culminating in the asinine (and borderline racist, IIRC) Pitt/Draft/War trilogy that brought the whole sorry enterprise to a close. By the time Captain Manhattan rolled around, in his ludicrous blue-and-orange cape ensemble, you could feel the talent throwing up their hands and saying, Thank God, let’s dispense with all the pretense and get back to what we do best.
It probably didn’t help that the books were being promoted like, and to the same audience as, standard Marvel Universe books.
It’s kind of a shame, because there really was potential there. NIGHTMASK in particular could have been an interesting little book, a bridge between the Mike Fleischer and Neil Gaiman SANDMAN concepts, but nothing came of it but lame superheroics. DP7 was probably the best of them—it had some interesting and likable characters, an intriguing proto-X-FILES feel, and some squicky moments of what the kids today call “body horror”—but it was insanely overwritten and too often it simply drifted. There was always an undertow, a feeling that the creators didn’t fully believe in the material. |
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