If I have ever read a New Universe comic, it’s been in passing. I remember the books coming out back in the late 1980s because I would see them on the shelves while I grabbed my G.I. Joe books and definitely remember seeing the ads for the line, but it never really seemed interesting to me. From what I have heard, there wasn’t much interest in it from a lot of people because Marvel jettisoned the project within a few years of its birth (after it had jettisoned Jim Shooter).

But I’ve been collecting the back end of Quasar because those issues aren’t on Marvel Unlimited, and right around issue #50 or so, there is a storyline involving something called The Star Brand. When I first saw that, it seemed familiar and then I remembered that it had something to do with the New Universe. I made a mental note to look it up and saw that it was one of the titles (which I’m pretty sure I already knew but had kind of forgotten) and decided to see if I could find the series on the cheap. I managed to grab the first six issues in a quarter bin and then spotted the rest of the series on Marvel Unlimited. Nineteen issues plus an annual isn’t that much of a commitment, so I went for it.

Okay, I need to back up here because before starting Star Brand, I actually read Secret Wars II. For some reason, I had it in my head that the last issue of that series had the Beyonder dying and that death starting the New Universe. Don’t ask me why I thought that was the case; it’s probably some Mandela effect thing where I could have sworn I read that somewhere. Maybe it’s because both were Jim Shooter projects that premiered around the same time? At any rate, I’ll give you my five-word review of Secret Wars II right here: What the hell was that?

Star Brand‘s first couple of issues provided enough of a palate cleanser for me to forget about the Beyonder’s exploits. The concept of the book is something that reminded me of what we would get in two books from the late 1980s and early 1990s that I’ve read for this project–the aforementioned Quasar and the Will Payton Starman series–which is that a guy gets a cosmic power and has to balance learning how to use it for good while balancing his personal life. The guy here is Ken Connell, who meets some old guy (called “The Old Man”) who touches him and leaves him with a tattoo of a star and a crescent–the titular Star Brand. It’s very Green Lantern in that way, except instead of Abin Sur dying after giving Hal Jordan the ring, The Old Man sticks around and is actually a bit of a nemesis. He seems to want the power back at various points or for Ken to use it in certain ways.

Complicating things is Ken’s personal life. He’s a mechanic, has a best friend who is a psychiatrist named Milo, and is involved with two women. One is Barbara, his girlfriend and a single mom with two kids; the other is Debbie, or “Duck” as she’s called (and whom “quacks” as an endearment of sorts). His relationship with Barbara falls apart because his superhero identity gets in the way (to the point where she’s literally wearing lingerie and throwing herself at him and he’s all, “shoot, gotta go do some Star Branding”). He eventually knocks Debbie up, which happens right before he blows up Pittsburgh.

That means I have to take a detour into another book I fished out of a quarter bin, the one-shot prestige format book, The Pitt. At the end of issue #12 of Star Brand, Ken is trying to let go of his power and learns from The Old Man that one way to do it is to dischange it into an inanimate object. He flies toward space holding a weight and is supposed to do it somewhere near the moon, but instead does it in the upper atmosphere and turns Pittsburgh into a smoldering crater. And that’s how we get The Pitt, which was supposed to be some sort of “reboot event” for the New Universe line but wound up being the beginning of the end for it (eventually leading to The Draft and the miniseries The War that closed out the line with World War III). Star Brand isn’t in The Pitt but we get to see the aftermath of his actions as the government and military try to contain the situation and people try to survive. We pick up Star Brand with Duck giving birth to her child and dying in childbirth because the kid literally punches his way out of her and is immediately super-intelligent.

Look, I’m not going to dare compare any of this to Miracleman, but holy crap there’s a lot of overlap, and they were being published around the same time. I’m going to give the writers the benefit of the doubt and say that they came about this independently (the Miracleman baby predates the one in Star Brand, but The Pitt was published before Miracleman #14-15, which is that brutal battle of London).

Anyway, back to the Star Brand book adn the baby. Ken Connell has gone missing and then shows up as insane in some way. Duck is dead. Barbara is … well, I’m not sure, but I’m going to assume she got blown up because that’s what happened to Milo. And the book becomes weird in places and disjointed in others. There are moments throughout the series where I was wondering if I had missed something because things were established but never went anywhere. Why was Barbara’s daughter acting completely different after an encounter with The Old Man? Why did this family whom had been caught in the “Pitt sludge” merge to form a hungry monster that looked like something out of a Cronenberg movie? How did Ken go from hero to nuts in less than 60 seconds? The last one was kind of answered, but the others …?

Anyway, the book was entertaining and I’m looking forward to finishing the Quasar title to see how the Star Brand storyline plays out. The New Universe itself was kind of an interesting concept and I’m not against picking up another title if I see it in the quarter bins–the Spitfire book looked interesting and I’d be curious to see what The War was like if I can find it. But as for these … they were all so beat up that I’m okay with letting them be recycled.

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Trash.

Addendum: Failed Universe #1. At the same time I grabbed the Star Brand books and The Pitt, I found a parody comic from Blackthorne Publishing. It was published in 1987 and was a spoof of the concept, lampooning Marvel’s money grab by having a Jim Shooter-type of comics publisher use a computer to create a bunch of new books so they can earn more money. It’s the type of thing that you would have expected from Mad or Cracked back in the day, but those magazines always did it better. This book seemed to be in love with its own joke. And many of the jokes were bad. Trash.