I think you mean they're more relatable instead of grounded in reality. That's one of the thing that made the Marvels fascinating. High school nerd, a race that is hated and feared, a blind man who was much more than that, a man who was unfit for war but is now a man out of his time, a group of four with a family dynamic, etc.

Not to say one can't relate to the DC ones but Marvel got theirs to be human regardless of their status.

Talking about the early Marvel stuff. I really enjoyed the FF early stuff. They're a lot of fun and wildly fantastical.

I don't think Wonder Woman is any different than Captain America when it comes to oozing patriotism and they somehow made that work perfectly in film.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Arrow. I loved that show from before day one when i saw it at comic con.

But look at DC's franchise in a medium that is perfect to pick up future customers, cartoons. WB has pushed the button in canceling Teen Titans, Young Justice, Batman Brave and the Bold and most every Batman show.

In the case of Brave and the Bold, that was perfect to push those minor characters into the spotlight.


Agreed. I loved the 90's Flash show.

Again, the problem is that DC's biggest enemy is WB itself.

My biggest pet peeve is when people claim Peter Parker is so realistic. No, he's not. He's supposed to be this big nerd, but yet he has tons of hot women drooling over him. He was even married to a supermodel. Peter Parker is not realistic. He is nerd fantasy of a nerd hoping he has a snowball's chance in hell with hot women.

I also hate how they have even termed the phrase "Parker luck" meaning he has such bad luck at things. Bullshit. I wish my luck was half as good as his luck is. This page with Johnny Storm sums it up well:

Didn't you post that exact image a whole back for the same reasons.

Peter Parker was the basic equal to Barbie for men. The super unattainable dream which is probably why most comic folks get frustrated.

You mean that Peter scheduled a date with both Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy on the same night?! Guess he'll have to juggle that while also stopping Doc Ock from his evil scheme, deal with JJ. Jameson's photo deadline and making sure that Aunt May doesn't almost find out his secret identity!

Oh how I could totally relate to that realistic problems.

Black Cat as well! Its a foursome!

Also, remember those triplets that lived across the hall from his apartment during the 80s? Bambi, Candi, and Randi were there names I think. They were all hot as hell and wanted to fuck the shit out of Peter.

Yeah, Peter has such rotten luck.

So it looks like Marvel has set it sights on Johnny Depp to play Dr. Strange.

http://screenrant.com/johnny-depp-do...trange-marvel/

I would agree that Marvel's characters always seemed more human than DC's.

Peter Parker had to worry about getting fired, paying the rent, taking care of his sick elderly aunt, etc. When he was in high school he was the nerd who got left out or picked on. That's some pretty ordinary, everyday stuff.

DC was a decade behind Marvel when it came to creating relatable characters with some humanity.

And DC's movies are a decade behind Marvel's, too. Warner Brothers has never really had any focus for their DC movies, aside from Nolan's Batman trilogy.

Man Of Steel does well at the box office, so what do they do? Make the sequel a pseudo Justice League movie. It's the second time in the last decade that they have had a hit Superman movie and failed to do a true sequel to it. Superman Returns was a flawed movie, but it did set up a good potential sequel. Hell, even Green Lantern, as flawed as that was, could have set up a really good sequel, too (GL VS Sinestro). Marvel would have gone ahead with those sequels and made them better than the originals, and their fans would have loved them for it.

DC/WB just doesn't get it.

That's really kind of the point. The "Big Seven" on the Justice League have usually been viewed as a pantheon of gods, and that is something that Grant Morrison really explored when he was writing the title. I don't know why a character has to be "relatable" to be considered good anyway.

posting this here because it ties in with comments people were making earlier about DC strengths being more in TV than theatrical films right now

as per Bleeding Cool
Just a couple quick thoughts- I think there was a comic title that had a similar focus/premise being not concerned with Batman, but with regular rank and file cops.
This is something I've felt for a while now has a lot of potential- but I think they are making a mistake in focusing the property around characters we already know. What I would have done is to take a soap opera assortment of new characters- all of whom would be related to the "aftermath" of any Batman vs villains confrontation- i.e paramedics, CSI, hospital workers, beat cops, reporters, etc. Build the show around these kinds of people -all of whom would naturally collide in the course of their daily duties- because seeing superhero events from their (more limited) perspective is something that is entirely fresh that we haven't seen before. And by growing new characters from the bottom up, you have a greater sense of unpredictability. Focusing on the iconic characters like Gordon, we go in knowing nothing extreme can ever happen to him with any lasting impact. Not so with a character you've never seen before.
A further benefit of a series like this is you get to lead into a future theatrical feature in an oblique way that could be truly interesting and exciting. Seeing little events start to add up in the series over the course of months would almost be similar to a viral campaign.

Yes, it was called Gotham Central.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotham_Central

I loved that one. That was very interesting. Brubaker is awesome. He also did a damn fine DD too. My favorite DD run.

I never bought into the whole "Marvel's characters are so relateable" junk. Yes, they have quarks, but it's not like the characters in DC don't have quirks to make them relateable either.

Batman: A major loss changed his life and he can't get over it.

Superman: Despite all the good he can do he has to pretend to be someone else.

The Flash: Despite being the fastest man in the world, can never get where he needs to be on time. Also obsessed with the death of his Mom.

Green Lantern: Lost his Dad at a young age which causes him to be reckless in his adult life.

Captain Marvel: A kid who literally has the chance to be an adult superhero with a magic word(this would also make for a great movie but I digress).

Blue Beetle: A Mexican kid who has to deal with everyday teenager related issues.

Yes they have some characters who aren't as easily relateable but so does Marvel.

Superman doesn't have to pretend he's someone else, he does it purposefully. The saying is that Clark Kent is the real person and Superman is the alter ego, which is the complete opposite of Batman.

Most of this character development you're talking about happened fairly recently, as well. I don't remember Barry Allen being obsessed with the death of his mom before Johns rewrote his origin; in fact, he was so boring that his series was basically cancelled prior to Crisis anyway. Also, before Johns took the helm and reinvented Hal Jordan, he was pretty much a non-entity, which is why they felt the need to completely destroy his character with Parallax and get a new GL. But in the Silver Age, in general Marvel had more of a man on the street feel than their DC counterparts, down to the use of real cities and focus on the melodrama of the civilian identities; the nerdiness and school problems of a teenaged Peter Parker, the constant angst of Ben Grimm and Reed Richards' continual failure to make up for causing the accident, the tortured Bruce Banner trying to contain the monster within him, the humbled Thor forced by his father to become a crippled mortal, the persecuted mutants, the man trapped in an iron suit because of a piece of shrapnel, the blinded attorney, etc.

I think most DC heroes tend to seem more iconic and untouchable (well, at least prior to the new 52). I've said it before, but nobody bats an eye if the X-men or Iron Man or whomever radically change their costumes, but for a long time you didn't mess with Superman or Batman's image all that much.

Yeah, DC really didn't start doing much character development until the 80s. Marvel and Stan Lee revolutionized comics in the 60s by actually having characters develop and grow, but DC didn't catch up until the 80s.

That's why you have people that say things like Superman is a boring goody-goody boyscout and Aquaman is a lame duck, because prior to the 80s they basically were. Legacy characters like Tim Drake, Kyle Rayner, and Wally West were so popular because their characters were much more developed than their predecessors were.

Part of that was the iconic, never changing nature of their characters. Which is why the 80's Wolfman and Perez New Teen Titans rivaled the X-men in popularity back in the day. They were teenaged sidekicks plus some new characters, but there was a ton of focus on their personal issues, their friendship, and they were allowed to grow. Before they were completely wiped out/changed by the New 52, of course.

Come now, Spider-man is just the projected view of the reader in having all the luck. Got picked on in high school and all that, but now he's a pimp with a hot red head model and the days of relating to him were all but gone till they decided to One More Day his ass back to that Parker who you could totally relate to having to juggle multiple dates in one night!


But let's not act as if DC hasn't tried to keep up with the real world issues. You mean to tell me drug abuse isn't a real enough problem?!



I mean, don't make me bust out how future Speedy got aids...


Oh fuck it.. Let's go there.


So realistic.

Look, yes, Marvel was first on the scene to do parallels to modern day issues such as Mutants being an allegory to the civil rights issues. Marvel has always been much closer to the pulse when it comes to connecting to the issues at the time. Hell, when 9/11 happened, and considering 90% of their characters live in New York, they were first to the scene in transferring that to the comic pages.

I actually really liked that Spidey issue about 9/11. Aside from very small bits in it, I loved it. Felt like something that made sense for those characters to go through.

My biggest complaint about the whole 9/11 Marvel stuff was the scene where the super villains are sad, somber and you see Dr. Doom shed a tear at these actions.

Especially odd since Juggernaut himself cause the WTC to fall back in 1991


Ahhhh, yeah, they sure got that realism down.

To be honest though, I'm tired of the gritty realistic shit in comics. Giving Barry the tragic Mother death couldn't save him from being a boring flat character to me. The fact that Wally's just wiped off the face of the comic universe because Johns has this boner for nostalgia just gets me.

I really wish they curbed the tragedy as an easy way to make them easier to relate to. We now have the whole putting a woman in a fridge cliche going on because Kyle was created. Sure, he's a cool character and all, but man was that not DC trying so fucking hard to capture that Peter Parker demographic.

I know, let's make an artist, which is totally what most of our readers want to attain to, and give him a power ring. But man, how are we going to make him look cool? Give him a girlfriend! Now let's kill her in a brutal way because that always works for making characters loved.

Kyle Baker's Plastic Man is a good example of an enjoyable character that doesn't need this DC heaviness that has pretty much brought them down so much.

DC announced just a few days ago that Wally is coming back in Flash Annual #3 in April.


I bet many young comic readers would like to become artists working in the comic industry. (Maybe not now, but certainly back in the early 90s.)

I know, that's why I stated it was their move to make a more easy to relate to character ala Peter Parker.

The 90's was all about passing the torch. You had Superman die and get replaced with different versions to fit all demographics, Batman get his back broken and replaced with an edgier version of himself. Hal gets bumped off for Kyle. Green Arrow gets phased out.

Yeah, the 90's sucked.


I am glad that Wally's coming back, though.

I thought you were being sarcastic about people wanting to become artists.

You think the 90s sucked because of the legacy characters, but yet you like Wally? He's a legacy character too...

Personally, I like the concept of legacy characters. It allows the characters to grow and the stories to change, instead of regurgitating the same old same old. The only thing I really didn't like was Jean Paul Valley becoming Batman. It should have been Dick Grayson.

People complain comics never change, but when change does happen, they complain that comics are changing from what they're used to.

The villains bit in that Spidey made no sense aside from Kingpin. Doom shedding a tear made no sense.

Wasn't it Doom, Magneto, and Fisk they showed? Magneto didn't make that much sense either but Doom was ridiculous. Otherwise it was a very solid issue.

That's one of the things that always made me love Marvel throughout all the fantastical nonsense they encounter, it is our world.

That issue as much as I liked it made me think a lot if they should have done that or not. They pretty much had to cuz they've always out our world events into the 616.

Reading Spider-Man as a kid, I was always annoyed that he couldn't pay the rent, or something stupid like that. You're fucking Spider-Man! You have rich friends, you can make money as a scientist, sell the formula to the webbing, anything!