DC Comics General

Hate to say it, but biggest reason Marvel was kicking DC's ass wasn't the content of their stories, but because Marvel had a great salesman in Stan Lee.

I'd like to say it was because the comic books were/are better, because I like Marvel's comics and characters more than DC's, for the most part, but the fact that some of both Marvel and DC's best selling stuff are things I consider tripe proves my tastes don't generally align with most comic book readers. I have argued why Civil War was an insult to tripe until I was literally out of breath, got no argument beyond "but I like it anyway" and watched a pack of teens buy the latest issue, because even with Stan Lee long gone by that point Marvel had learned how to sell comic books from him.

I also don't want to give Stan Lee too much credit, because creatively speaking the man didn't have it. The Marvel method was to let the artist tell the story, and when Lee stepped up to write his own it was clear why that was the Marvel method. I'm sure he took credit for Kirby and Ditko's ideas on his deathbed. Despite all that, Stan Lee does deserve all the credit in the world for those comic books getting attention, even if prose was about all he really had to offer content wise. DC comics generally were more safe and less mature than Marvels, but that's like saying WWF was more childish and less violent than Jim Crockett Promotions. To the outside observer it was all professional wrestling, and in that case the childish product had the better(and more ruthless more law breaking) salesman. DC was more ruthless than Marvel, but they didn't have the marketing savvy to go with it.

Edited by IndirectActiveTransport on Mar 10th 2024 at 12:36:21 PM

An exception would be lesser stars like Aquaman and Green Arrow, who were allowed to be more daring cause they weren't the face of the company.

Being more daring often didn't save them, though. Even Green Lantern-Green Arrow wasn't a big sales success in comparison to comparable Marvel heroes (in terms of positioning) like Captain America.

Edited by TheEvilDrBolty on Mar 10th 2024 at 1:55:42 PM

Re: KJ- the hints that Barbara's friend was about to arrive when Joker showed up, and then that friend found Barbara without seeing Joker, and Bullock finding Joker taking pictures of Barbara as the sickest part of what he did, seem to indicate that Joker didn't stick long enough to violate her that way.

The lines between the two companies, like who was more daring, more mature, etc, they started to get blurred during the 1970s when DC started hiring almost all the Marvel guys they could get, shades of WWF hiring all the AWA guys they could get brother, and really got blurred in the 1980s, but at least 83 onward DC starts coming off as try hard, where Marvel feels more casual about what it puts out in most cases.

That try hard feeling, I've gotten it a lot more from DC. That Futures End event really sticks out when I think about it. But again my personal tastes, or even actual writing quality or even pure artistic quality do not in of themselves equate to comic book sales. That Futures End thing I'm sorry I read? It was like in the top eight of comic book sales until the tail end of its run. What people saw in that thing to keep buying it I don't know, but they did. Rob Leifeld can't produce anything on time and can't draw a foot, but he's a more successful comic book artist than Todd McFarlen, who has produced some of the best looking pages and panels in the medium but is flat broke! All Star Batman And Robin The Boy Wonder was the best selling comic book for eight months and to this day I've yet to hear or read anyone explain what its merits were. In my personal opinion The Bana-Mighdall are something Wonder Woman could have done without, but they're among the more popular elements of the sub franchise. I admit to mostly liking what's been done with them, Rebirth-Infinite Frontier 2018 or so onward, but it still boggles my mind that first Bana-Mighdall story got approved. Definitely not one of George Perez's highlights. Writing, editing, drawing, inking, they're all important cogs in the machine, but it's impossible to know how an audience will react. You can make educated guesses, but you'll never know for sure. Sometimes the salesman finding the right buyers, giving them the right pitch, is the biggest difference maker.

Edited by IndirectActiveTransport on Mar 10th 2024 at 2:13:47 PM

It is something I've observed before that while Marvel and DC are both willing to get dark, DC often felt more insecure and desperate about it in comparison to Marvel. Which is precisely what it was like, Marvel got their initial audience partly because of being more willing to tackle darker, more mature subjects while DC only really started dipping into constant grimdarkness when DiDio took over and pushed his insecurity on the whole company.

Or I guess to put it another way, while Marvel and DC have done poorly-handled rape stories, when Marvel did it, it was because the writers felt they could handle it and could make meaningful stories from it, but when DC did it, it was because DiDio ordered them too in an attempt to impress people by showing they were willing to go there at all. You see this with the whole Dr. Light thing and compare it to the aforementioned Evil That Men Do over at Marvel; Identity Crisis uses rape as cheap shock value and an attempt to big up a loser villain, while Evil That Men Do, for all it's flaws, made an earnest and sincere attempt to treat the subject with the weight it deserves.

"Hate to say it, but biggest reason Marvel was kicking DC's ass wasn't the content of their stories, but because Marvel had a great salesman in Stan Lee"

When do you mean? By the time of Identity Crisis, Stan had long since retired from Marvel. He'd more recently done Just Imagine... for DC at that point. Marvel didn't become dominant until the 70's, and then throughout the 80's and 90's, who was number 1 went back and forth.

I mean Marvel's come back through the 1960s to their dominance in the 1970s can be attributed to Stan Lee's work as a spokesman and salesman. I mean what success Marvel had in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s is largely from lessons learned from Stan Lee. He never really went all in for DC, or any other comic book company the way he did for Marvel. When he left Marvel Stan Lee became more about self promotion.

Granted, that aspect of self promotion was still there even while he was at Marvel. That's what drove away Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby for a time, but Stan Lee successfully created the "here's the house of ideas, we're the revolution, you're supporting something great, Marvel rules and DC sucks" attitude that still pervades the Marvel fan base even today, to an extent, and was definitely running strong in the 1980s. DC's had its movements and groundswells here and there(most currently the obsession for the "Synder cut" even if that wasn't comic books) but DC never really had that going for them. There's no equivalent term for "Mindless Marvel Zombies", which Marvel itself managed to make marketable and sell even more comics with.

So what you're basically saying is that a big part of why Marvel managed to beat out DC in a lot of respects is because DC never had a Stan Lee figure, basically. Which makes sense.

Amusingly James Gunn has proven to be a good marketer for DC.

Sales of books have been going up a lot whenever he talks about them.

I'm not even remotely a fan of Gunn and dislike a great deal of his work, but I won't deny that the guy is great at that kind of marketing. It probably helps that he has a ton of good will from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies that he hasn't squandered.

Also @Indirect Active Transport in regards to what you said about Stan Lee and the Marvel Method earlier, I think that opinion you're voicing - a not uncommon one - is a little unfair towards Stan and likewise a little overly-gracious to Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Which is a long running issue. Everyone wants to simplify it into Stan as this Jerkass Corrupt Corporate Executive who "stole" ideas from sweet noble and pure underdog artists Jack and Steve, when the actual situation, from my knowledge, was far less clear-cut.

Stan was absolutely a talented writer in his own right and had A LOT of hand in making the stories he produced with Jack and Steve; he wasn't just stamping his name on their work, he was a full on co-writer. The Marvel Method wasn't just artists making up stories and than someone else getting all the credit, it was the artists and writers having equal sway on the plot. And Jack and Steve weren't these super-geniuses who never made a misstep and were responsible for everything good at Marvel, they had their own share of flaws. While Jack had a lot of legit gripes I would say, Steve was - to be blunt - kind of an up-his-own-ass dickhead about a lot of things. I think it's very telling that while Jack made plenty of great comics on his own without Stan, once Steve didn't have Stan to restrain him anymore, he spent the remainder of his days churning objectivist propaganda schlock that's only remembered as something Alan Moore made fun of in Watchmen.

Edited by immortaleditor on Mar 10th 2024 at 3:05:39 AM

It helps that he's actually showing the books outright, with covers, the title, and their creative teams.

Which you'd think is nothing special but apparently not even Feige has ever done this with Marvel comics.

I don't think Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby are a super geniuses though. Brilliant artists, but not without faults that I could get into if you really want me to. What I stated is that they created the Marvel Universe setting as we know it, and that Lee's creative contributions to that setting without their help really exposed that fact they were giving substance to the stories. Stan Lee's Silver Surfer, Stan Lee's Captain America, any run where he gets the full reigns and it shows he's mainly a dialog guy. I don't want to give him too much credit in that respect but in this very thread, not two pages ago, when Marvel was described as "more mature" than DC I stated that was only relative and that the lines got blurred through the decades. Jack and Steve jumped ship to DC and it didn't immediately knock Marvel back down to near bankruptcy. They clearly weren't geniuses who turned all they touched to gold. I attributed Marvel's success to Stan Lee MORE than Kirby, Ditko or anyone else and certainly never called Lee an evil executive either. I described him as a prose writer, salesman, spokesman and self promoter. I never implied he wasn't good at those things. How much more do I have to praise Stan Lee exactly before I'm allowed to mention he took more credit than he deserved? That creatively he was mainly a dialog guy?

It's the Hulk Hogan principle. Hogan was already the biggest star in the US during most of the 1980s and half of the 1990s. He was a big star in Japan too, one of the most popular professional wrestlers in the world to ever do it. But for some reason that's not enough, he has to lie to make himself even bigger. Stan Lee is one of the most important men in comic books and largely responsible for one of the biggest media brands in the world right now, one that competes with Harry Potter and Pokemon(both of which are showing moments of weakness that might allow Marvel to overtake them)! For some reason that wasn't enough.

You're not wrong about Steve Ditko either, post Marvel, but in crafting the Marvel Universe he played just as big a part as Jack Kirby. Kirby pitched a Spider-Man first. Kirby was rejected. It was Ditko who salvaged the idea. Gave us the teen super hero who became Marvel's most popular. Ditko who conceived the responsibility of protagonist to supporting cast that made so many of them strong enough characters to carry their own books. That latter writing method is one of the better things DC has taken from Marvel. Nubia of all people now has her own DC books, and some of them have sold decently in the Young Adult market. But I have to give Lee more credit? Fine, Ditko's Peter Parker had all the markings of a soon to be school shooter, which was at odds with his altruism. Lee helped make Spider-Man more consistent in and out of costume. Lee added a romantic element to the supporting cast's relations that showed Parker wasn't a total loser and lead the way to one of the more interesting marriages in comic books(why Lee insisted on having Mary Jane and only Mary Jane speak with slang ten years out of date I don't understand though). I'll maintain that Lee strength was mainly in writing dialog, but no, you're right in that it was wrong to imply prose was all he had to offer. I just think that with Kirby and Ditko "prose" was all Lee was needed for, while without them Lee needed more help with the contents of the comic books he was selling.

Though if you look at what Jack Kirby did after becoming a solo act at DC, their plotting definitely becomes a bit more undisciplined and occasionally incoherent than it was when collaborating with Lee.

Interestingly, Stan himself learned his salesmanship from EC Comics. He never worked for them, but they pioneered editorial talking directly to fans through letters pages and such, and used the same kind of patter he would ultimately use.

Kirby actually wanted to be a Stan Lee type figure over the Fourth World books—plotting them with individual writers and drawing maybe one of them himself. DC decided to have him do all of them himself, as it was a pace he could actually keep. While the New Gods stuff is stunning work, the scripting, I think, suffers from Kirby A.being stretched too thin and B. Not really being a scripter.

Edited by Robbery on Mar 10th 2024 at 5:04:14 AM

So that this discussion isn't entirely based on arguing over the merits between DC and Marvel, I'd like to say right now that I didn't care for Unstoppable Doom Patrol.

The poor treatment of Dorothy Spinner and Kate Godwin by disregarding their resurrections in DC Pride 2022 in spite of their offing in John Arcudi's run being a particularly reviled part of that era was bad enough, but I took great exception towards the excuse of Monsieur Mallah betraying and killing his lover the Brain (who I strongly prefer to the Doom Patrol's starting enemy General Immortus) over some out-of-nowhere bullspit about their relationship being toxic.

It also annoyed me that the team's conflicts with Batman and the Green Lanterns boiled down to the tired "superheroes are just looking for excuses to beat up marginalized groups" argument that conveniently ignores how a lot of the people Batman and the Green Lanterns combat are not a victim of persecution and actually are demented psychos who deserve to be locked up to keep them from harming others.

My hope is that should there be a new Doom Patrol comic after Unstoppable Doom Patrol that it is written by someone other than Dennis Culver, because the abysmal treatment of Dorothy and Kate, plus the epilogue of the Batwoman Who Laughs utterly razing Danny the Street honestly feels like Culver went through a checklist of how to peeve off fans of the Doom Patrol.

I have no strong feelings either way on making Larry gay like his counterpart in the live-action Doom Patrol show, and Cliff did need to be called out for deadnaming Larry during his time as Rebis, but those efforts at being progressive feel gravely undermined by what the miniseries did with Kate Godwin, who it should be noted has barely been acknowledged since the John Arcudi series got rid of her and Dorothy in compliance with the tradition of discarding members the current writer didn't want to use for every new iteration of the team.

Edited by CaptainTedium on Mar 12th 2024 at 3:48:00 AM

Okay the new Outsiders came out. Credit to it, it actually acknowledges Nocturna's assault on Kate and Kate refuses to consider her her girlfriend.

Otherwise the book remains pretentious as hell. An issue of character making an endless speech trying to sound deep, worsened by Nocturna being in a club of monsters going all "We are the truth of mankind, evil is the future" and the issue ends with them being complete karma houdinis with nothing being done about the serial killer club currently murdering people. The only thing done about them is Kate calling herself a predator and saying she will hunt them...... one of these days

Luke is useless. His role in the issue is to essentially be tricked by Klarion to save his life, cause had Luke tried to rescue any of the victims he would have died.

Edited by slimcoder on Mar 12th 2024 at 6:55:03 AM

Ow, that edge.

...did the victim of a sexual predator call themselves a predator?

Edited by kkhohoho on Mar 12th 2024 at 9:03:29 AM

Because Nocturna was going on about Prey and Predator spiel, ya know the weak and the strong.

Kate means predator in the sense that she is strong and she will triumph over her vampire bullshit.

So the other kind of predator.

Edited by slimcoder on Mar 12th 2024 at 7:06:37 AM

Still not a good look.

It isn't but that's pretty standard for this Outsiders run.

Try-Hard and Pretentious is a good summation of it.

It's still utterly hilarious that for all this book's ranting about how superheroes supposedly suck and don't bring "real change", it's own characters are completely and utterly failing to accomplish anything meaningful and not even protecting anyone from these supervillains who are just casually committing mass murder in front of them without fear.

Just finished reading the latest Outsiders

As was said more than once in the issue, the entire place was under a spell that stopped the monsters, serial killers and demons killing anyone who didn't consent so it was more assisting suicide than murdering people (Drummer was able to get away with killing the demon because the spell didn't work that way round). I did find it a little amusing that called himself a forgotten monster when he also turned up in this month's Speed Force.

I do think that this series is actually less about the main characters themselves and more about (re)introducing characters and concepts than anything else.

"They didn't kill anyone who didn't consent to it" is not much of an improvement, you realize?