Just finished "Marvel Comics in the 1960s" and it just confirmed for me more than ever why I've been more of a Marvel fan than a DC fan my entire life (despite Superman being my numero uno).

I've always liked the strong, anti-social personalities of many of the key heroes, the large scale conflicts they seem to create, the grandiose cosmic threats like Ego and Galactus, the operatic romances and lost loves... it's all over-the-top and I dig it.

Anyway...

1. Marvel or DC?

2. What attracted you more to one than the other?

3. Which creators define your selection?

4. Which characters define your selection?

5. What is the other missing that doesn't propel it to numero uno?

I was drawn to the Hulk as a young boy, because I first liked monsters (King Kong, Godzilla, Dracula, Wolfman, etc.). I was given the Hulk Fireside book, and soon after the TV show came on. My second favorite was Spider-man, who my older cousin loved. He gave me a huge stack of 70's Spider-man comics.

I suppose I liked the drama of Bruce Banner in the Jekyll and hide mold, with a real soap opera feel (as first displayed in the Ditko issues -- that panicky, angsty face he drew Banner with connected to me). I bought all of the Spider-man reprints in the Pocket Books editions (Ditko) and thought it was amazing, right from the get-go.

Later, I picked up an issue of Fantastic Four and immediately connected with Reed Richards. I read the issue where he sacrifices himself in the Negative Zone to send Johnny and Ben back (reprinted in Marvel's Greatest Comics) and started buying all the FF's from then.

I guess those three things made me start to want to buy everything Marvel -- Stan's essays in all the Fireside books (Origins, Son of Origins, Bring on the Bad Guys), plus the fact that Marvel had a healthy line of reprints going when I started, made it seem like Marvel was more the of the "club" where everything connected.

DC, I just had a couple of bad experiences. Bought a few off the stands and they were boring. Could have been bad luck. I was only Marvel exclusive for about 2 years, then I started reading Batman, Teen Titans, anything. But that first connection to Marvel (TV show, Fireside books, Pocket Books, healthy reprint line, favorite characters) remained strong forever.

1. DC
2. Heroic, noble, problem free characters, including some who were happily married. Heroes primarily concerned with justice and saving people. High importance placed on secret identities. Many characters of archetypal qualities.
3. Gardner Fox, John Broome, Bob Haney, Len Wein, Cary Bates, and sometimes Alan Moore.
4. Justice League of America circa 1967
5. Less what they're missing and more what they have that I don't want: soap opera lives for their characters, emphasis on powers, low importance of secret identities.

1. Marvel or DC?

Marvel.

2. What attracted you more to one than the other?

I think artwork was a huge factor. My love of the medium and the genre in particular stems mainly from my love of artwork. Marvel comics always felt a little less stiff, a little less formal and a little more "alive" than the DC books I was seeing growing up. By the time I started reading, Aparo was in his latter days, his figures were stiff and his characters felt like mannequins... I was surprised later to realize he was the same guy who drew those Batman & the Outsiders and Untold Legend of the Batman books I liked so much when I was younger (and didn't really discriminate between the two).

By the time the 90s were in full swing, Marvel was definitely the cool company -- all my friends were reading Marvel books, featuring the cool heroes at the time... Wolverine, Ghost Rider, Punisher, X-Men and Spider-Man. By the time Image was hitting it big, it felt like DC was a distant third (and for a brief time, they actually were in sales)... the old looking characters with lame art and boring stories. The only exception seemed to be Batman -- he remained eternally cool (thanks in part to the popularity of the Burton films).

It wasn't until the Death of Superman that DC seemed to pick up any steam, and even then, it was because of the gimmick storylines. Characters like Superboy and Az-Bats seemed like out-of-touch attempts to tap into the zeitgeist found in Image's books at the time.

They just felt old, out-of-touch, and behind the times for most of my life. They wouldn't seem cool until I got into Frank Miller's Batman work and Grant Morrison's JLA run.

3. Which creators define your selection?

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, John Romita, John Byrne, Frank Miller, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Joe Madureira and Erik Larsen.

4. Which characters define your selection?

Spider-Man, Thor, the Hulk, Daredevil, the X-Men and the Thing.

5. What is the other missing that doesn't propel it to numero uno?

Characters I can get behind other than Superman and Batman. The others have always felt really cool in the context of the JLA, but I just couldn't get into the other despite numerous attempts of reading the "good stuff" like Johns' Green Lantern or Waid's Flash. Even when I enjoyed the stories, they didn't stir a feeling of "I need more!" or "Wow, these are characters I believe in." Marvel's heroes always felt "real" to me while DC's roster outside of the big two always felt distant and wooden.

1. Marvel or DC? DC

2. What attracted you more to one than the other? More exposure to it as a kid. Super Friends.

3. Which creators define your selection? Aparo, Kubert, Cardy, Bolland, Perez, Ordway

4. Which characters define your selection? Batman, Metamorpho, Spectre, JLA, JSA

5. What is the other missing that doesn't propel it to numero uno? My favorite characters.

DC

Even though Marvel was new and DC had a decade of Silver Age continuity under its belt, DC was more accessible to me. DC had one or two complete stories per issue, while Marvel seemed to make a point of finishing each story in the first couple of pages of the next issue. DC was also better at educating new readers as to who was who in the DC continuity. The panel showing Pete Ross discovering Superboy's secret identity was repeated in issue after issue, bringing new readers up to speed on the Pete Ross / Superboy relationship. I would pick up an issue of Fantastic Four and have no idea where the Inhumans were from or who Wyatt Wingfoot was supposed to be. At the time, DC was a mixture of new characters and iconic superheroes with decades of history. You had Barry Allen and Hal Jordan with their new continuity, and Superman and Batman with villains and friends that went back for twenty years. The Superman universe in particular was amazing. It was packed with exotic characters and places. And you could jump in with almost any issue and get a good introduction to those worlds.

Superman was my main draw, so Otto Binder, Jerry Siegel, Mort Weisinger, and Curt Swan were the creators that produced my favorite books. The worlds of Krypton, Metropolis, Smallville, Midvale, and Kandor were as familiar to me as my own neighborhood. The Adam West series had us all reading Batman, and we sampled all of the other DC superhero titles, but it was the Superman family that had me hooked.

Superboy pretty much encapsulated everything that was DC for me. Smallville was a familiar locale. It was a mirror image of the small town where my parents were from and where I spent a great deal of time. Superboy and Adventure comics covered small town America and the amazing universe of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Plus the issues were peppered with fun stories about Superbaby, Krypto, the Legion of Super-Pets, etc.

The main fault of Marvel that kept them from being my favorite title was that the heroes weren't always heroic. The heroes were always fighting each other, their personal lives were filled with depressing drama, and even the best of them seemed to have convenient lapses of common sense. Comics were an escape for me. DC gave me a wonderful world filled with fun stories and heroes that were rewarded for their heroics by having good lives. I didn't want to read about elderly aunts that couldn't afford medication. I wanted to read about crime fighting millionaires and hard hitting journalists and scientific geniuses whose main problem was that they were having too much amazing action in their lives to make room for their girlfriends.

I call this "Pete Ross Syndrome."

It replaced "Krypton is Doomed Syndrome."

Doctors, lawyers, millionaires, scientists, test pilots. DC characters had cool jobs.

I find that pretty interesting, since that's why the DC universe seems so stuff and unreal to me... characters didn't really seem to have "real" problems beyond beating the villain of the week. To me, Peter Parker's stuggles with his aunt's illnesses were more dramatic and gut-wrenching than any issue involving escapes shackles in a villain's hideout or figuring out how to get around Kryptonite to take Luthor back to prison.

That said, Marvel characters had fairly dramatic jobs --


Thor's Don Blake identity


Daredevil


Iron Man


Reed Richards, Hank Pym, Bruce Banner


Ben Grimm

I knew this was a stealth debate thread.

I find it soap operaic and depressing.


Abandoned.


Noted.


Engineer or industrialist, but point taken.


No job, no job, no job.


No job.

There are lot of super heroes on the dole in the Marvel universe.

1. Marvel or DC?

DC.

2. What attracted you more to one than the other?

The Batman TV show. The day after the premiere I became a comic book reader, and Batman comics were my first purchases. That spread out pretty quickly to other DC titles.

3. Which creators define your selection?

Fox, Broome, Kanigher, Siegel, Binder, Infantino, Kane, Swan, Anderson, Mooney.

4. Which characters define your selection?

Just about all of the superheroes: the Bat characters, the Super characters, The Flash, The Atom, The Green Lantern, Hawkman, The JLA, The Legion Of Super-Heroes, Robby Reed, Adam Strange, The Elongated Man, The Spectre ....

5. What is the other missing that doesn't propel it to numero uno?

They weren't the first I experienced. I think it's really as simple as that.

My point was that, across the board, DC's characters had successful secret identities. Until Hal quit flying planes and Ollie lost his fortune, pretty much all of the DC characters had great personal lives. This was a stark contrast to Peter Parker's ups and downs, Bruce Banner's destroyed life, Ben Grimm's loss of a normal life, etc., etc., etc. Marvel had some cool secret identities, but there were just as many secret ID's that came with dramatic baggage.

The dramatic backstory clicked with Marvel fans, but I couldn't get with it. The Avengers being made up of Cap, Wanda, Pietro, and Hawkeye... that was just bizarre to me. It was basically Cap and three anti-heroes. Great for Marvelites, but not for me.

1. Marvel or DC?

Marvel

2. What attracted you more to one than the other?

I always liked both, but as I moved into preteen years Marvel just seemed cooler. Still does really,

3. Which creators define your selection?

I didn't follow creators in the day. I do now though. But probably Wolfman, Gerber, Byrne, Stern.

4. Which characters define your selection?

Howard the Duck. The Defenders, Spider-Man, Doctor Doom and the X Men.

5. What is the other missing that doesn't propel it to numero uno?

At the time, DC felt less "real". These days the differences are less pronounced.

Also over the years, the DC chars I've really liked were really close to Marvels. The Ray. Firestorm, Waids Flash, Blue Devil.

1. Marvel or DC?

Marvel.

2. What attracted you more to one than the other?

I'm not sure - I think there were just more Marvel reprints available where I was when I was a little kid. The Hulk was the first thing I got into, followed by Spider-Man, the FF, Creatures on The Loose, Howard the Duck, Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, Man-Thing, Planet of the Apes; these were all available in cheap B&W reprint form, so that's what I got into. It was just a matter of circumstance, I think. When I was older I began to read the Flash, Green Lantern, Creature Commandos, Omega Men, Warlord, Sgt. Rock, Camelot 3000, The Atomic Knights, and a whole bunch of DC stuff. I was always more Marvel oriented, though, because of those early days.

3. Which creators define your selection?

I'm mostly about different eras, and the art and writing styles from them. The only time I've bought comics based on the writer alone is when I've seen something by Steve Gerber I hadn't heard of before. Having said that, I used to buy anything that was drawn by John Byrne, John Buscema or Dan Jurgens. So, all those guys I guess.

4. Which characters define your selection?

I'll give anything Hulk or Spidey related the benefit of the doubt and read them. I'll always read anything where Howard the Duck appears. I used to get Marvel Two-In-One because of Ben Grimm, and I was a fan of Dan Slott's Thing comic from a while back. I also used to love Marvel's comic book adaptations of movies - especially the Star Wars and Indiana Jones ones. I also loved Marvel's versions of stuff like Conan and John Carter, Doc Savage, etc. I'd read all of those before I'd read the original books they were derived from. There were also these 'Marvel Classics' ones with versions of Treasure Island and Frankenstein and things like that - they were a favourite as well. I think it's because they were characters I'd heard about elsewhere. Having said this, I followed Byrne to DC, and primarily became a Superman reader in the wake of MOS - I collected all the comics that Supes starred in. It was only when the Electric Superman thing happened that I lost faith in comics completely. I still haven't really ever got back into them; not in quite the same way, at any rate.

5. What is the other missing that doesn't propel it to numero uno?

I think it was just that I discovered/stumbled upon Marvel first. Had I discovered Superman before I read that first Hulk comic, things may have turned out to be different. Where I grew up, the newsagent carried much more Marvel stuff (and even more Gold Key, Murray and Whitman stuff) than they did DC stuff, so it was just circumstance, I suppose. Because it was the first thing I found, it became my comic book touchstone, and the standard by which I judged all other comics - if they differed too much from Marvel, I tended to be put off when I was a kid. There had to over the top drama, conflict, self-doubt and monsters for me to 'connect' with a comic. Barbarians and scantily clad women also seemed to be more plentiful in Marvel comics, and I was all about those.

Sorry, didn't mean to come off that way. I'm not criticizing anyone's choices, just trying to conversate about different experiences.

Besides, it's really no debate at all. Marvel rulz.

Word.

Me too.

Change "Batman TV Show"
to
"Superman TV Show"
and I'll add another
"Me too".