Broken Frontier

In his latest Bad Signal, Warren Ellis discusses yesterday's conference call and his plans for Marvel's New Universe:

Yesterday, I did a Marvel phone conference with retailers and journalists.

"Any questions?" Marvel's John Dokes asked brightly, remembering with bitterness that I'd promised to keep it clean.  And there was deathly silence on the line.  "I do it for the children," I said.

The conference was to talk up NEXTWAVE a bit -- and I just saw the lettered inked pages, and I'm actually still smiling at the gags,which is rare for me -- and to announce my own summer 2006 project for Marvel.  I wanted  something to fuck around with.  I wanted to keep my foot in that half/two-thirds of the overall direct market that doesn't order my other work.  And I wanted one of those old-style writing challenges that I hadn't really done before -- taking an old fucked-up franchise and monkeying around inside it.

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 tomind, and SLAN was very clearly aprecedent 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.)

Anyway.  That's all for next year.

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