The Alliance Universe is a new superhero universe. It focuses on original superhero character creation, storytelling, and entertainment across graphic novels, film, TV, video games, art, NFTs, merchandising, and licensing. We seek growth and partnership in all these categories, with intelligent entrepreneurs, companies, distributors, and artists. Media types—whether graphic novels, films, or video games—are not the important thing here. Forms of media and the technologies that support them will forever change.
Superheroes, on the other hand, like their ancient Greek predecessors, are destined to transcend the media of their origin.
Therefore, it is more accurate to refer to a “Superhero Industry” rather than a comic industry. Indeed, today when Marvel
considers its products, it does so in terms of characters. For instance, as reported in the Hollywood Reporter, it wasn’t this or that movie, comic book serial, or action figure that made Marvel $1.3 billion in 2014; it was Spider-Man.
The goal of the Alliance Universe project is to create definitive and enduring superheroes. We are convinced we have achieved this. If you’ve watched our promotional video for the graphic novel The Alliance: Adventures of Über-Chad and “got it,” you may already agree with us. Our aspiration is to be “genre breakers” in the superhero world, to create definitive archetypes, and to render the development of more superheroes futile and redundant (or at least until humanity, in its glory and folly, provides new inspiration!). Hey, we’re ambitious!
Currently, the Alliance Universe, which is ever-expanding, features over 60 hilarious, serious, and thoroughly bad-ass original superheroes and villains. Our characters and their backstories are deeply interconnected, giving our Universe a coherence that would have been impossible to replicate at Marvel or DC in the heyday of their comic book character creation. There, characters and their stories were produced serially, often by different writers, and often without regard to one another. In a sense, they inhabited different universes, which were only later cobbled together, with varying degrees of success, into one. Our characters were created, for the most part, simultaneously. They are part of a bigger story and universe, into which they fit seamlessly.
But why are we confident that our characters are enduring, that they “have legs”? Because we’ve taken the time to listen to the true heartbeat of the world and the “youth culture” where it increasingly occurs: online. We’ve dared to do what a completely out-of-touch Hollywood and Hollywoodized superhero industry has failed to do: we’ve listened to actual people. Rather than telling people what their ideas and dreams are, we’ve listened to them. We’ve allowed life to imitate art. Our heroes were inspired by an organic meme-folk lore that persists everywhere in online spaces. They are original heroes inspired by glimpses seen in online memes or in contemporary personalities. They are part of a “collective unconsciousness” or even a “collective consciousness” crafted by the “anon” “plebs.” Our audience is pre-existing, waiting, and eager to be inspired and amused by a true pantheon of heroes and villains that seem genuine to them rather than forced. Our heroes are “subversive” in a good way and relevant in the manner that Superman, Green Lantern, Batman, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and the Hulk once were.
In an oft-cited 1965 Esquire poll, college “student radicals” ranked Spider-Man and the Hulk, alongside Bob Dylan and Che Guevara, as their favorite revolutionary icons. Superhero characters can’t be underestimated in terms of cultural and even political impact. For this reason, they also can’t be underestimated as economic properties.
From the Anti-Nazi Superman of the late 1930s to the socially and politically conscious parables of Spider-Man, the Hulk, Black Panther, and Ms. Marvel in the 1960s, superheroes have always reflected and, more importantly, shaped cultural mores. Typically, life imitates art rather than the other way around. The power of these superheroes and their ability to endure lay precisely in their rich mythic, political, and cultural subtext. In other words, they “mean something,” and people sense this whether consciously or, more commonly, unconsciously. Sure, money and promotion are needed to give them a chance, but they only catch on if they are in some way truly meaningful. Our heroes also share rich underlying meanings.
Superheroes appeal to the young and increasingly to the not-so-young. They have a powerful formative influence. They are an opportunity to meet people where they are. This is especially true of our heroes, as we have actually bothered to see where they are! Kids and adults can relate to superheroes because they speak to that wilder sense of wonder, imagination, creativity, fantasy, hope, energy, and possibility that children especially possess. Because they are “epic” and because the world itself is often at stake, they are stirring, invigorating, inspiring, memorable, and influential. Kids and adults are moved by superheroes, morally influenced by them, and desire to be like them, to imitate their understanding of what is right and wrong. In this way, the importance of superheroes is greater than that of other cinematic, television, or literary figures encountered later in life. Superheroes make an impression when “the clay is still soft.” Everyone has heard of Superman and Spider-Man. Everyone has been influenced by them. Our motto is, “We need heroes to become them.”
The innovations of DC and Marvel comics in this field are numerous and undeniable. Both companies, growing from an earlier pulp novel industry and inspired by earlier comic book publishers, have produced indelible superheroes and superhero parables. However, both, for various reasons (financial, political, and cultural), have grown increasingly irrelevant and trite… at least on an artistic and cultural level.
Hence, the innovation in the superhero world has fallen to independent graphic novelists. However, there, too commonly, the focus is on simply making comics “darker,” more explicit, more morally ambivalent, or “adult.” While this may not be a problem in itself, frequently what is lacking is the vital energy, cleverness, originality, purposefulness, and mythic parabolic power of those earlier DC and Marvel characters.
Stick around, learn more about our characters and the project, order our first graphic novel, and see if you agree. You can read a sample on this website. If you truly believe in the oft repeated slogan that “culture lies upstream” of politics and everything else, then we believe you won’t find a worthier project than the Alliance Universe. We believe that “Project Über Chad” is at once a highly unique project and yet one that is in some sense obvious. Like… why hasn’t this been done already? In other words, the Alliance Universe is inevitable. Enjoy.”
