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Marvel VS DC, A Different Take...

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Marvel VS DC, A Different Take...

Old 05-23-20, 11:32 AM
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Re: Marvel VS DC, A Different Take...

I've always been a DC guy, and when I was growing up, they seemed to have this mythic nature to them. My first exposures were to the Reeve Superman films, the Batman quadrilogy, and Batman: The Animated Series, as well as my mom talking about her love of Wonder Woman. So I had all of these very iconic portrayals and stories from an early age. I really dug the Spider-Man and X-Men 90s cartoons and they definitely had their own style, but the DC stuff always seemed "bigger" to me.

I really started buying comics during Infinite Crisis and post-Civil War, and those events continued to highlight the differences to me. DC being a cosmic commentary on storytelling and Marvel addressing more grounded issues.

As I dove into the backlog of popular stuff like DKR and Watchmen, I started viewing Marvel as fun, disposable entertainment and DC as a more archetypical, mythic universe.

My biggest gripe with DC is their attempt to become more like Marvel in tone, as well as becoming more marketing-driven and adding all of these offshoot characters (ESPECIALLY for Batman), rather than keep things basic, differentiated, and making things feel like they matter (oh and get a dialogue editor).

Ironically, I think the 2015 Ultimates series was a better Justice League book than a lot of the real thing.

I just bought the Darkseid War digital last night, so I'm going through that. It's pretty fun, pretty stupid. Then I have Batman: Prey and another Legends of the Dark Knight story included with that.
Old 05-23-20, 12:34 PM
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Re: Marvel VS DC, A Different Take...

Short version: before the age of 10 I probably read (or at younger ages just looked at the pictures) Marvel and DC comics in around an equal amount. Around 10 years old (late 70's) I went full on Marvel, not just because of the superheroes, but also because all the other cool comics they were publishing, e.g. Star Wars, ROM, Micronauts, Godzilla, etc. and read almost no DC at that time. In the mid 80's my cousin introduced me to titles like Crisis and New Teen Titans, so I started to slowly move to DC titles, especially when stuff like Dark Knight, Watchmen and Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing started coming out. By early 90's I mostly read DC, especially the Vertigo stuff. So at that point it was about 80/20 DC. Nowadays I don't read new comics from either company, but if I'm going to grab a collected trade paperback of older books, it will probably be a DC one over Marvel.
Old 05-23-20, 07:38 PM
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Re: Marvel VS DC, A Different Take...

I first started collecting and reading comics in 1981. The first ones I started reading were DC comics due to my familiarity with the characters through the Super Friends cartoons. Since I was new to comics it was easier to follow DC comics at the time because you could pick up a single issue and have a contained story without having to know what happened in the previous issue or the past few years of stories. Marvel had a much tighter continuity and it was harder to pick up the random issue if you didn't know much about the characters. About a year and a half later I picked up an issue of Marvel Tales that reprinted an early LEee/ Ditko Amazing Spider-man issue. After that I starting reading more Spider-Man and Marvel titles and my interests geared a lot more toward Marvel than DC. I would still pick up some random DC issues but never followed any of their titles for very long and mostly lost interest in DC not too long after Crisis on Infinite Earths and the early reboot of their characters.

In the 1990's I was mostly into Marvel and Valiant. Valiant went downhill after they fired Jim Shooter and Marvel went downhill after bringing back Spider-Man's "parents" and then the Clone Saga. After that I stopped buying comics regularly and would woluld only read a random issue here or there. I still can't get back into Spider-Man after they retconned everything with Peter Parker's marriage. It feels like he is just a Spider-Man from an alternate/ What If universe and not the real Spider-Man. Marvel and DC now just seem to retread the same stories over and over again. I just don't care for the big cosmic events where the whole universe or galaxy is continually at stake.

Nowadays, I'll order a random trade paperback from the library to read. I don't like having to get bogged down with trying to follow the current continuity anymore, so I try to pick up self contained stories. From the big two, I have mostly been enjoying the Earth One trades that have been out. Most were decent and just had alternate takes on the characters and could easily be read without needing to know about 50-80 years worth of past story lines. mostly though I'm reading independent comics as they seem much more original than anything from Marvel or DC. Walking Dead was a great run and many other Image titles are fairly decent.

As for the difference between Marvel vs. DC characters and ideology, I looked at DC as more of a mythology where most of their characters were gods or god-like. They represented the peak of what people could aspire for. Marvel had a more relatable approach to their characters. They all had personality flaws and made mistakes, so they were far from perfect and easier to identify with.
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Old 05-23-20, 08:56 PM
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Re: Marvel VS DC, A Different Take...

Valiant under Shooter was pretty great. For a short while, that was the tightest comic book universe going and had a similar cohesive feel to the early Marvel universe by Kirby, Ditko and Lee. I highly recommend reading classic Archer & Armstrong.
Old 05-24-20, 12:17 AM
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Re: Marvel VS DC, A Different Take...

Originally Posted by PhantomStranger
Valiant under Shooter was pretty great. For a short while, that was the tightest comic book universe going and had a similar cohesive feel to the early Marvel universe by Kirby, Ditko and Lee. I highly recommend reading classic Archer & Armstrong.
They were great for a while, then after Shooter, they tried to epand too quickly and do too many gimmicks like Marvel and DC were doing. Arher and Armstrong was great!! I also liked the begining of The Second Life of Doctor Mirage. Los of nice comical moments early on in those. I started to lose interest in Valiant when started to focus way too much on Master Darque and those alien spagetti monsters. I've never read the new stuff, but it's still going after a good number of years, so I guess they have some following.
Old 07-05-20, 12:52 PM
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Re: Marvel VS DC, A Different Take...

As I've been collecting DC books in something of a scattershot fashion (not entirely, but something here, something there - then I try to complete collections if I like what I read), the one thing that really hurts DC is the lack of continuity.

Rebooting the entire line as many times as they have has really hurt them. I mean, I know that when I buy something from the 90's or 2000's I may be getting a different continuity from what came from the 60's through mid 80's, or that the New 52 line was supplanted a few years later (I do like the Justice League International and Firestorm New 52 titles), but I don't have a full knowledge of ALL of the reboots and when they happened.

I just got 20 books from that Zavvi deal (10 books for $35, placed two orders), and I found that I really liked most of them - but they're all from different realities/timelines/continuities - so continuing on with those titles I have to research which VOLUME of each title it's from, and then find the TPB's from that era. It takes more research than collecting should.

I will say this - DC was definitely putting out better comics in the 90's than Marvel was. Probably the late 80's, too. Jim Shooter made Marvel more generic (overall, there were some exceptions), but after Shooter things fell apart and styles and storylines were all over the place with no focus. Then Marvel added a bazillion titles (did we really need 14 Spider-Man titles, or 9 X-Men titles?), and did a bunch of long, unnecessary crossovers that really weren't all that great, and they also shit on their history by retconning some titles (I'm sorry, the clone DIED in ASM 149, and ASM 150 definitively stated that the survivor was the original).

DC hasn't been faultless, like I said - too many reboots and retcons of their own is where they went wrong, but of the titles I'm reading DC did a great job, overall, from the late 80's to the early Teens.
Old 07-05-20, 05:05 PM
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Re: Marvel VS DC, A Different Take...

I think what hurt DC in the long run was how successful the original Crisis was in rebooting the universe. The original Crisis was awesome and worked out well, both financially and in comic book terms. But I think it was mostly a fluke that taught DC's management all the wrong lessons.
Old 07-05-20, 06:05 PM
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Re: Marvel VS DC, A Different Take...

Originally Posted by B5Erik

I will say this - DC was definitely putting out better comics in the 90's than Marvel was. Probably the late 80's, too. Jim Shooter made Marvel more generic (overall, there were some exceptions), but after Shooter things fell apart and styles and storylines were all over the place with no focus. Then Marvel added a bazillion titles (did we really need 14 Spider-Man titles, or 9 X-Men titles?), and did a bunch of long, unnecessary crossovers that really weren't all that great, and they also shit on their history by retconning some titles (I'm sorry, the clone DIED in ASM 149, and ASM 150 definitively stated that the survivor was the original).

DC hasn't been faultless, like I said - too many reboots and retcons of their own is where they went wrong, but of the titles I'm reading DC did a great job, overall, from the late 80's to the early Teens.
I remember that when Mark Waid was on The Flash and Impulse, and Doug Moench and Kelley Jones were on Batman. At that time, I felt like DC was putting out better stuff than Marvel.
The 1980s, I have no idea. I started reading both around '89. But from getting back issues from that era, it feels like Marvel was overall better. Miller's Daredevil, Claremont's X-Men, all the Spider-man titles, New Mutants, Secret Wars, Walt Simonson's Thor...they seemed to have more stuff going on.

Batman was always pretty solid if not great. Superman...all those pre-Crisis stories seem pretty generic. I don't think Wonder Woman was doing anything exciting. JLI was great though.

Originally Posted by PhantomStranger
I think what hurt DC in the long run was how successful the original Crisis was in rebooting the universe. The original Crisis was awesome and worked out well, both financially and in comic book terms. But I think it was mostly a fluke that taught DC's management all the wrong lessons.
I think Crisis worked overall. Marvel had this epic in-universe history that stretched back to the 40s. DC's Golden Age was in another universe that might as well have been a What If? or Elseworlds. Merging Earth 1 and 2 gave The Flash some more material to work with. It gave us the JSA being able to interract with the JLA.

But they kept doing that shit over and over again. Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, the New 52, Rebirth...
They got too caught up with the geek continuity details and how to explain things and using that as a springboard for events. Sometimes it can work like Batman RIP but other times it just makes things worse, like Identity Crisis.
Old 07-05-20, 07:11 PM
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Re: Marvel VS DC, A Different Take...

Crisis worked on the short term, but it handcuffed creators into working 50 years of DC history into a streamlined continuity and that wasn't going to work for them or the fans. For example, people wanted to see the Justice Society and Supergirl after Crisis, thus the JSA was taken out of the time loop and Supergirl was brought back as Matrix.

Like I've said in other threads, DC screwed badly bringing both Barry Allen and Hal Jordan back. The retcons and reboots haven't helped either but they should have been treated as storylines instead of the forever promising "Things will never be the same". For example, the New 52 should have been treated as a 5 year storyline from the get go instead of a reboot.

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