(emotional) CRIPPLE FIGHT.

I love comic book fans.

DC, in general, had better plot-hooks, and was a hell of a lot more creative and varied. Plenty of man-out-of-time fish out of water stories… the focus wasn’t so much on the villains, who were kinda like window dressing. It was all about defining the hero’s emotional core or trying to squeeze in as many crazy sci-fi concepts as the audience could stand. Meanwhile, Captain America is fighting the Red Skull for the 4th time. This year.

I just realized the irony of this paragraph: you praise DC for being more varied because they have man out of time and fish out of water stories. Then you criticize Captain America for being derivative. But isn’t Captain America himself an example of a man out of time/fish out of water stories? And as far as being fish out of water or loners, what about the Thing, Spider-Man and the Hulk. You also have Thor, who is both a man out of time (from Norse times) AND a fish out of water (his hometown is Asgard, a mystical land where he lived among gods).

Both T. and MarkAndrew make interesting points (though T. does it with much less arrogance, Mark seems to be very intolerant of people that think differently than he), but both Marvel and DC were repetitive at times. Lots of comics produced per month, sometimes by the same creative teams.

Oh I totally agree with this. Lots of repetitive stories from both Marvel and DC. A lot of this had to do with the fact that there wasn’t a big reprint and trade paperback market for reading old issues plus a high turnover of fans as many didn’t keep the habit into teenage years and adulthood, so it was easier to get away with repeating stories. I am not denying Marvel was repetitive, I just took issue with the claim that Marvel was significantly more repetitive than DC was.

I don’t agree that there was a lot of “defining the hero’s emotional core” going on at DC Comics in the Silver Age. Perhaps in Superman titles and a few others like the Legion, sure.

Honestly, even Legion didn’t have that much defining of emotional core until Marvel came along. For a long time despite the large cast the dialogue and personalities of Legion members was pretty interchangeable.

I don’t agree that there was a lot of “defining the hero’s emotional core” going on at DC Comics in the Silver Age. Perhaps in Superman titles and a few others like the Legion, sure. But Flash, Batman, Green Lantern, Atom, Hawkman, Justice League, despite the cool, original sci-fi ideas had very little “emotional core”, the heroes were pretty much all cut from the same stoic, staid, champion of order, 1950s patriarcal figure. Even their girlfriends all seemed alike.

Batman only got more emotionally complex with Denny O’Neill in the 1970s.

There was a lot of formula going on at Marvel too, the underdog and love triangle stuff were partly a response to DC’s godlike heroes and steady girlfriends (exception: Superman, but there he was both corners of the love triangle), but I think Spider-Man, Thor, and the Fantastic Four were much more different from each other than Green Lantern, Flash, and JLA, choosing 3 superhero titles from each publisher.

Unlike the JLA, the characters in the FF and Avengers had their individual voices. The downside of this was that these individual voices were often stereotypical. Reed was the Introverted Noble Scientist, Johnny was the Hot-Head, Sue was the Girly Girl. Still an improvement over the JLA, were all of them were Stoic Staid Hero.

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