The backup issues were better about this, but not by much. I know that it was hard for Shooter to get top artists for this imprint, but damn, I was really underwhelmed by the showing of dreamlike art in this collection. If Shooter had wanted this to work then the trippy dream world aspect of it should have been pushed harder. Some of the art is nice, and I think it might just be a product of the time, but for a book about entering dreams, the art isn’t dreamy enough for its premise. The characters suffer from the classic “a lot of personality and not much to do.”

Teddy desperately wants to help Keith in his adventures, their new legal guardian who is also their doctor has to juggle taking care of them and making sure they get the therapy they need from their traumatizing event, and then there’s the siblings’ physical therapist who must mention she’s Latina every other panel. The supporting cast tries to have a bigger part of the series, but it comes at the detriment of the main story. It made things hard to follow and muddied up the already incredibly hard to follow dialogue and plot. Throughout the 12 issues of Nightmask’s solo, the dream sequences are strange and disjointed, which I think might have been trying to replicate the actual feeling of dreaming but was done very poorly. As cool as this premise sounds, it’s not executed very well. Throughout the first issue, he realizes he’s able to enter people’s dreams and affect what happens within them.

After a bombing at an airport, Keith goes into a coma, and when he wakes up, he finds out his parents died and his sister, Teddy, is wheelchair bound. Nightmask is a teenager named Keith Remsen whose parents were doing research and experiments on dreams and how to enter them. It’s an interesting concept, but it never saw the success Shooter would have liked, and reading this collection, I can’t say it necessarily deserved it. The goal of the imprint was to have a more grounded and less outlandish version of a superhero world where heroes’ powers were more subdued and focused more on their feats in a less external universe-ending-event kind of way. New Universe was a short-lived experiment in the late ’80s by then Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter.

Star Brand Classic Vol. 1 by Jim Shooter