Starting the engines earlier: At Comic World News, Jason Pomerantz talks to Neil Gaiman about 1602:

"What I specifically wanted to play with was the feel of the original Stan Lee (and Jack and Steve etc) characters. I wanted the simplicities. I wanted to write the characters I fell in love with when I was seven (in UK reprints, so I got the Marvel universe from the start). I didn't want to do something that was like a Marvel version of Alan Moore's 1963, though -- apart from anything because the original Marvel comics were those things that Alan was recreating, which meant that if I went that route at best I'd come up with something that was an imitation of what Stan and Jack had done.

"So I decided to do something else instead.

"The best thing for me about the 1602 conceit was the idea that I was going to simply start the engines of the Marvel universe earlier, and see how it worked.

"Some things were just sitting around in the back of my head, and had been for a long time -- I thought it might be fun to create a daredevil who was closer to Matt Murdock's imaginary brother Mike than he was to Matt himself, for example. Many of them turned up quite happily on the page. Mostly I was just impressed with how well Stan, Jack et al had built things."