We did this a long while back and it was a blow out for Marvel... but I'm curious how the board breaks down these days.

Are there people that like DC more than Marvel besides Mietus, Raf, and Glover here on IMWAN?

I'm not eight years old any more!

Or to put it another way, I like some of both and don't feel any need to champion one or the other.

Here's my other poll, done way back in 1879 -- viewtopic.php?f=1&t=18147

Marvel 24, DC 10

I imagine Swanderson and Tommy Tomorrow are mostly DC guys.
I'm mostly a Marvel guy, but I like some of each, and a whole bunch
of the other companies: Dell, Gold Key, Charlton, Valiant, Dark Horse,
IDW, Fantagraphics, Top Cow, Eclipse, Pacific, Atlas Seaboard, ....

I'm DC, except for Claremont's X-Men which I feel is the best superhero series of all time - greater even than Lee & Kirby's FF.

But I DC characters always made sense to me. They were heroic. They were always fighting evil. The motives of their villains were always clear.

I never understood what most of the Marvel heroes & villains wanted when I was growing up. They always seemed to be fighting just to be fighting. The Marvel heroes were constantly jumping to conclusions and fighting each other as well, even other heroes that they knew well and should give the benefit of the doubt to.

Whenever a DC hero was acting out of character there seemed to be a trust from his fellow heroes that showed that they were honorable and that they had a brain.

There's that too. I've enjoyed a fair few superhero stories, but my real all-time favorites are the duck-verse stories from Dell/Gold Key!

Which goes to show that, for a time at least, there WAS a fundamental difference between the two that could explain why some might prefer one or the other. Did you like flawed heroes or heroic heroes? Or some of both?

For decades now it's only been flawed heroes--or even downright anti-heroes--from both.

Often I hunger for a true flawless hero. That large painting of Superman that hung in Donenfield's office that Hanzo and Jay discussed in another thread really does give me a warm feeling. That Superman is so heroic and caring, honest and dependable. I really do feel that kids need such heroes and role models and I'm not sure that they are getting them nowadays.

I gravitated to less powerful heroes. In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
Superman was vastly powerful, so, apart from some wonderful Curt
Swan artwork, I had little incentive to buy those comics. I loved Batman,
especially the Batman found in Detective Comics, along with the whole
Bat Family of characters: Babs, Alfred, Dick, Jason Bard, James Gordon, ....

My Dad had two to three year's worth of most of the Marvel characters'
comics stacked in the basement, so it was great that I knew the early
stories and could buy the same characters six or seven years later.
There was also the "mystery" incentive of trying to piece together what
had happened in the in between years (both by reading the Editor's
blurbs in current issues and by buying up back issues whenever I
could). There was too much DC history for me to collect them, but then,
they also didn't dwell on their own history that much as Marvel did. And
that may be the main difference between the two companies when I had
started buying my own comics. I was right there with DC when they
would launch new titles and new characters: Freedom Fighters, Ragman,
Steel the Indestructible Man, Shade, Stalker, Claw, and so on. Sadly,
all of those titles imploded and died shortly after their debuts.

So, really, for me, it came down to lower powered heroes and continuity.
And, as Marvel has been steadily boosting it's character's strength
levels and ignoring more and more of their continuity in the last two
decades, I have become less and less interested in collecting them.

That concerns me as well. The shortage of selfless role models of any kind in contemporary society worries me.

This is true for me as well as I became a teen. Despite my childhood nostalgia for Superman, the Flash, by the time I was 15 I much preferred heroes like Batman, Daredevil, the Falcon, Wildcat, Black Lightning, etc. that were a little more street level. Unfortunately, as you stated, with the exception of Batman & Daredevil, those kinds of stories were hard to find.

I think that the difference between Marvel and DC -- personality. How does a true flawless hero act? Well -- predictably.

Before Marvel started taking off, what was the inner monologue of every DC hero?

"Great Scott! Super-Villain is attacking/robbing ______!!! But how do I change to Superhero without making Love Interest suspicious?"

To me, Spider-Man or Bruce Banner is a far better role model than some standard no child will ever reach. Yeah, Peter Parker's got it tough and he makes mistakes -- but see how he never gives up on doing the right thing in the end, no matter how discouraged he gets? See how he puts family and friends before himselves, even when he's unhappy? That's how you do it in real life.

As a kid growing up in the 90's, DC heroes just seemed old and boring. We didn't have Neal Adams on Batman or George Perez on Justice League. It wasn't until they started killing and mutilating their icons that my friends and I even bothered to purchase a DC book -- except Batman, of course.

EVERYONE loves Batman.

James Taylor and Kurt Swanderson, for sure.

When I read comics, I was a DC guy.

Then you became more AC/DC?

Technically I'm a National Periodicals person.

I've long argued, in fact, that the Marvel heroes are actually MORE heroic, because they ultimately do the right thing, even when it's difficult or unpopular. The DC heroes never seemed to struggle with those kinds of issues - or, it seemed that way when I was a kid, anyway.




The differences between DC and Marvel really have become much less pronounced. I think that that's too bad, really. Yeah, I'm a Marvel fan, but I liked that the Big Two had different approaches. I think it's fun to identify with one company or another - just as sports fans identify with favorite teams. Of course, some fans take it all too seriously.

The joys of cherry-picking via the memories of IMWANkers means a lot more to me than if I'd actually spent the time reading the same material. I actually prefer your discussions as a use of my time to trying to read very many comic book stories (I read one or two a day, or have a holiday where I read like twenty in two days).

I think imagining being secretly, actually Spider-Man everywhere I was allowed to go so much grew into Marvel Zombie adolescence. Then I tried to chunk it all a while and buy some clothes and build some muscles a couple of years. Any time I came back after that, I've been pretty open to whatever's good!

What a cool beginning. My Dad didn't like to read anything at all.

I was attracted to exploring DC by its less-traveled corridors at first, too. Whatever's in the quarter bins!


Those two ingredients, lower powered heroes and continuity, are germaine to what I would do with our own Portal Immortal. I look forward to rewriting all those notes into crisp scripts!

Drawing an action book, however, seems like it would take me months.
Man, so many of you here draw, my head spins. I had no idea when I joined. Even "non-artists" will put up a good drawing now and then.

I'm thinking about taking a comic book class at the Academy of Art San Francisco this summer. They offer "Penciling and Inking" and "Comic Book History."

If you can find time you totally should!!!

I know, right! It sounds like fun!

I'm doing it!