Characters that fit best into Marvel or DC

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RUSCHE
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Re: Characters that fit best into Marvel or DC

Post by RUSCHE »

I hope this is within topic parameters, I feel The Dark Knight Returns could have been a Marvel story. Replace Superman with Tony Stark and Batman with Steve Rogers. The government would know they could not control Steve, he would never allow his friends freedom and the very Ideal of being a hero to be crushed or corrupted. Toney would have justified it by doing the most good and to extent being somewhat in control. Now I know he stopped making weapons and such, but this is a corrupt system and America.
RUSCHE
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Re: Characters that fit best into Marvel or DC

Post by RUSCHE »

RUSCHE wrote: Sat Jan 26, 2019 2:18 am I hope this is within topic parameters, I feel The Dark Knight Returns could have been a Marvel story. Replace Superman with Tony Stark and Batman with Steve Rogers. The government would know they could not control Steve, he would never allow his friends freedom and the very Ideal of being a hero to be crushed or corrupted. Toney would have justified it by doing the most good and to extent being somewhat in control. Now I know he stopped making weapons and such, but this is a corrupt system and America.
I understand it is sounds like a Civil War rehash.
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Ken
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Re: Characters that fit best into Marvel or DC

Post by Ken »

How much classic (pre-Claremont, pre-Cockrum, pre-Byrne) X-Men have you read? How much classic Doom Patrol? I mean, yes, the All-New All-Different X-Men took off and became huge. The NEW Doom Patrol never got past its three issue try-out in Showcase. But if you're going to compare them fairly, one has to look at when Doom Patrol was a reasonably solid seller, and the X-Men at the time weren't the juggernaut they would be later.

But the point of what Ares is saying is that it is less the characters and more the style of story-telling that WAS different between the two companies. Classic Thor would have no problem fitting into DC. The weird hybrid between known myths and comic book action? William Marston was doing that in Wonder Woman 20 years prior.

Teen-ager working in the newsmedia who becomes a super-hero who everyone thinks is an adult? C'mon, any guesses? His initials are alliterative. C'mon?

Yes, Billy and Peter have different powersets, but what makes them truly unique from each other are their family situations, and their relationship with their boss. In the hypothetical world where Marvel Comics revived Captain Marvel, you can be sure as sh*t that Sterling Morris would be as hostile to Captain Marvel and Billy as J. Jonah Jameson is to Peter and Spider-man.

And once the fans-turned-creators got into the business in the late-60s, that's really where the differences broke down. Hawkeye was introduced as a bad guy, but really, all he was was Green Arrow as a bad guy. Then he became an Avenger, a hero, but one who was a lot more belligerent to his team. Denny O'Neil gets put on Justice League of America, and Green Arrow's regular feature was gone. Suddenly, Green Arrow started becoming more belligerent to his team; Green Arrow was now imitating Hawkeye. And in the 1980s, Hawkeye gets romantically involved with a black-clad blonde with limited powers. I remember in a pre-Squadron Supreme interview said he wasn't going to do much with the Golden Arrow/Lady Lark relationship because he'd already told that story in the Hawkeye miniseries.

The early Fantastic Four reads an awful lot like the Challengers of the Unknown with powers.

I'm thinking of a super-scientific city-state in Africa that is hidden from the outside world. Now I'm thinking of another. One keeps itself separate from the rest of the world because its inhabitants are a whole different species. The other is populated by highly xenophobic humans. Personally, I find Gorilla City more plausible than Wakanda. I can accept super-intelligent gorillas not wanting to take over the world, a country full of normal men with the same level of tech? I have to ask 'why the f--- haven't they conquered the planet'.

How about red-clad lawyers fighting the underworld in a devil inspired costume? Fawcett did it first with Mr. Scarlet. Stan just gave Matt Murdock a variation of Dr. Mid-Nite's powers and a lot more hand-wringing.

Marvel did give us more communist bad guys than DC did. Iron Man gave us the Crimson Dynamo, villain. The Teen Titans gave us Leonid (Starfire) Kovar, Russian teen-aged hero.

Stan and Roy won't let Jack Kirby use the Ragnarok story in Thor to launch his "New Gods" idea. He takes it down the street, and BAM! DC gives Jack a multi-book deal.

Jack Starlin looks at Kirby's New Gods from DC, and decides that Darkseid is such a cool villain that he turns around and SNAP! creates Thanos.

If Superman had been created at Marvel that Jor-el's prediction wouldn't be "Krypton will explode like a gigantic bomb", it would be "Krypton will be consumed like a giant pomegranate."

Late 1950s, early 1960s, DC gives Aquaman a new origin, since no one remembered the old one. They used Namor's. Namor wasn't using it. Namor wouldn't be revived for a nother few years.

It's not the characters and concepts that don't fit. It's the style. At DC, everyone, even the teenagers, sounded like they're 40. At Marvel, everyone, even the middle-aged men, sounded like they were 14.
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Jabroniville
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Re: Characters that fit best into Marvel or DC

Post by Jabroniville »

OKAY- I'm back and am still trying to read what Ares wrote. Goddamn man, I don't wanna TLDR people, but this is like a three-sitting set of essays :P.

To me, it seems odd that anyone who had a preference in companies would not acknowledge that there were... differences between the companies.

Someone put it broadly once, and I think it holds up, particularly in the '60s-'80s eras: DC was what human beings SHOULD be; Marvel was what they actually are. Marvel's heroes were good men and women, but were beset by human frailties- temperamental, arrogant, shy, weepy, violent, indecisive, introspective and unlucky. The most brilliant man at Marvel was kind of an egotistical ass who over-explained things and lectured too much- stuff like that. DC was more "a bunch of guys with the same Upstanding Moral Person personality". Again, not universal.

It, of course, changed with time. And writer crossover only made this more extreme- Roy Thomas brought a lot of his Marvel sentiments over to the DC Universe, and other writers did the same. Things that were once emblematic of DC- the never-ending "Spin-Offication" of heroes, starting hitting Marvel harder and harder- John Byrne noted that DC writers ending up and Marvel suddenly caused a deluge of replacements, clones and successors.

By the '80s, DC in particular started aping a LOT of Marvel. Wolfman & Perez's Titans were basically Marvel characters (save Donna Troy, who actually stood out and benefited from the fact that she was more a paragon of perfection). John Byrne explicitly said he tried to "Peter Parkerize" Superman. By the '90s, you were getting Kyle Rayner, Helena Bertinelli and others- Marvel-ized characters through and through. DC's Bloodlines copied the "Grim 'n' Gritty" style and made a mess of it. A decade later, and there'd hardly be a difference between companies at all.

Characters Who'd Fit Into Both:
Ken makes mention of Green Arrow. I think he and many other characters could fit into either company. I never intended that every characters is an either/or kind of thing. Green Arrow, Hawkman & Hawkgirl, Hal Jordan and any number of other characters would have fit in with Marvel just fine, and many Marvel characters could have been put into DC. Especially once writers started jumping ship in the '70s and '80s, and you saw people do the "well, I'll just debut my character HERE then!" thing.

The Punisher/Lobo:
It's funny Ares would bring up Lobo, because he's an even MORE perfect example of "A Marvel guy at DC"- he's a loutish, cigar-chomping asshole who flies around and gets into scraps. Totally Marvel :). There are certainly Punisher-style guys at DC, but they all seem somewhat out of place until you get to modern times (which is wayyyyyyyyyyy more morally grey).

The Marvel Family:
I still can't picture the Marvel Family in the Marvel Universe until about 2000 or so, when Marvel started shoving Supermanalogues all over the place. The whole "Smiling, kind-hearted, morally-great, cape-wearing, ultra-powerful superhero" thing was much more a DC thing. Marvel's closest comparisons in power were militaristic yes-men (Gladiator), morose philosophers (Silver Surfer) or arrogant Shakespearean blowhards (Thor). Billy would have stuck out like a sore thumb. The characterization would have probably gone much differently- Ares complains about how DC flanderized Marvel into a doofus "gee willikers" kid or a jerk in today's time, but Marvel would probably have gone even further. He'd probably STILL be dwelling over the deaths of his parents, or crippled with self-doubt.
Mark Waid apparently once said that in DC, you could write a story about the Justice League being turned into gorillas, while that sort of thing wouldn't work at Marvel. Except we have seen things like that. We've seen an Avengers storyline where all of the Avengers got gamma-irritated and they all turned into Hulks, and we've even seen a Heroes for Hire story where the heroes were literally turned into apes thanks to the High Evolutionary.
Wasn't the Hulks thing SUPER-recent? I've mentioned many times how the differences are negligible now.
Jabroniville
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Re: Characters that fit best into Marvel or DC

Post by Jabroniville »

Ken wrote: Sat Jan 26, 2019 2:58 am Teen-ager working in the newsmedia who becomes a super-hero who everyone thinks is an adult? C'mon, any guesses? His initials are alliterative. C'mon?

Yes, Billy and Peter have different powersets, but what makes them truly unique from each other are their family situations, and their relationship with their boss. In the hypothetical world where Marvel Comics revived Captain Marvel, you can be sure as sh*t that Sterling Morris would be as hostile to Captain Marvel and Billy as J. Jonah Jameson is to Peter and Spider-man.
Peter as a smart-assed, picked-on nerd with an obsessive desire to protect his Aunt and make money still comes off much differently than most incarnations of Billy I've seen.

The early Fantastic Four reads an awful lot like the Challengers of the Unknown with powers.
How about red-clad lawyers fighting the underworld in a devil inspired costume? Fawcett did it first with Mr. Scarlet. Stan just gave Matt Murdock a variation of Dr. Mid-Nite's powers and a lot more hand-wringing.
Yup, and Stan & Jack soon intersected their own personalities into things, turning them into a different kind of thing entirely. Marvel swiped a TON of stuff in its day. And the hand-wringing is emblematic of Marvel.
I'm thinking of a super-scientific city-state in Africa that is hidden from the outside world. Now I'm thinking of another. One keeps itself separate from the rest of the world because its inhabitants are a whole different species. The other is populated by highly xenophobic humans. Personally, I find Gorilla City more plausible than Wakanda. I can accept super-intelligent gorillas not wanting to take over the world, a country full of normal men with the same level of tech? I have to ask 'why the f--- haven't they conquered the planet'.
GORILLA CITY more plausible than Wakanda? I just can't even with this one :). The Wakandans were explicitly shown as an insular people who jealously guarded their secrets from the world. There's been nations like that- Japan before the Black Ships arrived, for instance.
Ken wrote: It's not the characters and concepts that don't fit. It's the style. At DC, everyone, even the teenagers, sounded like they're 40. At Marvel, everyone, even the middle-aged men, sounded like they were 14.
See, I was gonna make some kind of point about you preferring DC to Marvel, yet behave more like a Marvel character, but now that you've said THIS, it would just come off as rude and troll-ish :P.

But the thing here is that Marvel & DC had very different uses of characters, in general. It wasn't universal (see Green Arrow; Vision & Red Tornado were also very similar guys), but it was there. Gorilla City in The Flash was handled way differently than Mount Wundagore in The Fantastic Four- a recurring element played straight because "Gorillas Sell Comics!" versus a one-off threat for the Fantastic Four "so we don't have to write a seventh Doctor Doom fight this year". I think certain characters, the Marvel Family in particular, wouldn't fit unless they WERE handled in that very specific Marvel way, which may have altered the characters and their setting more than it should have been. They'd ironically lose their Marvel-ness at Marvel.
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Ken
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Re: Characters that fit best into Marvel or DC

Post by Ken »

Japan had to wait for the black ships because its an island nation. Wakanda is landlocked. Visitors showing up on foot, or horseback, or whatever would happen a lot sooner in its history.

Gorilla City, itself, only requires the acceptance that hyper-evolved Gorillas exist.

Wakanda requires acceptance of 1) a miracle metal, 2) a mountain-sized rock from space crashed into the Earth without causing an extinction event, and 3) that a jealous and insular people wouldn't turn warlike, once they learned their technology was generations ahead of the technology of the people they're afraid of.

In universes where Kryptonians and Galactus exist, the science fiction elements are, unexpectedly, ridiculous, beautiful nonsense, and realism need not apply.

I've never been a gorilla. I have no idea how they feel about humans.

I have problems believing in a human nation filled with generations of moral paragons.
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Ken
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Re: Characters that fit best into Marvel or DC

Post by Ken »

The Challengers of the Unknown were created by Jack Kirby.

Brian (Mr. Scarlet) Butler actually did a fair amount of hand-wringing, more than most for the era, especially when he ended up out of work.
Jabroniville wrote: Sat Jan 26, 2019 6:14 amI think certain characters, the Marvel Family in particular, wouldn't fit unless they WERE handled in that very specific Marvel way, which may have altered the characters and their setting more than it should have been. They'd ironically lose their Marvel-ness at Marvel.
There WAS no singular Marvel Family way. That's something everyone gets wrong. People treat them as if they were stylisticaly identical. They weren't.

One would never see a golden age style Mary Marvel story at Marvel/Atlas. Marvel/Atlas never targeted the demographic that Mary Marvel stories were aimed for. Fawcett intended Mary Marvel for a younger and female audience.

Billy's stories, generally, had a lighter, more comedic bent. And, again, his stories might not fit the Marvel/Atlas style which was full of angst and grandiose speeches. Billy had his shit too together to fit in with the Marvel/Atlas crowd.

The talking tiger and space worms were Billy's. The eccentric adoptive uncle was primarily part of Mary's supporting cast.

But Freddy Freeman? He's a cripple who eked out a living selling newspapers on a street corner. He lived in a boarding house, filled with similarly poor people, often burdened with problems that Freddy/Captain Marvel Jr. would help them solve. He'd fit in fine at Marvel/Atlas. He'd undoubtedly end up spending more time feeling sorry for himself on panel. But overall, the darker, grittier world that Junior lived in would fit in at Marvel/Atlas pretty dang well.

And of course I act like more like a Marvel character, when I prefer DC. I enjoy super-heroes for escapism. Watching Pater Parker going through the same shit I'm trying to escape from doesn't really deliver any escapism.

But, all that said, when you watched the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon from Trans-Lux, did they still feel like Spider-Man stories? It was Spider-Man without the angst, without the soap opera elements. It was Spider-Man done DC style. Did it still work as Spider-Man?
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Re: Characters that fit best into Marvel or DC

Post by greycrusader »

Yeah, people today don't realize just how diverse the solo adventures of the Golden Age Marvel Family really were-Cap's adventures were obviously done in a light-hearted, oft-times self-consciously silly manner, but though they were far more whimsical than those of Superman, they weren't played for laughs. Sivana, Black Adam, Ibac, King Kull, and Mr. Mind were just as formidable as the likes of Luthor, Vandal Savage, Metallo, the Ultra-Humanite and others, just a bit more outlandish in appearance and dialogue. Many of the more playful Captain Marvel tales weren't any more over-the-top than DC's early Silver Age stories.

As mentioned, Cap Jr's book was grimmer and more down to earth in art and story; his main villain was Captain Nazi (responsible for killing Freddie's uncle and crippling Freddie's leg), and his adventures centered around the war effort and the human interest of the downtrodden whom Jr. lived among in the tenement.

Mary Marvel (who technically should be considerably stronger than Diana-strength of Hercules backed by power of Zeus, remember?) was likewise entirely different in her exploits-Mary belonged to a genre that really didn't exist for DC or Marvel (Timely), that of young girl fantasy-romance adventures.

All my best.
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