DC, Marvel And ‘The_Problem’

[Ubiquitous]

Q: You mentioned �The Problem� in last week�s column. So, what is �The
Problem?� �@green2814

A: Last week, I dug in a little into the idea that even though they
share prominent creators and have influenced each other back and forth
over the course of the last 50 years, the DC and Marvel Universes have
some fundamental differences in the way they�re structured. One of the
things I really wanted to get across in that column was that neither one
is really fundamentally better than the other, they�re just incompatible
in a lot of ways, and I touched on how that results in something I call
The Problem. Since that�s still pretty fresh in everybody�s mind, and
since you were nice enough to set the ball right on the tee and hand me
the bat, I might as well elaborate on that now. It�s actually pretty
simple.

To put it bluntly, The Problem is that DC wants to be Marvel, and they
have for the past 50 years.

Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel and DC ComicsI call it The
Problem and I think I have a pretty good reason for that, but to be
honest, that desire has actually led to some of the best DC stories ever
printed � arguably some of the best comics ever printed, so it�s not
entirely a bad thing. The thing is, when you look at the history of
those two companies and how they�ve fed off each other, you start to see
what looks like an inferiority complex that�s driven decisions about the
direction of their stories that seems to be there for decades, across
multiple creators and editors, and once you notice it, the evidence just
keeps on mounting up.

To really understand it, you have to understand what a profound change
the arrival of Marvel comics was to the superhero genre, and to do that,
you really have to go back to the beginning. DC � or at least, the
company that would become DC � is there from the very beginning of
superheroes as we know them. For all the scholarly talk about how
sequential art goes back to cave paintings and how the early superheroes
were just the next step from pulp novels (which is true), the superhero
comic as we know it was born with Superman and Action Comics #1. DC is
there on day one, and everything that comes after, right up to today, is
directly descended from that one comic. And there�s a lot that comes
after, too, and it starts right away. Superman�s popularity launches
this massive boom in the Golden Age that sees a thousand imitators
springing up overnight, creating this huge amount of material, most of
which most comics readers have never even heard of, and probably
wouldn�t care about if they had, and with good reason. I recently wrote
about how modern Siegel and Shuster�s Action #1 story feels, but for
every Golden Age story from Jack Cole or Will Eisner that feels like
it�s years ahead of its time, there are a dozen that are almost
unreadable for how flat they feel � and that�s coming from someone who
actually likes a lot of those weird old books.

Now, within a couple of years, Marvel � or at least, the company that
would become Marvel � is there too, but not really. Not in the form we�d
recognize, even though Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and a couple of characters
like Captain America are already in place. They�re laying groundwork for
stuff that�s going to come after, but at the time, they�re not really
anything DC needs to worry about, and before too long, there won�t
really be anything for DC to worry about.

Five or six years after Action Comics #1, the Golden Age boom is in full
swing, but ten years after that, there�s nothing that even comes close
to challenging DC for dominance in the world of superhero comics.
Superman in particular had become an instant American icon, and even
though Batman started off as a pretty blatant ripoff of the Shadow, it
wasn�t long before creators like Bill Finger, Sheldon Moldoff and Dick
Sprang had forged him into his own character. They had that unmistakable
aura of being the originals, and that went a long way towards cementing
them in pop culture, fueling DC to some pretty incredible heights. That
company steamrolled its way through the �40s and �50s, knocking out its
competition with a ruthless efficiency until it was pretty much the last
man standing. This is oversimplifying it a little, but what they
couldn�t outsell or outlast, they either bought or just flat out
destroyed. When Fawcett�s Captain Marvel was outselling Superman, they
sued to put the kibosh on that, claiming he was infringing on Superman,
and when EC�s horror comics were toppling superheroes out of dominance,
DC (along with MLJ, the company that would become Archie) were the ones
pushing for the Comics Code that would effectively neuter EC and put
their biggest competition into an early grave in the name of Protecting
America�s Youth.



Seduction of the Innocent and Crime SuspenStories #22



More importantly than that, though, they didn�t just eliminate their
competition: they absorbed them. When Quality went down for the count in
1956, for example, DC picked up Plastic Man, Blackhawk and a few other
characters and dropped them right into their burgeoning universe. This
wasn�t limited to the Golden Age, either. They�d eventually get the EC
books (and MAD Magazine) too, and the Charlton books (Blue Beetle,
Captain Atom, and all those) in the �80s. While it would take them a
while to finally acquire Captain Marvel, they got something more
important out of it than the character. They got Otto Binder, the writer
of those classic Captain Marvel Adventures stories, who would go on to
be the definitive Superman writer of the �50s, and certainly one of the
most influential of all time. His tenure at DC saw the creation of some
of the most popular elements of Superman, the stuff that�s still in use
today. Supergirl, Kandor, Bizarro, the Legion, the concept of the
out-of-continuity �imaginary story,� � those are Binder stories. He
didn�t create Jimmy Olsen (Jimmy, the Harley Quinn of his day, was an
import from the radio show), but he certainly defined his character and
with it, the feel of the Silver Age. And he did it by just continuing
the style he and CC Beck had been honing on CMA.

Captain Marvel Adventures #19The irony of DC suing Captain Marvel
because he was too similar to Superman, and then hiring a writer to make
Superman more like Captain Marvel is staggering. It�s almost on the
level of Archie destroying EC�s popular, lurid horror comics and then
doing a zombie comic with incestuous Cheryl Blossom subtext, but at
least they waited 60 years for that one.

The point I�m making here is that from the very beginning, this is how
DC as a company has dealt with their competition. What they can�t
destroy, they absorb. They�re like Dracula (DraCula?), and like Dracula,
it often leads to some pretty awesome stuff. I wouldn�t trade those
Binder Superman stories for all the Captain Marvel comics in the world,
just like I wouldn�t trade some of the other stories that this brought.

While all this was going on, DC was thriving. Huge sales in comics,
sure, but also as a pop culture phenomenon. It cannot be understated how
much of a cultural impact Superman in particular had � the Superman
radio show was the medium used to bring down the Ku Klux Klan by
exposing their secrets, for Pete�s sake. That�s a big deal.

And while all that was going on, Marvel (or Atlas, or Timely, you know
the drill by this point) was just sort of there, hanging out, trying to
get things going. Mostly they stuck with romance comics (a genre Jack
Kirby and Joe Simon invented) and monster books that were more or less
watered-down versions of the EC formula with proto-kaiju and predictable
twist endings, and while I wasn�t there, I almost have to imagine that
part of that was because there wasn�t much of a percentage in mixing
with DC in terms of superheroes. DC had its own horror comics and
romance titles, but then, as now, they weren�t really the key part of
the line (though, you know, they at least had them). DC was focused on
superheroes, and since they had the most popular superhero ever created,
and the second most popular superhero ever created, and the third, and
the fourth and the fifth, and Aquaman, what�s the point of even trying
to compete with them? How do you even begin to take on Superman?

Well, if you�re Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and you�ve been watching all
this go down for the past 20 years, it�s easy. You just sit down one day
and reinvent the superhero comic. No big deal.

Which is exactly what they did. I�ve talked about this before, how the
Marvel comics are deceptively simple in how they work. They�re
undeniably adventure comics, the same kind of superhero stories that
DC�s publishing, only they add in the stuff they�d been working on for
the past decade. The twists and horrified reactions of the monster
comics, the angsty, unrequited yearning of the romance books, and just
bundle it all together in a book that doesn�t look like anything else on
the stands. That last part is easy, because at this point, the only
thing worth mentioning on the stands is DC, and they all have a pretty
similar look. Wayne Boring, Al Plastino, Curt Swan and Kurt
Schaffenberger are all phenomenal artists (Schaffenberger is probably
the most underrated and overlooked Superman artist of all time, and his
work is flat-out gorgeous), but to a certain extent, their art all sort
of looks the same. There are differences and styles and you can tell
them apart, sure, but they�re definitely part of the same school.

Jack Kirby is not.

So in 1961, Kirby and Lee take a gamble and put out Fantastic Four #1, a
new kind of superhero comic�


Fantastic Four #1 and Action Comics #282Marvel and DC�s November 1961
offerings. Superman�s toughest day doesn�t seem all that tough by
comparison.



�and people Lose. Their. S**t.

It might not have been an overnight success � there�s that legendary
story of Martin Goodman giving up on Marvel and shutting down the
offices and Kirby arriving and throwing out ideas like �Let�s bring back
the Sub-Mariner! Let�s bring back Captain America!� in a last-ditch
effort to strike gold while the workmen are trying to take the furniture
out of the buildilng � but it doesn�t take long before Marvel develops a
pretty huge fan following. And the way they do it, the way they
cultivate it, isn�t just through the books themselves.

Obviously, the books are a big part of it and didn�t really need any
help standing out against DC�s Silver Age fare. By all accounts, Mike
Sekowsky was a treasure of a man and a consummate professional who could
hit a deadline like a prize fighter, but his barrel-chested Justice
League looks like a bunch of cardboard cutouts next to Steve Ditko�s
weird spindly limbs and twisted grimaces or John Romita�s solid, romance
novel cover models running around in Spider-Man. Whether they like it or
not, everyone knows Marvel�s doing something different. But that�s only
half of how they set themselves apart.

The other half, quite frankly, might be what made all the difference,
and you can lay it at the feet of exactly one man: Stan Lee.

You can argue for hours, days even, about Lee�s proper place in history,
about whether he deserves the starry eyed admiration of the general
public who think he�s the sole creator of everything there was in the
Marvel Universe and whose shoulders bore the monumental, nearly
unthinkable task of scripting every single classic of the early days of
Marvel, or whether he deserves the scorn of the Kirby and Ditko
partisans who see him as a funky flash-man who attached himself like a
parasite to more talented artists and then used them to catapult himself
(and only himself) into the spotlight every chance he got. I think the
truth of that is somewhere in the middle, but there�s one thing you can
say about Lee that I don�t think anyone�s going to dispute: He�s the
ultimate salesman. Lee is, to this day, a self-promoter of unfathomable
skill, and in those early days of Marvel, he was in his prime.

He was not there to make friends. He was, in fact, there to make
enemies.

Lee realized, just like everyone else, that Marvel was doing something
different from the competition, so he used the soapbox of letter columns
to set up the idea that it was time to take sides, laying out that
Marvel and DC were engaged in open conflict for the readers, and the
Marvel books were constantly telling you that you were smart for reading
Marvel books instead of Brand Ecch. If you go back and read those
�Fantastic 4 Fan Pages� from the early years, they�re like these
bombastic diss tracks, and Stan�s writing �Ether� every single month.
It�s actually kind of hilarious: At one point, it gets so bad that
people who like Marvel and DC write in to ask Stan to please stop
insulting them at the end of every issue. Stan, in true huckster
fashion, puts this issue to the readers with a poll: Should they keep
talking about how much DC sucks, or focus instead on how much Marvel
rules?

Incidentally, DC�s letter columns at the time would occasionally feature
Robert Kanigher just straight up being a dick to people who wrote in
nitpicking stories, basically telling readers to get a life. They are
also hilarious, but it�s not really difficult to see why Stan didn�t
have much of a hard time getting this adversarial relationship going.





The key point of Stan�s argument is that Marvel�s offering a more
�sophisticated� choice, and to be fair, that�s fairly accurate � but
only in the way that DC�s making comics for kids, and Marvel�s trying to
corner the teen market. This, it�s worth noting, was the dawn of the
teenager as an economic powerhouse, and that made a huge difference to
the evolution of comics as much as it did to everything else. You can
see that reflected across all of pop culture as everyone tries to
capitalize on it, whether it�s Marvel comics and their soap operatic
angst or, you know, the best song ever written. It all happens at once,
and it was inevitable that it was going to happen in comics � Marvel
just got there first, because DC had no real reason to change just yet.

So Marvel becomes a success. Even more than that, Marvel becomes a
success with the exact crowd that DC was losing anyway as they aged out.
This was a fact of the industry for a long time, too � Gold Key, one of
the other comics publishers at the time (though not one that ever really
made any headway in superheroes) used to actually have a policy of just
reprinting the same ten or twelve stories over and over again, because
they figured they only had a two-year window of readership. Kids would
get into M.A.R.S. Patrol or Brothers of the Spear when they were twelve,
and by the time they were fourteen, their interest would inevitably turn
to, I don�t know, baseball. Since you only had them for two years, why
bother making more than two years worth of stories? Just cycle through
them, because by the time you hit the next round of reprints, everyone
who read them last time has discovered making out and is no longer
interested.


Brothers of the Spear #1 and #12. Brothers of the Spear #1 and #12.
Significantly less interesting than making out.



It strikes me as a pretty defeatist attitude, and is probably the reason
I�m not writing about the key differences between DC, Marvel and Gold
Key, but, you know, whatever works for you.

Marvel changed all that by the simple act of catering to a slightly
older audience. Instead of the average comics reader getting to the
point where they were no longer being served by DC and therefore no
longer being served by comics, period, there was now something that was
designed to stretch that interest for a few more years. As a bonus �
another trick picked up from soap operas � Marvel�s stories weren�t the
concise, self-contained eight-pagers that ran in DC books. They were one
continuing epic where each installment was fully built on the last,
where nothing ever ended back at the status quo. There was always a
cliffhanger to keep the reader coming back, even when it seems weird not
to finish something. A while back I wrote about Fantastic Four #50, and
how the most surprising thing about it was that after raging for two
issues, the Galactus story ends halfway through the book, and then it�s
off to visit Johnny at college to start up the next thing.

Again, even while Marvel became a success, DC was not exactly hurting at
the time. Far from it, in fact � while the FF were fighting Galactus,
Batman was in prime time in a show that was wildly popular. There�s a
weird desire in certain parts of comics fandom to minimize the Batman
show, but it was a massive hit, to the point where �Batman, the Beatles
and Bond� were considered to be the �three Bs of the �60s.� That�s
pretty great company to be in, folks. It was also, despite another
annoyingly persistent myth, actually pretty faithful to the comics of
the time � this January, DC�s actually acknowledging that after 48 years
by putting out a collection of the stories that were used as episodes. I
could not be more excited about that.

Point being, DC�s formula was still more or less working for them.
Obviously styles were evolving, but that�s going on all the time. The
thing is, after a few years, it becomes pretty apparent to everyone that
Marvel�s not going anywhere, and DC finally has an opponent it can�t
outlast and is starting to have a hell of a lot of trouble outselling.
So they go with the tactic that they, as a company, always go to when
they can�t afford to ignore something.

They try to absorb it.

The degree to which they succeed really depends on where you set the
goalposts, but I�d argue that they didn�t quite get what they wanted.
The universes are too fundamentally different to really do the job the
way they want to do it. It�s easy to graft Captain Marvel onto Superman,
but by the time DC decides they need to do something about Marvel, those
radically different styles are already crystalized in ways that don�t
fit together that smoothly. But they keep trying, for the next 42 years.

And like I said, it�s not all bad by any means. It�s actually something
of a renaissance for DC, and it starts in �71 with the most logical move
DC could possibly make if they wanted to capture Marvel�s success: They
hire Jack Kirby, which, with all due respect, is basically hiring
Marvel. But see, this is the other part of The Problem: They know they
want to be more like Marvel, but they don�t really understand how to get
there, so instead of unleashing Kirby on the DC Universe (which, to be
honest, probably would�ve been more jarring than anything else), they
put him in this weird little box. For the most part, they let Kirby do
what Kirby does, which is create new concepts, and from that we get a
ton of amazing stuff added into the DC Universe: Darkseid and the New
Gods, Etrigan the Demon, OMAC, Kamandi, far futures and distant pasts,
cosmic and magical, and it�s all great. But they don�t do the one thing
you�d expect them to do. They don�t put him on Action Comics and have
him usher in a bold new era of weird cosmic Superman stories in the
flagship book. They put him on Jimmy Olsen.



Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #133



Again, I love Kirby�s Jimmy Olsen, but it�s such a weird book to put him
on, and it shows how little faith they had in Kirby while at the same
time wanting him to give their universe a touch of that Marvel magic.
It�s a little early for a lot of people, but I�m of the mind that you
can mark the end of the Silver Age and the start of the Bronze Age from
the exact day that Jimmy Olsen #133 hits the stands. Jimmy was such a
product of the Silver Age that he couldn�t have existed as he did at any
other time in comics history, but the second Kirby�s on that book,
there�s no going back. The Silver Age is over. Which, of course, is
exactly what DC wanted, to have their books feel more modern and to
appeal to the teens, to blunt the backlash of fans who thought Batman
�66 had been making fun of them.

And yet, they send in Silver Age mainstay Al Plastino to re-draw
Superman�s face so that things don�t get out of hand.

Green Lanern #85What follows is a decade of DC trying to play catch-up.
Peter Parker deals with campus riots over housing for low-income
students, goes through hard economic times and watches Harry Osborn take
acid in Amazing Spider-Man, so DC sends a space cop with a magic wishing
ring and a Robin Hood cosplayer on a trip across the country because one
of them didn�t know racism existed and the other didn�t know drugs
existed, and the result is one of DC�s most highly regarded stories. The
same team that did that one, Denny O�Neil and Neal Adams (who had worked
together before at, surprise, Marvel) would also produce some amazing
Batman stories, but O�Neil would be given the assignment to reduce
Superman�s power, bringing him more in line with these flawed Marvel
heroes. He teamed up with Curt Swan to do it, but in another sign of DC
being skittish and not quite knowing what they want, the changes are
reversed in record time. Late in the decade, they lure Amazing
Spider-Man writer Gerry Conway over from Marvel, and he and Al Milgrom
(another Marvel mainstay) create Firestorm, who is exactly what you�d
expect from a DC attempt to do a Spider-Man story in the �70s. You can
see it happening all over the era.

And then you hit the �80s, and Operation Make DC More Like Marvel goes
nuclear.

It starts with New Teen Titans, which is maybe the most blatant attempt
at playing catch-up to Marvel by giving them a team book that would be
comparable to the endlessly popular X-Men, created by two guys who had
made their names across the street at � surprise! � Marvel Comics.
Wolfman in particular hadn�t just written six years of Tomb of Dracula
over there, he had a cup of coffee as editor-in-chief. That�s how much
of a Marvel guy Wolfman was at the time, and Perez had worked with Roy
Thomas and Jim Shooter on Fantastic Four and Avengers. As a sidenote, in
the same way that I mark the end of the Silver Age by Kirby�s arrival on
Jimmy Olsen, I have a friend who mars the end of the Bronze Age by
Perez�s arrival at DC, stepping in to draw Justice League when long-time
DC artist Dick Dillin died in the middle of an arc. It�s a huge
departure in style that�s almost as jarring, and when you consider what
comes after, it makes a lot of sense.

New Teen Titans was a smashing success in building a book with the mix
of action, adventure, romance and drama that Marvel had revolutionized
superhero comics with, but for the purposes of this story, it pales in
comparison to what comes next. When DC sees the success they can have by
actually committing to becoming more like Marvel, they decide to go all
in on a scale that no other publisher has really done since (although
they�ve done it a couple more times themselves, to varying degrees of
diminishing returns): they scrap the entire universe altogether in
Crisis On Infinite Earths and build one that�s more like Marvel.

One interesting note about Crisis that underscores it all is that one of
Wolfman�s ideas for the new DC Universe that would result was actually
going as far as renaming the company from �DC� (short for �Detective
Comics,� the piece of trivia everyone knows) to Action Comics, but it
was shot down because �DC� had the name recognition. Personally, I think
Wolfman was absolutely right. It has the same connection to the history
of the company and actually makes more sense given that it�s the book
that launched everything, and perhaps more importantly, �Action� is
exactly the kind of intriguing, enticing brand name for something that
�DC� isn�t, and that �Marvel� is.

This is the key point, and it�s the one that�s glossed over to an almost
maddening degree. The reason they always state in the company line is
that the Pre-Crisis was just too darn complicated for �new and
occasional readers� � that�s how they phrase it in the recent Superman
75th Anniversary hardcover � and it makes a certain kind of sense when
you consider that stuff like knowing the difference between Earth-2,
Earth-X and Earth-C was considered the arcane realm of annoyingly
detail-oriented True Fans�. Really, though? It�s one of the biggest and
most persistent lies in the history of DC Comics, albeit one that ranks
significantly lower than �Batman Created By Bob Kane.�

It�s complete bulls**t, and we know that for a variety of reasons.
First, the DC Multiverse wasn�t actually used that often. It showed up
once a year in Justice League for their annual crossover, but beyond
that, it wasn�t really used any more than any other plot device, unless
you were, you know, Rascally Roy Thomas (another Marvel import who�d
been EiC at the House of Ideas), who really, really loves the Golden Age
characters. Second, and probably most damning for the �it�s too
confusing� line, I can assure you that if you actually read a comic
about Earth-2, they were not going to let you forget it. They would go
out of their way to let you know what you were dealing with and the idea
of parallel worlds was explained WITH DIAGRAMS virtually every time it
showed up. You were about as in danger of being confused by Earth-2 as
you were by Superman putting on glasses and this Clark Kent guy showing
up out of nowhere. Third, if the multiverse was so deucedly complicated,
they prrrroooobbbbably wouldn�t have almost the exact same multiverse in
place now.

And yet, that lie persists, and ironically, it�s often brought up by
Marvel partisans to explain why Marvel was so much better than DC, as
though �there�s another Earth with another Superman, only he�s older� is
in any way even remotely as complex as, say, any two-year stretch of
X-Men comics between 1989 and the present.

Looking back, there�s only one logical reason to want to throw it out:
Because Marvel didn�t have a multiverse. Well, except that they did, but
they kept it confined to one book hosted by some creepy bald voyeur that
nobody actually liked, other than that one about Conan being stranded in
the present and walking around with a pet leopard, but we�re getting
sidetracked. The sole reason for it is that they wanted to be more like
Marvel � they even did it as a twelve-part world-shaking event because
that�s what Marvel had done a year earlier with Secret Wars � and all
the evidence you need to know that�s true is in how they rebuilt.



Man of Steel #1 and Batman #404



When it came time to redefine their major characters, here�s who DC got:
John Byrne on Superman and Frank Miller on Batman. Perez would come in a
few years later to rebuild Wonder Woman, but in 86, those were the guys,
and they could not have been more Marvel Comics. It should be noted that
Byrne in particular had wanted to do Superman forever. There was a time
during the Shooter era when Marvel actually came really close to just
buying, or at least getting the publishing rights to the DC characters
from Warner Bros., and when Byrne heard about it, he had his pitch ready
within about nineteen seconds. It fell through, obviously, but Byrne got
the job after Crisis, largely because of the massive success he�d had on
X-Men (of course) and Fantastic Four, the most Marvel title of �em all.

Miller�s a much more interesting case in a lot of ways. What always gets
glossed over about Miller and Batman is how little there actually is,
and when you get right down to it, there are really only eight issues.
Okay, no, there�s actually about 20ish if you count penciling �Santa
Claus: Wanted Dead Or Alive� (which I do) or the recent stuff like Dark
Knight Strikes Again and All Star Batman (which I don�t), but really,
those endlessly influential building blocks of modern Batman? Eight
issues. Two stories. Two incredibly influential, monumentally great
stories, but two stories. I�m not sure if I buy it, but you can make a
case that just by sheer volume, the Frank Miller comic that influenced
Batman most wasn�t a Batman comic at all. It was Daredevil. That�s
certainly the book that got him and David Mazzucchelli the job
redefining a vigilante for a crime-ridden urban sprawl.

The weird thing about these two stories in particular is that they get
these guys that are so strongly identified with Marvel titles and, with
Miller, they get a story that feels undeniably like a DC title, albeit
one with the same grim elements that you find in Daredevil. Everyone
remembers the grittier parts of Year One with the crooked cops, Catwoman
as a dominatrix and the hard-boiled narrative, but at the end of the day
(and the end of the fourth issue), that�s a book that�s steeped in
optimism, where One Man Can Make A Difference and where Batman jumps off
a bridge and catches a baby and survives. In Marvel comics, people tend
to have a much harder time with being thrown off of bridges.

Byrne probably comes the closest to doing a Superman that fits that
Marvel aesthetic, if only by virtue of drastically reducing Superman�s
(ugh) canonical power level and then capping off his run with a story
where Superman executes three pocket universe Kryptonians and then
leaving the other writers of the book to deal with all the baggage that
brings along, but he did a lot to preserve what was there at the core of
Superman. Man of Steel (the comic, not the movie) is still my standard
for Superman origins for exactly that reason, although it�s worth noting
that his major, lasting contribution to the universe was recasting Lex
Luthor as a sinister industrialist rather than a professional mad
scientist supervillain � which is a very Marvel Comics way of doing
things.

Incidentally, did you catch �pocket universe� in that last paragraph?
Two years, folks. That�s how long the death of the DC Multiverse, the
entire stated reason for Crisis, managed to last.

If that wasn�t enough of a sign that DC was trying to hammer itself into
something more similar to the Marvel Universe, there are other signs all
over the place. The Justice League, for instance, was recast without the
big-name heroes into a team book built on contrasting personalities that
felt more like the �80s Avengers, and when you hit the �90s and Marvel
rolls out with stuff like X-Force, you get DC hopping on the bandwagon
with Extreme Justice, but the exclamation point on the whole era was
probably INVASION!, a comic that actually had an exclamation point in
the title. It�s my favorite event ever, partially because it�s so quick
(three 80-page giants illustrated by Todd McFarlane before he jumped
ship and started drawing Spider-Man) and partially because there are so
many good tie-ins, but when you get right down to it, INVASION! is
almost hilarious in how much it�s attempting to be Marvel. For one
thing, it�s the only DC story written by Bill Mantlo, one of the key
writers of Marvel�s Bronze Age (and one of the most tragic stories in
comics, please help if you can), but then there�s the consequences. The
big result of the whole thing? Invading aliens drop a �gene bomb� on the
population, triggering latent �meta-genes� in the population and
activating super-powers in a small percentage.



Invasion! #2



In other words, it brought mutants to the DC Universe.

It�s worth noting that this led to another creative renaissance for DC,
and that despite the desire to compete with Marvel on their own terms,
the �90s DCU was defined in a way that was uniquely its own. This is
something else I�ve written about before, and it�s the reason Mark Waid
and Mike Wieringo�s Flash is arguably the most important DC Comic of the
�90s, because it�s the comic that was firmly rooted in the idea that
would distinguish DC from its competition: The idea of Legacy.

When they collapsed their alternate universes into one, they did the one
thing those multiple Earths were explicitly designed to prevent: they
put everything on a timeline that dated back to the actual creation of
those comics. It took a little massaging over the years, but eventually
that came to work in its favor, by establishing that the DC Universe was
built on this tradition of heroism that stretched back to 1939, with
superheroes from World War II, where the heroes of past eras could pass
their titles down to a current generation. There are obvious problems
with this, of course, because it forces you to choose between having a
Superman who�s current and �young� and a Superman in his rightful place
as the first superhero, but you know, there were ways around it. Heck,
they�d already created characters like Etrigan who dated back thousands
of years, so the �Superman is the first� ship had already sailed. The
idea they settled on was that there were heroes for a while, and then
there weren�t, and then Superman comes along and ushers us into a new
age of heroes that�s bigger and better than anything before.

Flash #97It�s a great idea, and it�s what led to books like Flash, where
it was a primary theme, and in Green Lantern, a book that had die-hard
fans who apparently weren�t aware that having 3600 versions of a
character means that he can be replaced, and even in the Batman titles,
where Robin was the role that progressed as time went on. It was a good
idea that led to great stories, and best of all, if you�re trying to
distinguish yourself from your rival, it was something Marvel didn�t
have.

Marvel, for better or worse, has always been about what�s going on now,
and a lot less eager to look back at its own past. That�s the spirit of
Kirby running through those books, I think, but the result is that if
it�s always now, it was never really then. Peter Parker never was
Spider-Man, he is Spider-Man, and while there are often attempts to
shake things up by putting a new character into a role, it never really
lasts. While DC was building the idea of a progression � from Jay to
Barry to Wally, from Alan to Hal to John to Guy To Kyle, from Dick to
Jason to Tim, etc. � Marvel�s standard method was to bring someone in
for a while and then have them graduate to the new character to their
own role when the original version came back. Rhodey fills in as Iron
Man, then becomes War Machine. Eric Masterson fills in as Thor and then
becomes Thunderstrike. Ben Reilly fills in as Spider-Man and then the
angry shrieking gets so loud that we just stuff him in a metaphorical
woodchipper until enough time passes that we miss him. It�s the circle
of life. And it�s also the policy that DC adopted when they hit the
reset button again in 2011, restoring the likes of Barry Allen and Hal
Jordan to their previous roles.

For a while, that was the way things were, and weirdly enough, this is
also the part of history where Marvel straight up goes bankrupt, and DC,
for the very first time since 1961, is perfectly cool with not being
Marvel anymore. But it didn�t last, largely because of The Other
Problem, which is � and I swear I�ll keep this one short � that DC got
it into their collective head that they needed to be Very Serious. This
is an extension of The Problem that goes back to the days when DC Comics
were for kids and Marvel Comics were for teens, and DC raged like a
little brother because it didn�t want to be for kids, it wanted to be
for grown-ups. At the same time that they�re restructuring their
universe to be more like Marvel, they�re also publishing the comics that
will get them the most critical success that they will ever have, the
ones that I don�t even really need to identify by name because you all
know where this is going, but I will anyway: Alan Moore and Dave
Gibbons� Watchmen, Frank Miller�s Dark Knight Returns and, just as
importantly, Moore and Steven Bisette�s Swamp Thing, among others.

Watchmen #11



And once again, people Lose. Their. S**t.

Biff! Pow! Comics aren�t just for kids! They�re not even comics anymore,
they�re Graphic Novels so put it in the suck it bucket, Adam West! And
the thing is, they�re not just mature readers comics, they�re actually
really good, and so are a lot of the others that spring up around this
time, whether they�re coming from the Indie Boom of the �80s or winning
Pulitzer Prizes like Maus. And DC, the collective entity that is DC as a
company, the one I�ve been personifying for the entire column, sees this
and has a revelation.

�Aha!� says this imaginary version of DC, �I get it now! The reason they
liked Marvel, which was going for a slightly older audience, the reason
I had competition that cut into my sales after bestriding the Earth like
a mighty colossus for three solid decades, was that they wanted things
that were mature. All that stuff that I used to do that was for kids,
about cartoon characters with superpowers facing down weird situations,
that wasn�t mature. They want violence and blood and cusswords and
crying and moping and boy howdy they definitely want a whole lot of
rapes. And since I can only do one kind of thing, that is what I must
do.� Seriously, they have been chasing that dragon so hard that they
actually did more Watchmen comics in an effort to drum up past glory. It
creates this weird corporate schizophrenia where they want to look back
at the high points of their past, but want them to be more Very Serious
than they actually were. This is The Other Problem, and it�s why we have
Identity Crisis and a Superman movie with no bright colors that ends
with death.

And then DC slowly begins the process of trying to make that vision a
reality. In the mid 2000s, Marvel has come back from bankruptcy and it
gets so bad that DC does two comics � Identity Crisis and Justice
League: Cry For Justice � that are so hellaciously ruinous that they
pretty much have no choice but to throw the baby out with that foul tub
of bathwater and start over again. And this time, they hire yet another
former Marvel Editor-In-Chief, Bob Harras, to run the show. And that
pretty much brings you up to today.

And again, it�s worth saying that there�s good, even great work coming
out of DC this time around, too, even if the overall mood of the
universe, if such a thing even exists, feels like a relentless grind to
get through sometimes. But that, in turn, raises the question of why, if
there are so many amazing comics that result from this, from The New
Gods in �71 to Hard Traveling Heroes to Batman: Year One to Flash to
Zero Year, is this The Problem? If there�s that much good that results
from it, then shouldn�t it be, at worst, The Curious Affectation?

The reason that it�s The Problem is because of how it makes them look at
their characters with this eternal inferiority complex that can never
really be resolved. That fundamental difference between the universes
that I mentioned above and wrote about at length last week means that if
they want to be Marvel, they�re never actually going to get there.
They�re just going to keep tying new ways to get there and resetting
when they realize that they�ve only complicated matters, and it�s all so
unnecessary. Superman doesn�t need to be anything else, he�s already
Superman, and the same goes for Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of
those characters. They can be better, sure, but the way you make them
better is by sitting down and asking �how can this be better,� not by
asking �how can this be more like that other thing?� You get good stuff
out of that, yes, but you also get Superman executing criminals and
Extreme Justice, and that�s the kind of thing we can do without.

For their part, Marvel pretty much seems like they could give a f**k.


--
Q: Why is ObamaCare like a turd?
A: You have to pass it to see what's in it.

[Bill Steele]

In article <lb23uj$a6c$1...@dont-email.me>,
Ubiquitous <web...@polaris.net> wrote:

> Q: You mentioned ?The Problem? in last week,s column. So, what is ?The
> Problem?? ^@green2814

>
> A: Last week, I dug in a little into the idea that even though they
> share prominent creators and have influenced each other back and forth
> over the course of the last 50 years, the DC and Marvel Universes have

> some fundamental differences in the way they,re structured. One of the

> things I really wanted to get across in that column was that neither one

> is really fundamentally better than the other, they,re just incompatible

> in a lot of ways, and I touched on how that results in something I call

> The Problem. Since that,s still pretty fresh in everybody,s mind, and

> since you were nice enough to set the ball right on the tee and hand me

> the bat, I might as well elaborate on that now. It,s actually pretty

> simple.
>
> To put it bluntly, The Problem is that DC wants to be Marvel, and they
> have for the past 50 years.
>
> Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel and DC ComicsI call it The
> Problem and I think I have a pretty good reason for that, but to be
> honest, that desire has actually led to some of the best DC stories ever

> printed ~ arguably some of the best comics ever printed, so it,s not

> entirely a bad thing. The thing is, when you look at the history of

> those two companies and how they,ve fed off each other, you start to see
> what looks like an inferiority complex that,s driven decisions about the

> direction of their stories that seems to be there for decades, across
> multiple creators and editors, and once you notice it, the evidence just
> keeps on mounting up.
>
> To really understand it, you have to understand what a profound change
> the arrival of Marvel comics was to the superhero genre, and to do that,

> you really have to go back to the beginning. DC ~ or at least, the
> company that would become DC ~ is there from the very beginning of

> superheroes as we know them. For all the scholarly talk about how
> sequential art goes back to cave paintings and how the early superheroes
> were just the next step from pulp novels (which is true), the superhero
> comic as we know it was born with Superman and Action Comics #1. DC is
> there on day one, and everything that comes after, right up to today, is

> directly descended from that one comic. And there,s a lot that comes
> after, too, and it starts right away. Superman,s popularity launches

> this massive boom in the Golden Age that sees a thousand imitators
> springing up overnight, creating this huge amount of material, most of
> which most comics readers have never even heard of, and probably

> wouldn,t care about if they had, and with good reason. I recently wrote
> about how modern Siegel and Shuster,s Action #1 story feels, but for

> every Golden Age story from Jack Cole or Will Eisner that feels like

> it,s years ahead of its time, there are a dozen that are almost
> unreadable for how flat they feel ~ and that,s coming from someone who

> actually likes a lot of those weird old books.
>

> Now, within a couple of years, Marvel ~ or at least, the company that
> would become Marvel ~ is there too, but not really. Not in the form we,d

> recognize, even though Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and a couple of characters

> like Captain America are already in place. They,re laying groundwork for
> stuff that,s going to come after, but at the time, they,re not really
> anything DC needs to worry about, and before too long, there won,t

> really be anything for DC to worry about.
>
> Five or six years after Action Comics #1, the Golden Age boom is in full

> swing, but ten years after that, there,s nothing that even comes close

> to challenging DC for dominance in the world of superhero comics.
> Superman in particular had become an instant American icon, and even
> though Batman started off as a pretty blatant ripoff of the Shadow, it

> wasn,t long before creators like Bill Finger, Sheldon Moldoff and Dick

> Sprang had forged him into his own character. They had that unmistakable
> aura of being the originals, and that went a long way towards cementing
> them in pop culture, fueling DC to some pretty incredible heights. That

> company steamrolled its way through the ,40s and ,50s, knocking out its

> competition with a ruthless efficiency until it was pretty much the last
> man standing. This is oversimplifying it a little, but what they

> couldn,t outsell or outlast, they either bought or just flat out
> destroyed. When Fawcett,s Captain Marvel was outselling Superman, they

> sued to put the kibosh on that, claiming he was infringing on Superman,

> and when EC,s horror comics were toppling superheroes out of dominance,

> DC (along with MLJ, the company that would become Archie) were the ones
> pushing for the Comics Code that would effectively neuter EC and put
> their biggest competition into an early grave in the name of Protecting

> America,s Youth.

>
>
>
> Seduction of the Innocent and Crime SuspenStories #22
>
>
>

> More importantly than that, though, they didn,t just eliminate their

> competition: they absorbed them. When Quality went down for the count in
> 1956, for example, DC picked up Plastic Man, Blackhawk and a few other
> characters and dropped them right into their burgeoning universe. This

> wasn,t limited to the Golden Age, either. They,d eventually get the EC

> books (and MAD Magazine) too, and the Charlton books (Blue Beetle,

> Captain Atom, and all those) in the ,80s. While it would take them a

> while to finally acquire Captain Marvel, they got something more
> important out of it than the character. They got Otto Binder, the writer
> of those classic Captain Marvel Adventures stories, who would go on to

> be the definitive Superman writer of the ,50s, and certainly one of the

> most influential of all time. His tenure at DC saw the creation of some

> of the most popular elements of Superman, the stuff that,s still in use

> today. Supergirl, Kandor, Bizarro, the Legion, the concept of the

> out-of-continuity ?imaginary story,? ~ those are Binder stories. He
> didn,t create Jimmy Olsen (Jimmy, the Harley Quinn of his day, was an

> import from the radio show), but he certainly defined his character and
> with it, the feel of the Silver Age. And he did it by just continuing
> the style he and CC Beck had been honing on CMA.
>
> Captain Marvel Adventures #19The irony of DC suing Captain Marvel
> because he was too similar to Superman, and then hiring a writer to make

> Superman more like Captain Marvel is staggering. It,s almost on the
> level of Archie destroying EC,s popular, lurid horror comics and then

> doing a zombie comic with incestuous Cheryl Blossom subtext, but at
> least they waited 60 years for that one.
>

> The point I,m making here is that from the very beginning, this is how
> DC as a company has dealt with their competition. What they can,t
> destroy, they absorb. They,re like Dracula (DraCula?), and like Dracula,
> it often leads to some pretty awesome stuff. I wouldn,t trade those

> Binder Superman stories for all the Captain Marvel comics in the world,

> just like I wouldn,t trade some of the other stories that this brought.

>
> While all this was going on, DC was thriving. Huge sales in comics,
> sure, but also as a pop culture phenomenon. It cannot be understated how

> much of a cultural impact Superman in particular had ~ the Superman

> radio show was the medium used to bring down the Ku Klux Klan by

> exposing their secrets, for Pete,s sake. That,s a big deal.

>
> And while all that was going on, Marvel (or Atlas, or Timely, you know
> the drill by this point) was just sort of there, hanging out, trying to
> get things going. Mostly they stuck with romance comics (a genre Jack
> Kirby and Joe Simon invented) and monster books that were more or less
> watered-down versions of the EC formula with proto-kaiju and predictable

> twist endings, and while I wasn,t there, I almost have to imagine that
> part of that was because there wasn,t much of a percentage in mixing

> with DC in terms of superheroes. DC had its own horror comics and

> romance titles, but then, as now, they weren,t really the key part of

> the line (though, you know, they at least had them). DC was focused on
> superheroes, and since they had the most popular superhero ever created,
> and the second most popular superhero ever created, and the third, and

> the fourth and the fifth, and Aquaman, what,s the point of even trying

> to compete with them? How do you even begin to take on Superman?
>

> Well, if you,re Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and you,ve been watching all
> this go down for the past 20 years, it,s easy. You just sit down one day

> and reinvent the superhero comic. No big deal.
>

> Which is exactly what they did. I,ve talked about this before, how the
> Marvel comics are deceptively simple in how they work. They,re

> undeniably adventure comics, the same kind of superhero stories that

> DC,s publishing, only they add in the stuff they,d been working on for

> the past decade. The twists and horrified reactions of the monster
> comics, the angsty, unrequited yearning of the romance books, and just

> bundle it all together in a book that doesn,t look like anything else on

> the stands. That last part is easy, because at this point, the only
> thing worth mentioning on the stands is DC, and they all have a pretty
> similar look. Wayne Boring, Al Plastino, Curt Swan and Kurt
> Schaffenberger are all phenomenal artists (Schaffenberger is probably
> the most underrated and overlooked Superman artist of all time, and his
> work is flat-out gorgeous), but to a certain extent, their art all sort
> of looks the same. There are differences and styles and you can tell

> them apart, sure, but they,re definitely part of the same school.

>
> Jack Kirby is not.
>
> So in 1961, Kirby and Lee take a gamble and put out Fantastic Four #1, a

> new kind of superhero comic?
>
>
> Fantastic Four #1 and Action Comics #282Marvel and DC,s November 1961
> offerings. Superman,s toughest day doesn,t seem all that tough by
> comparison.
>
>
>
> ?and people Lose. Their. S**t.
>
> It might not have been an overnight success ~ there,s that legendary

> story of Martin Goodman giving up on Marvel and shutting down the

> offices and Kirby arriving and throwing out ideas like ?Let,s bring back
> the Sub-Mariner! Let,s bring back Captain America!? in a last-ditch

> effort to strike gold while the workmen are trying to take the furniture

> out of the buildilng ~ but it doesn,t take long before Marvel develops a

> pretty huge fan following. And the way they do it, the way they

> cultivate it, isn,t just through the books themselves.
>
> Obviously, the books are a big part of it and didn,t really need any
> help standing out against DC,s Silver Age fare. By all accounts, Mike

> Sekowsky was a treasure of a man and a consummate professional who could
> hit a deadline like a prize fighter, but his barrel-chested Justice

> League looks like a bunch of cardboard cutouts next to Steve Ditko,s
> weird spindly limbs and twisted grimaces or John Romita,s solid, romance

> novel cover models running around in Spider-Man. Whether they like it or

> not, everyone knows Marvel,s doing something different. But that,s only

> half of how they set themselves apart.
>
> The other half, quite frankly, might be what made all the difference,
> and you can lay it at the feet of exactly one man: Stan Lee.
>

> You can argue for hours, days even, about Lee,s proper place in history,

> about whether he deserves the starry eyed admiration of the general

> public who think he,s the sole creator of everything there was in the

> Marvel Universe and whose shoulders bore the monumental, nearly
> unthinkable task of scripting every single classic of the early days of
> Marvel, or whether he deserves the scorn of the Kirby and Ditko
> partisans who see him as a funky flash-man who attached himself like a
> parasite to more talented artists and then used them to catapult himself
> (and only himself) into the spotlight every chance he got. I think the

> truth of that is somewhere in the middle, but there,s one thing you can
> say about Lee that I don,t think anyone,s going to dispute: He,s the

> ultimate salesman. Lee is, to this day, a self-promoter of unfathomable
> skill, and in those early days of Marvel, he was in his prime.
>
> He was not there to make friends. He was, in fact, there to make
> enemies.
>
> Lee realized, just like everyone else, that Marvel was doing something
> different from the competition, so he used the soapbox of letter columns
> to set up the idea that it was time to take sides, laying out that
> Marvel and DC were engaged in open conflict for the readers, and the
> Marvel books were constantly telling you that you were smart for reading
> Marvel books instead of Brand Ecch. If you go back and read those

> ?Fantastic 4 Fan Pages? from the early years, they,re like these
> bombastic diss tracks, and Stan,s writing ?Ether? every single month.
> It,s actually kind of hilarious: At one point, it gets so bad that

> people who like Marvel and DC write in to ask Stan to please stop
> insulting them at the end of every issue. Stan, in true huckster
> fashion, puts this issue to the readers with a poll: Should they keep
> talking about how much DC sucks, or focus instead on how much Marvel
> rules?
>

> Incidentally, DC,s letter columns at the time would occasionally feature

> Robert Kanigher just straight up being a dick to people who wrote in
> nitpicking stories, basically telling readers to get a life. They are

> also hilarious, but it,s not really difficult to see why Stan didn,t

> have much of a hard time getting this adversarial relationship going.
>
>
>
>
>

> The key point of Stan,s argument is that Marvel,s offering a more
> ?sophisticated? choice, and to be fair, that,s fairly accurate ~ but
> only in the way that DC,s making comics for kids, and Marvel,s trying to
> corner the teen market. This, it,s worth noting, was the dawn of the

> teenager as an economic powerhouse, and that made a huge difference to
> the evolution of comics as much as it did to everything else. You can
> see that reflected across all of pop culture as everyone tries to

> capitalize on it, whether it,s Marvel comics and their soap operatic

> angst or, you know, the best song ever written. It all happens at once,

> and it was inevitable that it was going to happen in comics ~ Marvel

> just got there first, because DC had no real reason to change just yet.
>
> So Marvel becomes a success. Even more than that, Marvel becomes a
> success with the exact crowd that DC was losing anyway as they aged out.

> This was a fact of the industry for a long time, too ~ Gold Key, one of

> the other comics publishers at the time (though not one that ever really
> made any headway in superheroes) used to actually have a policy of just
> reprinting the same ten or twelve stories over and over again, because
> they figured they only had a two-year window of readership. Kids would
> get into M.A.R.S. Patrol or Brothers of the Spear when they were twelve,
> and by the time they were fourteen, their interest would inevitably turn

> to, I don,t know, baseball. Since you only had them for two years, why

> bother making more than two years worth of stories? Just cycle through
> them, because by the time you hit the next round of reprints, everyone
> who read them last time has discovered making out and is no longer
> interested.
>
>
> Brothers of the Spear #1 and #12. Brothers of the Spear #1 and #12.
> Significantly less interesting than making out.
>
>
>
> It strikes me as a pretty defeatist attitude, and is probably the reason

> I,m not writing about the key differences between DC, Marvel and Gold

> Key, but, you know, whatever works for you.
>
> Marvel changed all that by the simple act of catering to a slightly
> older audience. Instead of the average comics reader getting to the
> point where they were no longer being served by DC and therefore no
> longer being served by comics, period, there was now something that was

> designed to stretch that interest for a few more years. As a bonus ~
> another trick picked up from soap operas ~ Marvel,s stories weren,t the

> concise, self-contained eight-pagers that ran in DC books. They were one
> continuing epic where each installment was fully built on the last,
> where nothing ever ended back at the status quo. There was always a
> cliffhanger to keep the reader coming back, even when it seems weird not
> to finish something. A while back I wrote about Fantastic Four #50, and
> how the most surprising thing about it was that after raging for two

> issues, the Galactus story ends halfway through the book, and then it,s

> off to visit Johnny at college to start up the next thing.
>
> Again, even while Marvel became a success, DC was not exactly hurting at

> the time. Far from it, in fact ~ while the FF were fighting Galactus,
> Batman was in prime time in a show that was wildly popular. There,s a

> weird desire in certain parts of comics fandom to minimize the Batman

> show, but it was a massive hit, to the point where ?Batman, the Beatles
> and Bond? were considered to be the ?three Bs of the ,60s.? That,s

> pretty great company to be in, folks. It was also, despite another
> annoyingly persistent myth, actually pretty faithful to the comics of

> the time ~ this January, DC,s actually acknowledging that after 48 years

> by putting out a collection of the stories that were used as episodes. I
> could not be more excited about that.
>

> Point being, DC,s formula was still more or less working for them.
> Obviously styles were evolving, but that,s going on all the time. The

> thing is, after a few years, it becomes pretty apparent to everyone that

> Marvel,s not going anywhere, and DC finally has an opponent it can,t

> outlast and is starting to have a hell of a lot of trouble outselling.
> So they go with the tactic that they, as a company, always go to when

> they can,t afford to ignore something.

>
> They try to absorb it.
>
> The degree to which they succeed really depends on where you set the

> goalposts, but I,d argue that they didn,t quite get what they wanted.

> The universes are too fundamentally different to really do the job the

> way they want to do it. It,s easy to graft Captain Marvel onto Superman,

> but by the time DC decides they need to do something about Marvel, those

> radically different styles are already crystalized in ways that don,t

> fit together that smoothly. But they keep trying, for the next 42 years.
>

> And like I said, it,s not all bad by any means. It,s actually something
> of a renaissance for DC, and it starts in ,71 with the most logical move
> DC could possibly make if they wanted to capture Marvel,s success: They

> hire Jack Kirby, which, with all due respect, is basically hiring
> Marvel. But see, this is the other part of The Problem: They know they

> want to be more like Marvel, but they don,t really understand how to get

> there, so instead of unleashing Kirby on the DC Universe (which, to be

> honest, probably would,ve been more jarring than anything else), they

> put him in this weird little box. For the most part, they let Kirby do
> what Kirby does, which is create new concepts, and from that we get a
> ton of amazing stuff added into the DC Universe: Darkseid and the New
> Gods, Etrigan the Demon, OMAC, Kamandi, far futures and distant pasts,

> cosmic and magical, and it,s all great. But they don,t do the one thing
> you,d expect them to do. They don,t put him on Action Comics and have

> him usher in a bold new era of weird cosmic Superman stories in the
> flagship book. They put him on Jimmy Olsen.
>
>
>
> Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #133
>
>
>

> Again, I love Kirby,s Jimmy Olsen, but it,s such a weird book to put him

> on, and it shows how little faith they had in Kirby while at the same
> time wanting him to give their universe a touch of that Marvel magic.

> It,s a little early for a lot of people, but I,m of the mind that you

> can mark the end of the Silver Age and the start of the Bronze Age from
> the exact day that Jimmy Olsen #133 hits the stands. Jimmy was such a

> product of the Silver Age that he couldn,t have existed as he did at any
> other time in comics history, but the second Kirby,s on that book,
> there,s no going back. The Silver Age is over. Which, of course, is

> exactly what DC wanted, to have their books feel more modern and to
> appeal to the teens, to blunt the backlash of fans who thought Batman

> ,66 had been making fun of them.

>
> And yet, they send in Silver Age mainstay Al Plastino to re-draw

> Superman,s face so that things don,t get out of hand.

>
> Green Lanern #85What follows is a decade of DC trying to play catch-up.
> Peter Parker deals with campus riots over housing for low-income
> students, goes through hard economic times and watches Harry Osborn take
> acid in Amazing Spider-Man, so DC sends a space cop with a magic wishing
> ring and a Robin Hood cosplayer on a trip across the country because one

> of them didn,t know racism existed and the other didn,t know drugs
> existed, and the result is one of DC,s most highly regarded stories. The
> same team that did that one, Denny O,Neil and Neal Adams (who had worked

> together before at, surprise, Marvel) would also produce some amazing

> Batman stories, but O,Neil would be given the assignment to reduce
> Superman,s power, bringing him more in line with these flawed Marvel

> heroes. He teamed up with Curt Swan to do it, but in another sign of DC
> being skittish and not quite knowing what they want, the changes are
> reversed in record time. Late in the decade, they lure Amazing
> Spider-Man writer Gerry Conway over from Marvel, and he and Al Milgrom

> (another Marvel mainstay) create Firestorm, who is exactly what you,d
> expect from a DC attempt to do a Spider-Man story in the ,70s. You can

> see it happening all over the era.
>

> And then you hit the ,80s, and Operation Make DC More Like Marvel goes

> nuclear.
>
> It starts with New Teen Titans, which is maybe the most blatant attempt
> at playing catch-up to Marvel by giving them a team book that would be
> comparable to the endlessly popular X-Men, created by two guys who had

> made their names across the street at ~ surprise! ~ Marvel Comics.
> Wolfman in particular hadn,t just written six years of Tomb of Dracula
> over there, he had a cup of coffee as editor-in-chief. That,s how much

> of a Marvel guy Wolfman was at the time, and Perez had worked with Roy
> Thomas and Jim Shooter on Fantastic Four and Avengers. As a sidenote, in

> the same way that I mark the end of the Silver Age by Kirby,s arrival on

> Jimmy Olsen, I have a friend who mars the end of the Bronze Age by

> Perez,s arrival at DC, stepping in to draw Justice League when long-time
> DC artist Dick Dillin died in the middle of an arc. It,s a huge
> departure in style that,s almost as jarring, and when you consider what

> comes after, it makes a lot of sense.
>
> New Teen Titans was a smashing success in building a book with the mix
> of action, adventure, romance and drama that Marvel had revolutionized
> superhero comics with, but for the purposes of this story, it pales in
> comparison to what comes next. When DC sees the success they can have by
> actually committing to becoming more like Marvel, they decide to go all
> in on a scale that no other publisher has really done since (although

> they,ve done it a couple more times themselves, to varying degrees of

> diminishing returns): they scrap the entire universe altogether in

> Crisis On Infinite Earths and build one that,s more like Marvel.

>
> One interesting note about Crisis that underscores it all is that one of

> Wolfman,s ideas for the new DC Universe that would result was actually
> going as far as renaming the company from ?DC? (short for ?Detective
> Comics,? the piece of trivia everyone knows) to Action Comics, but it
> was shot down because ?DC? had the name recognition. Personally, I think

> Wolfman was absolutely right. It has the same connection to the history

> of the company and actually makes more sense given that it,s the book
> that launched everything, and perhaps more importantly, ?Action? is

> exactly the kind of intriguing, enticing brand name for something that

> ?DC? isn,t, and that ?Marvel? is.
>
> This is the key point, and it,s the one that,s glossed over to an almost

> maddening degree. The reason they always state in the company line is

> that the Pre-Crisis was just too darn complicated for ?new and
> occasional readers? ~ that,s how they phrase it in the recent Superman
> 75th Anniversary hardcover ~ and it makes a certain kind of sense when

> you consider that stuff like knowing the difference between Earth-2,
> Earth-X and Earth-C was considered the arcane realm of annoyingly

> detail-oriented True Fans?. Really, though? It,s one of the biggest and

> most persistent lies in the history of DC Comics, albeit one that ranks

> significantly lower than ?Batman Created By Bob Kane.?
>
> It,s complete bulls**t, and we know that for a variety of reasons.
> First, the DC Multiverse wasn,t actually used that often. It showed up

> once a year in Justice League for their annual crossover, but beyond

> that, it wasn,t really used any more than any other plot device, unless
> you were, you know, Rascally Roy Thomas (another Marvel import who,d

> been EiC at the House of Ideas), who really, really loves the Golden Age

> characters. Second, and probably most damning for the ?it,s too
> confusing? line, I can assure you that if you actually read a comic

> about Earth-2, they were not going to let you forget it. They would go
> out of their way to let you know what you were dealing with and the idea
> of parallel worlds was explained WITH DIAGRAMS virtually every time it
> showed up. You were about as in danger of being confused by Earth-2 as
> you were by Superman putting on glasses and this Clark Kent guy showing
> up out of nowhere. Third, if the multiverse was so deucedly complicated,

> they prrrroooobbbbably wouldn,t have almost the exact same multiverse in
> place now.
>
> And yet, that lie persists, and ironically, it,s often brought up by

> Marvel partisans to explain why Marvel was so much better than DC, as

> though ?there,s another Earth with another Superman, only he,s older? is

> in any way even remotely as complex as, say, any two-year stretch of
> X-Men comics between 1989 and the present.
>

> Looking back, there,s only one logical reason to want to throw it out:
> Because Marvel didn,t have a multiverse. Well, except that they did, but

> they kept it confined to one book hosted by some creepy bald voyeur that
> nobody actually liked, other than that one about Conan being stranded in

> the present and walking around with a pet leopard, but we,re getting

> sidetracked. The sole reason for it is that they wanted to be more like

> Marvel ~ they even did it as a twelve-part world-shaking event because
> that,s what Marvel had done a year earlier with Secret Wars ~ and all
> the evidence you need to know that,s true is in how they rebuilt.

>
>
>
> Man of Steel #1 and Batman #404
>
>
>

> When it came time to redefine their major characters, here,s who DC got:

> John Byrne on Superman and Frank Miller on Batman. Perez would come in a
> few years later to rebuild Wonder Woman, but in 86, those were the guys,
> and they could not have been more Marvel Comics. It should be noted that
> Byrne in particular had wanted to do Superman forever. There was a time
> during the Shooter era when Marvel actually came really close to just
> buying, or at least getting the publishing rights to the DC characters
> from Warner Bros., and when Byrne heard about it, he had his pitch ready
> within about nineteen seconds. It fell through, obviously, but Byrne got

> the job after Crisis, largely because of the massive success he,d had on
> X-Men (of course) and Fantastic Four, the most Marvel title of OEem all.
>
> Miller,s a much more interesting case in a lot of ways. What always gets

> glossed over about Miller and Batman is how little there actually is,
> and when you get right down to it, there are really only eight issues.

> Okay, no, there,s actually about 20ish if you count penciling ?Santa
> Claus: Wanted Dead Or Alive? (which I do) or the recent stuff like Dark
> Knight Strikes Again and All Star Batman (which I don,t), but really,

> those endlessly influential building blocks of modern Batman? Eight
> issues. Two stories. Two incredibly influential, monumentally great

> stories, but two stories. I,m not sure if I buy it, but you can make a

> case that just by sheer volume, the Frank Miller comic that influenced

> Batman most wasn,t a Batman comic at all. It was Daredevil. That,s

> certainly the book that got him and David Mazzucchelli the job
> redefining a vigilante for a crime-ridden urban sprawl.
>
> The weird thing about these two stories in particular is that they get
> these guys that are so strongly identified with Marvel titles and, with
> Miller, they get a story that feels undeniably like a DC title, albeit
> one with the same grim elements that you find in Daredevil. Everyone
> remembers the grittier parts of Year One with the crooked cops, Catwoman
> as a dominatrix and the hard-boiled narrative, but at the end of the day

> (and the end of the fourth issue), that,s a book that,s steeped in

> optimism, where One Man Can Make A Difference and where Batman jumps off
> a bridge and catches a baby and survives. In Marvel comics, people tend
> to have a much harder time with being thrown off of bridges.
>
> Byrne probably comes the closest to doing a Superman that fits that

> Marvel aesthetic, if only by virtue of drastically reducing Superman,s

> (ugh) canonical power level and then capping off his run with a story
> where Superman executes three pocket universe Kryptonians and then
> leaving the other writers of the book to deal with all the baggage that
> brings along, but he did a lot to preserve what was there at the core of
> Superman. Man of Steel (the comic, not the movie) is still my standard

> for Superman origins for exactly that reason, although it,s worth noting

> that his major, lasting contribution to the universe was recasting Lex
> Luthor as a sinister industrialist rather than a professional mad

> scientist supervillain ~ which is a very Marvel Comics way of doing
> things.
>
> Incidentally, did you catch ?pocket universe? in that last paragraph?
> Two years, folks. That,s how long the death of the DC Multiverse, the

> entire stated reason for Crisis, managed to last.
>

> If that wasn,t enough of a sign that DC was trying to hammer itself into

> something more similar to the Marvel Universe, there are other signs all
> over the place. The Justice League, for instance, was recast without the
> big-name heroes into a team book built on contrasting personalities that

> felt more like the ,80s Avengers, and when you hit the ,90s and Marvel

> rolls out with stuff like X-Force, you get DC hopping on the bandwagon
> with Extreme Justice, but the exclamation point on the whole era was
> probably INVASION!, a comic that actually had an exclamation point in

> the title. It,s my favorite event ever, partially because it,s so quick

> (three 80-page giants illustrated by Todd McFarlane before he jumped
> ship and started drawing Spider-Man) and partially because there are so
> many good tie-ins, but when you get right down to it, INVASION! is

> almost hilarious in how much it,s attempting to be Marvel. For one
> thing, it,s the only DC story written by Bill Mantlo, one of the key
> writers of Marvel,s Bronze Age (and one of the most tragic stories in
> comics, please help if you can), but then there,s the consequences. The
> big result of the whole thing? Invading aliens drop a ?gene bomb? on the
> population, triggering latent ?meta-genes? in the population and

> activating super-powers in a small percentage.
>
>
>
> Invasion! #2
>
>
>
> In other words, it brought mutants to the DC Universe.
>

> It,s worth noting that this led to another creative renaissance for DC,

> and that despite the desire to compete with Marvel on their own terms,

> the ,90s DCU was defined in a way that was uniquely its own. This is
> something else I,ve written about before, and it,s the reason Mark Waid
> and Mike Wieringo,s Flash is arguably the most important DC Comic of the
> ,90s, because it,s the comic that was firmly rooted in the idea that

> would distinguish DC from its competition: The idea of Legacy.
>
> When they collapsed their alternate universes into one, they did the one
> thing those multiple Earths were explicitly designed to prevent: they
> put everything on a timeline that dated back to the actual creation of
> those comics. It took a little massaging over the years, but eventually
> that came to work in its favor, by establishing that the DC Universe was
> built on this tradition of heroism that stretched back to 1939, with
> superheroes from World War II, where the heroes of past eras could pass
> their titles down to a current generation. There are obvious problems
> with this, of course, because it forces you to choose between having a

> Superman who,s current and ?young? and a Superman in his rightful place

> as the first superhero, but you know, there were ways around it. Heck,

> they,d already created characters like Etrigan who dated back thousands
> of years, so the ?Superman is the first? ship had already sailed. The

> idea they settled on was that there were heroes for a while, and then

> there weren,t, and then Superman comes along and ushers us into a new
> age of heroes that,s bigger and better than anything before.
>
> Flash #97It,s a great idea, and it,s what led to books like Flash, where

> it was a primary theme, and in Green Lantern, a book that had die-hard

> fans who apparently weren,t aware that having 3600 versions of a

> character means that he can be replaced, and even in the Batman titles,
> where Robin was the role that progressed as time went on. It was a good

> idea that led to great stories, and best of all, if you,re trying to
> distinguish yourself from your rival, it was something Marvel didn,t
> have.
>
> Marvel, for better or worse, has always been about what,s going on now,
> and a lot less eager to look back at its own past. That,s the spirit of

> Kirby running through those books, I think, but the result is that if

> it,s always now, it was never really then. Peter Parker never was

> Spider-Man, he is Spider-Man, and while there are often attempts to
> shake things up by putting a new character into a role, it never really

> lasts. While DC was building the idea of a progression ~ from Jay to

> Barry to Wally, from Alan to Hal to John to Guy To Kyle, from Dick to

> Jason to Tim, etc. ~ Marvel,s standard method was to bring someone in

> for a while and then have them graduate to the new character to their
> own role when the original version came back. Rhodey fills in as Iron
> Man, then becomes War Machine. Eric Masterson fills in as Thor and then
> becomes Thunderstrike. Ben Reilly fills in as Spider-Man and then the
> angry shrieking gets so loud that we just stuff him in a metaphorical

> woodchipper until enough time passes that we miss him. It,s the circle
> of life. And it,s also the policy that DC adopted when they hit the

> reset button again in 2011, restoring the likes of Barry Allen and Hal
> Jordan to their previous roles.
>
> For a while, that was the way things were, and weirdly enough, this is
> also the part of history where Marvel straight up goes bankrupt, and DC,
> for the very first time since 1961, is perfectly cool with not being

> Marvel anymore. But it didn,t last, largely because of The Other
> Problem, which is ~ and I swear I,ll keep this one short ~ that DC got

> it into their collective head that they needed to be Very Serious. This
> is an extension of The Problem that goes back to the days when DC Comics
> were for kids and Marvel Comics were for teens, and DC raged like a

> little brother because it didn,t want to be for kids, it wanted to be
> for grown-ups. At the same time that they,re restructuring their
> universe to be more like Marvel, they,re also publishing the comics that

> will get them the most critical success that they will ever have, the

> ones that I don,t even really need to identify by name because you all

> know where this is going, but I will anyway: Alan Moore and Dave

> Gibbons, Watchmen, Frank Miller,s Dark Knight Returns and, just as
> importantly, Moore and Steven Bisette,s Swamp Thing, among others.

>
> Watchmen #11
>
>
>
> And once again, people Lose. Their. S**t.
>

> Biff! Pow! Comics aren,t just for kids! They,re not even comics anymore,
> they,re Graphic Novels so put it in the suck it bucket, Adam West! And
> the thing is, they,re not just mature readers comics, they,re actually

> really good, and so are a lot of the others that spring up around this

> time, whether they,re coming from the Indie Boom of the ,80s or winning

> Pulitzer Prizes like Maus. And DC, the collective entity that is DC as a

> company, the one I,ve been personifying for the entire column, sees this
> and has a revelation.
>
> ?Aha!? says this imaginary version of DC, ?I get it now! The reason they

> liked Marvel, which was going for a slightly older audience, the reason
> I had competition that cut into my sales after bestriding the Earth like
> a mighty colossus for three solid decades, was that they wanted things
> that were mature. All that stuff that I used to do that was for kids,
> about cartoon characters with superpowers facing down weird situations,

> that wasn,t mature. They want violence and blood and cusswords and

> crying and moping and boy howdy they definitely want a whole lot of
> rapes. And since I can only do one kind of thing, that is what I must

> do.? Seriously, they have been chasing that dragon so hard that they

> actually did more Watchmen comics in an effort to drum up past glory. It
> creates this weird corporate schizophrenia where they want to look back
> at the high points of their past, but want them to be more Very Serious

> than they actually were. This is The Other Problem, and it,s why we have

> Identity Crisis and a Superman movie with no bright colors that ends
> with death.
>
> And then DC slowly begins the process of trying to make that vision a
> reality. In the mid 2000s, Marvel has come back from bankruptcy and it

> gets so bad that DC does two comics ~ Identity Crisis and Justice
> League: Cry For Justice ~ that are so hellaciously ruinous that they

> pretty much have no choice but to throw the baby out with that foul tub
> of bathwater and start over again. And this time, they hire yet another
> former Marvel Editor-In-Chief, Bob Harras, to run the show. And that
> pretty much brings you up to today.
>

> And again, it,s worth saying that there,s good, even great work coming

> out of DC this time around, too, even if the overall mood of the
> universe, if such a thing even exists, feels like a relentless grind to
> get through sometimes. But that, in turn, raises the question of why, if
> there are so many amazing comics that result from this, from The New

> Gods in ,71 to Hard Traveling Heroes to Batman: Year One to Flash to
> Zero Year, is this The Problem? If there,s that much good that results
> from it, then shouldn,t it be, at worst, The Curious Affectation?
>
> The reason that it,s The Problem is because of how it makes them look at

> their characters with this eternal inferiority complex that can never
> really be resolved. That fundamental difference between the universes
> that I mentioned above and wrote about at length last week means that if

> they want to be Marvel, they,re never actually going to get there.
> They,re just going to keep tying new ways to get there and resetting
> when they realize that they,ve only complicated matters, and it,s all so
> unnecessary. Superman doesn,t need to be anything else, he,s already

> Superman, and the same goes for Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of
> those characters. They can be better, sure, but the way you make them

> better is by sitting down and asking ?how can this be better,? not by
> asking ?how can this be more like that other thing?? You get good stuff

> out of that, yes, but you also get Superman executing criminals and

> Extreme Justice, and that,s the kind of thing we can do without.

>
> For their part, Marvel pretty much seems like they could give a f**k.

Fascinating analysis, with a lot of insider stuff I never knew.

The one thing I'd add as an outsider is that Marvel took a big lead at
the launch of the Silver Age by being much more original. Yes, they
pulled things from their past, like the Torch and Angel, but in new
settings, and Spider-Man and the Hulk were totally new. DC simply
resurrected its old heroes, and often with rather opff-putting changes,
like the Green Lantern Corps and an alien Hawkman. I have a feeling
somebody behind a desk said "No fantasy: It's got to be science fiction."

[ruben safir]

On Mon, 13 Jan 2014 20:29:58 -0500, Ubiquitous wrote:

> A: Last week, I dug in a little into the idea that even though they
> share prominent creators and have influenced each other back and forth
> over the course of the last 50 years, the DC and Marvel Universes have
> some fundamental differences in the way they’re structured.

The fundemental flaw in this thinking is that there is a DC and a
Marvel... and there really isn't. What you have is a bunch of talent
hussling to make a buck and they go back and forth, from outfit to
outfit, at will and often for low wages. Anything Marvel or the
independents do imediately affects DC and vice-verse.

The trouble is that everything has now moved out of NYC to Hollywood and
Comics have completely lost their independence, community and control of
the art form. The affect of Hollywood on the comic industry is the real
game changer and now the tail is waging the dog.

Ruben


--
The Coin Hangout: http://www.coinhangout.com/home

[Ruben]

On Mon, 13 Jan 2014 20:29:58 -0500, Ubiquitous wrote:

> outsell or outlast, they either bought or just flat out destroyed. When
> Fawcett’s Captain Marvel was outselling Superman, they sued to put the
> kibosh on that, claiming he was infringing on Superman,
> and when EC’s horror comics were toppling superheroes out of dominance,
> DC (along with MLJ, the company that would become Archie) were the ones
> pushing for the Comics Code that would effectively neuter EC and put
> their biggest competition into an early grave in the name of Protecting
> America’s Youth.

this section is not accurate. please provide primary material for proof..
--
The Coin Collectors Hangout: http://www.coinhangout.com/home

[Bill Steele]

In article <pan.2014.02...@none.com>, Ruben <no...@none.com>
wrote:

It's certaily factual that DC sued over Captain Marvel, and pretty hard to imagine
any other motivation. It's as if Leno sued Letterman because they both
tell jokes.

[William George Ferguson]

DC did file suit against Fawcett in 1941. It wasn't finally decided until
1953, when, with the implosion of superhero comics, Fawcett settled out of
court, because it was getting out of the comics publishinbg business
anyway, and it wasn't economiclly worth it to fight. In the early 70s, DC
leased the character rights from Fawcett, although they couldn't call the
comic Captain Marvel because Marvel had copyrighted that title in the 60s.
In the late 70s DC bought the characters outright.

As for the CCA, that was formed as simple self-defense, not as a black ops
attack on EC..Dr. Wertham and Estes Kefauver were already doing all the
attacking on EC that needed to be done. Wertham, as heavily as he attacked
EC, attacked DC equally heavily (he was the source of 'Batman and Robin are
gay', and while he can't be completely blamed for 'Wonder Woman is a B&D
lesbian' he was certainly completely on board with it.

--
I have a theory, it could be bunnies

[Bill Steele]

In article <qfnqf9p784v5ihbl6...@4ax.com>,

William George Ferguson <wmgf...@newsguy.com> wrote:

> As for the CCA, that was formed as simple self-defense, not as a black ops
> attack on EC..Dr. Wertham and Estes Kefauver were already doing all the
> attacking on EC that needed to be done. Wertham, as heavily as he attacked
> EC, attacked DC equally heavily (he was the source of 'Batman and Robin are
> gay', and while he can't be completely blamed for 'Wonder Woman is a B&D
> lesbian' he was certainly completely on board with it.

I recall that they were also after whoever it was that published Sheena,
Jungle Comics, Planet Comics and some others that were comic-book
takeoffs of the pulps, mostly complaining about the scanty costumes and
finding "subliminal" sexual images -- e.g., an arm and shoulder looks
like bare buttocks.

[Bill Steele]

There's an axiom that whoever gets there first owns the turf. The Betles
,were a sensatioin, so then wem got to hear a lot of other British
bands. How many can you remember?

\No one could be as powerful as Superman. Fawcett tried and got stung
for it. Others had to settle for being less powerful but at least
special. Marvwel gave us a guy on fire, a Norse god with a big hammer,
a merman. DC itself settled for a Greek god, a guy with a magic lamp
(two of them actually), a ghost. And we had lots of normal humans
running around in costumes with maybe a gadget or two: The Flame,
Sandman, Hawkman.

30 ydears mlater, gamma rays, radioiactive spiders, mutants and the
recycled Galactic Patrol.

The "problem," I think, is that there's no end to imagination.

[Kevrob]

First, the OP should have just quoted a bit, and posted the link:

http://comicsalliance.com/dc-comics-marvel-golden-age-silver-age-comics-history/


Ask Chris #172: DC, Marvel And 'The Problem'
by Chris Sims November 22, 2013 12:41 PM

An article over 2 years old.

The film divisions of the companies running things is a natural
result of Marvel buying Disney, and of DC's being folded into
the conglomerate that became Time Warner. It happened to DC
first, and more slowly, since DC was part of Kinney before it
bought Warner Bros./7 Arts, and wouldn't be until the grosses
rolled in for 1978's SUPERMAN that the comics properties were
proven to be sources of motion picture profits. When Warner and
Time, Inc. merged, DC became a cog in a larger print empire, one
which, as print magazines are either migrating to the web or
dying, becomes less important.

Kevin R

[Kevrob]

On Friday, February 14, 2014 at 3:32:36 PM UTC-5, Bill Steele wrote:
> In article <qfnqf9p784v5ihbl6...@4ax.com>,
> William George Ferguson <wmgf...@newsguy.com> wrote:
>
> > As for the CCA, that was formed as simple self-defense, not as a black ops
> > attack on EC..Dr. Wertham and Estes Kefauver were already doing all the
> > attacking on EC that needed to be done. Wertham, as heavily as he attacked
> > EC, attacked DC equally heavily (he was the source of 'Batman and Robin are
> > gay', and while he can't be completely blamed for 'Wonder Woman is a B&D
> > lesbian' he was certainly completely on board with it.
>
> I recall that they were also after whoever it was that published Sheena,
> Jungle Comics, Planet Comics and some others that were comic-book
> takeoffs of the pulps,

Fiction House, which also published pulps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiction_House

> mostly complaining about the scanty costumes and
> finding "subliminal" sexual images -- e.g., an arm and
> shoulder looks like bare buttocks.

..or worse, a female pubic area.

Kevin R