While prepping for this week’s Retro Review (Stay tuned, it’s a corker!), I started reminiscing about the various comic-book universes past. The 1990s were full of promising startups (Jim Shooter alone had a hand in about five), but most quickly became a Lost Universe, leaving us to wonder what happened to the denizens of Comics Greatest World, the real-world-styled heroes of Defiant or the perhaps-best-left-unremembered Lightning Comics characters. Even those continuities that have restarted, such as Valiant Comics, aren’t quite the same, making me wonder if the original versions of Sting, Shadowman and that alien gray with the Omega chest-symbol are still “out there” somewhere and leading to today’s parallel query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) would still revive the world of Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 4, the cool grown-up Legion future, asking: Which Lost Universe of comics past would you bring back, given the authority?
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What was that wrestling comic starring Ultimate Warrior called? That one, but it would be written by Grant Morrison.
If I could set the clock back before it was spoiled by Marvel, Ultraverse.
If I have to take it as it was before it stopped publishing, Milestone.
The original pre-crisis multiverse. So much simpler than the convoluted messes they have been trying to give us since then.
If I had my druthers, I’d bring back Valiant’s 1999-2004 universe, then I’d bring back DC’s Golden Age.
If they could get past the red tape, I’d bring back the Ultraverse. I wouldn’t even mind it being a part of the Marvel Multiverse, so long as it stayed true to it’s original concept and doesn’t suddenly have an Ultraverse Spider-Man or Ultraverse versions of other Marvel characters pop up.
Amalgam would be fun to see revisited as well. I keep hoping that it would become an annual 5th week event, where at least once a year DC and Marvel team up and each release an equal number of stories set within the setting. It wouldn’t even require a DC vs Marvel event as the last event had the Amalgam Universe created to exist within a pocket universe without needing a merging of the Marvel and DC universes.
And while there are a few TMNT comics available, I’d love to see the Archie TMNT setting revisited. It sorta happened a few years back, with a character from the Archie setting helping an incarnation of the Mirage characters, but it didn’t really revisit the setting itself. Even though it started as a copy of the 80’s animated series, it built up it’s own mythos separate from the series and the Mirage comics and was a halfway decent incarnation (not as dark as the Mirage comics often were, yet not always as goofy as the old cartoons).