New Universe
It was created by Jim Shooter, Archie Goodwin, Eliot R. Brown, John Morelli, Mark Gruenwald, Tom DeFalco, and edited by Michael Higgins.
This was in contrast to the traditional Marvel Universe, which always purported to take place in a mirror of the real world where public knowledge of superheroes, supervillains and their activities had little effect on normal day-to-day business.
The concept was fleshed out, and ideas for the individual series proposed, at a meeting with Shooter, DeFalco, Archie Goodwin, Eliot R. Brown, John Morelli, and Mark Gruenwald.
The New Universe's first divergence from normal reality was the White Event, a strange astronomical phenomenon that occurred on that date, at 4:22 a.m., EDT, and lasted for mere moments.
It bathed the Earth in a bright white light and caused genetic anomalies in two out of every one million humans, which led to their developing superhuman powers.
[4] However, three of the eight launch titles, including two created by Goodwin himself, had no connection of any sort to the White Event: Mark Hazzard: Merc, Spitfire and the Troubleshooters, and Justice.
[1] Because of false starts, and delays in developing the New Universe concept, production of the first issues faced harsh deadline pressures as the 25th anniversary approached.
In addition, many readers felt that the line did not follow the advertised "world outside your window" concept; especially strong contradictions to the line's supposed realism were Justice (about an alien knight from a quasi-medieval civilization), Kickers Inc. (a team of five professional football players who work as heroes-for-hire as a sideline), and Codename: Spitfire (whose later issues involved technology that verged on the fantastical).
In 2007, comics journalist Philippe Cordier went so far as to declare Jim Shooter's run on Star Brand to be "the New Universe's only good title".
[5] By the end of the imprint's first year, four of the titles (Kickers, Inc., Mark Hazzard: Merc, Nightmask and Codename: Spitfire) were cancelled, while a fifth (Star Brand) had been downgraded to bimonthly status, and Shooter himself had departed Marvel.
[6] In an effort to save the line, DeFalco (now Marvel's editor-in-chief), Gruenwald, John Byrne, and editor Howard Mackie ended up removing some of the more fantastic elements from it and, in a few cases, doing radical revamps.
[6] Byrne signed up to write and do breakdowns on Star Brand, altering the series so that it focused less on Ken Connell and more on the power of the titular object itself.
Connell's effort results in a tremendous release of energy, which scoops out a massive crater, obliterating the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and most of the surrounding area in what became known as the Black Event.
[7] The crater that existed where Pittsburgh had once been became known as "The Pitt", and its creation marked a turn into a generally grimmer tone for the line, with a more militarized international political scene, and some themes of post-apocalyptic fiction being explored.
The increasingly unstable political scene would have effects such as the forcible military recruitment of paranormals for a war with the Soviet Union (believed by the Americans to have caused the disaster), as portrayed in the graphic novel The Draft.
After observing this world, Proteus becomes determined to retrieve the most powerful weapon in the known universe, the Star Brand, by attempting to take the body of Ken Connell.
In 2006, Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada and Editor Mark Paniccia set in motion events to celebrate Marvel Comics' 20th Anniversary of the New Universe.
In late February and early March, Marvel launched the Untold Tales of the New Universe, a five-week comic event that took place in a pre-Pitt timeframe in the original continuity.
initiative, in the fifth volume of The Avengers, writer Jonathan Hickman resurrects several concepts from the New Universe including The White Event, Nightmask and Star Brand, as well as elements from newuniversal like the Superflow.
