Nuke Me with the New!

About Nuke Me with the New!

I've been with the New Universe since the beginning. I thought it was such an incredibly cool idea at the time. (I was 15.) I even bought two copies of all the #1 issues, because I knew they'd be valuable someday. (Hah!) I ended up immediately dropping Justice and Star Brand because I felt they, featuring aliens and extra-dimensional warriors, violated the concept of the "world outside your window." I didn't follow Merc because it's just not the kind of thing I like. And yet I gleefully bought Kickers, Inc.. There's no accounting for a 15-year-old's taste, I guess.

When the line was pared down from eight to four titles, I started buying and reading them all. When the whole line got canceled, I went to the quarter bins to complete my collection of all the New Universe titles. Luckily, I followed Mark Gruenwald to Quasar, as I generally like Marvel's cosmic setting. That, of course, led to buying Starblast.

Fast forward to 2005. I've been wanting to work out a New Universe timeline for years, but haven't had time. Marvel has the Exiles visit something resembling the New Universe. Cool! Then they announce a New Universe event is coming in March 2006. If I'm ever going to start a New Universe web site, now is the time to do it. So I spend a couple of late nights working on it and here we are. (And I really still don't have time to work out the timeline, but I've made a start at it anyway.)

The Title

About a year into the New Universe, Marvel had a contest to find a slogan (along the lines of "Make mine Marvel") for the New Universe. The winner, by Ernest Pascua of Hilo, Hawaii, was announced in month 15: NUKE ME WITH THE NEW! I'm really not that fond of the slogan, but since no web site I could find was using it, it seemed like the right thing to do. And it saved me from having to come up with something original, which is not my forte.

The Font

Would you like to know what font was used for the New Universe logo? Unfortunately, according to Marvel Age #47, the logo was inspired by the lettering on a toy Uzi box. This means there probably isn't a font that exactly matches the logo.

So, you ask, how did I make the NMwtN logo? Well, first I took all the characters I could (E, I, N, U, W) from a scan of the logo on a comic book cover. The K was done by hand and is a total guess as to what is should look like. The M is a flipped and mirrored W. The T is a mirrored R. The H is an N with the bottom cut off and a stem added. The exclamation point was done by hand, too, but I'd say it's a pretty safe guess.

After making the logo, I discovered a T in the New U. "font" on the "Giant-Sized Annuals." Then I also found that the "The New Universe Timeline" title in the back of later books used the "font." However, the "T" there doesn't match the one in "Giant," so who's to say what's right? I'm too lazy to change it now anyway.