The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is an encyclopedic guide which details the fictional universe featured in Marvel Comics publications. The original 15-volume series was published in comic book format in 1982, followed by sporadic updates.
Origin
Jim Shooter, Marvel's then editor-in-chief, conceived of the idea, envisioning a guide detailing statistics much in the manner of those found upon the backs of baseball cards. This initial project was to be called The Marvel Super-Specifications Handbook (the eventual title incorporating the term "Marvel Universe" was appropriated from Al Milgrom, who had used it as a working title for the anthology series Marvel Fanfare). Shooter appointed Mark Gruenwald editor of the project, and Gruenwald developed the project to include all aspects of the Marvel Universe, although he noted it was not comprehensive. In addition to Gruenwald, contributing writers on the initial volume were Marvel editors Mike Carlin, Eliot R. Brown, and Peter Sanderson. Josef Rubinstein was brought on by Gruenwald to be the sole inker of the entire 20-year project because he felt Rubinstein was best able to make the characters easily recognizable and to subvert his own style to that of the handbook's various pencillers.
Critics of the Handbook have argued that the level of detail within the guide effectively limited the ability of writers to innovate, a charge Gruenwald dismissed, reputedly stating that the information presented was only the most recent data and was subject to change. Sanderson, one of the writers of the original guide, noted that "Mark sought to make the Marvel characters' super-powers as firm a basis in real science as possible. After the first version of the Handbook, Mark decided that some of the explanations had grown too complicated, and asked me to simplify them."
The OHOTMU detailed the more significant characters, items and locations in the Marvel Universe, itemizing them into individual entries. Individual entries usually consisted of: A frontal full-body view of the character. Prose text describing the character's origin, powers, and other abilities and unique traits, as well as "statistics" such as place of birth, former aliases, height, weight, hair and eye color and so forth. The original edition opted only to describe the "origins" of characters (how they acquired their powers), instead focusing heavily on detailed explanations for how those powers functioned. In the Book of the Dead supplement, however, the handbook provided entire "histories" for the deceased characters, a trend which was then adopted for the main body of the Deluxe Edition, allowing the entire life and career of the characters to be covered. Major important pieces of equipment were also given technical illustrations with breakdowns of their functions and features. Example images of the character in action, taken directly from the comics themselves.
In the original, characters were listed at one character to a page, although minor characters were sometimes listed at two to a page and major characters would occasionally receive more than one page. In the Deluxe Edition, however, every character received at least one page, with significant characters receiving up to 3-5 pages. Both editions had wraparound covers that could be linked together to form a giant poster. In the late 1980s, a poster made up of the first twelve issues of the original Handbook was released. For the poster, several characters were added and others received up-to-date looks.
In the Master Edition (1990–1993) this changed and every character was allocated a double-sided loose leaf page. Later versions allocate characters different lengths of entry depending on their history and importance.
Publication history
There have been several versions of the concept since it was first published in 1982: