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As a kid in the 70's Marvel was really head and shoulders above DC, mostly because they were utterly out of control. You had the big sellers like Spidey and the FF, but they had such insane series as Son of Satan, Howard The Duck, Gerber's Defenders and the like. It really felt as if the adults had gone home and it was a bunch of nutjobs running things. After Shooter came in and hired editors, a lot of the magic was lost for me. Through the 80's, Marvel hit on a very successful formula of super-hero soap operas, and while the books sold better and were more successful, the feeling of "anything can happen" went away. Aside from a few artistic bursts in the early 80's, by 1985, the main Marvel line was amazingly bland. By the 90's, it had grown incredibly incestuous, with editors writing titles for other editors, most of the writers gone and art that was flashy, busy and couldn't tell a story to save its life. After Bob Harris was gone as EIC, Quesada brough back writers, focused on telling stories that people wanted to read, and for a while, made Marvel a place that was interesting again. It seems to be backsliding now to blander storytelling and formula like in the 80's, but that stuff does sell.
DC in the 70's was mostly unreadable to me as a kid. The stories were gimmicks in the place of plot, and their characters seemed dated and old. Then, as Shooter chased off talent like Marv Wolfman and Roy Thomas, DC started to get interesting...and they took chances with creative teams. Len Wein, who'd written all of Marvel's big guns at some point, was the editor who brought in Alan Moore and let him go nuts on Swamp Thing. After Crisis, there seemed to be two DCs, one that was chruning out standard 70's Marvel fare and another that was seeing just how far they could push mainstream comics. By the late 80's, I was reading mostly DC...however, Vertigo got spun off into their own imprint, and DC was throwing crap at the wall to see if it stuck. Some of it was Starman and some of it was Psyba-rats...horridly inconsistant. They made bank on shocking long-time readers, but rarely had anything to follow-up the shock (I remember really liking the Superman books before he died, and then losing interest within 6 months of that story ending...never really to get it back). DC seems to keep being the place where people can come in and do really fun, great work, but it either isn't promoted and dies quickly, or they have no idea what to do when one of the creative team leaves.
So...now, I prever Marvel, but with George coming back to some of their mainstream super-hero stuff, DC will probably will me back. |
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