Brown and Mike Carlin purportedly were angry because Devil Dinosaur was deliberately excluded). Gruenwald, as the project's editor, decided which active characters would be featured and how ( Eliot R. Shooter appointed Mark Gruenwald editor of the project, and in Gruenwald's hands the project gained its published name and also grew in scope to cover all aspects of the Marvel Universe, although Gruenwald himself noted it was not comprehensive. They took "Marvel Universe", Al Milgrom's intended title for what later became Marvel Fanfare. This initial project was to be called The Marvel Super-Specifications Handbook, but the word "specifications" was removed because it was too formal, hard to spell and bad for a logo and the prefix "super" was disliked by Shooter for personal reasons. Shooter intended it to be an answer to frequent readers' post mail asking for technical questions. Jim Shooter, Marvel's then Editor in Chief, initially came up with the idea for the project, envisioning a guide detailing statistics much in the manner of those found upon the backs of baseball cards. The abbreviation " Ohotmu" was used as the name of a Watcher in What The-?! #16. It is also the inspiration for the Marvel Database Project.
The original 15 volume series was published in comic book format in 1982.
The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, also known as OHOTMU, is a guide which attempts to detail the Marvel Universe.