Poe’s Law: I think you’re pulling my leg…but I’m not 100% sure!
The trend i usually saw was younger readers liked dc for the simple black and white morality. Teens liked marvel for the complexity and emotion. To me its kind of like Star Trek tng or ds9. Tng fans liked the short, encapsulated stories that were resolved in one hour, but ds9 fans liked the massive story arcs.
And being pre-Crisis - Wally didn’t take up the mantle until Barry’s ‘death’ during Crisis.
50’s kid here. I liked:
- Superman (the Action Comics version)
- Batman (although even as an idiot kid I found Bob Kane’s illustrations amateurish)
- Flash
until the Fantastic Four debuted. Far better than the DC comics in every respect, especially the “real people” with everyday insecurities and jealousies and so on; I was instantly converted and hooked. DC comics took a back seat. Soon thereafter Spiderman appeared and perfected the “realistic person with feelings and problems behind the mask” approach. This despite the fact that (in my discerning 11 year old opinion) the original Spiderman artwork (by Steve Ditko? Kirby?) was godawful bad. Spiderguy is still my favorite comic/superhero, even though I haven’t looked at a comicbook since the mid 60’s.
Good point… For me, the point where I felt that DC had “grown up” was when the Teen Titans dealt squarely and honestly with such issues as drug addiction. Instead of “Jimmy Olsen grows Antlers and Tows Santa’s Sleigh” it was a story with real-world relevance, showing that real-world problems are damned hard to address, and sometimes, there just aren’t any answers at all, let alone easy ones. That was the point where I started buying DC again.
Didnt help that dc lost their minds in the 70s and 80s. I remember one stretch where all kryptonite no longer harmed superman, so he ate a piece.
A family friend owned the local distribution for all magazines, including comic books. I used to get to go there on Sundays and pick up any and all the comic books I wanted…he only had to rip off the cover page and return it to the publishers to get the money back - but the cover-less comic books (too expensive to return, due to the weight involved) were tossed in the garbage, so the free pickings for me were great.
However, I too hated all of the super hero comic books. They were just too stupid for me to appreciate. I liked some of the artwork, but the stories never interested me an iota and I found most of the plots the same thing, over and over. I would occasionally pick up some of them, and certainly knew every superhero, but would usually just scan through them and give them to other neighborhood kids.
I liked Donald Duck…go ahead and laugh, but there was a lot of text in those stories, with some witty problems and solutions and also great artwork. None of the other Disney characters had near as interesting of stories so I never bothered getting them, but Donald and Scrooge and the nephews were always taking great adventures to the Amazon, or Egypt or to a cave or wherever, and what can I say - I just liked their stories the best.
I didn’t really like 10 Great Dishes Of The World by Robert Carrier but I really treasure my copy of French Provincial Cooking by Elizabeth David.
Doom Patrol. Til Grant Morrison, and by then the whole vertigo thing was happening.
The Little Lulu comics in the 50s and 60s were masterpieces of storytelling. I never read them until I stumbled upon a cache of them my cousin had and found them fascinating. Funny, well plotted, and clever.
I loved doom patrol. I didn’t know until later but I have a huge thing for robots. Anything with a robot I love, especially tank-type bruisers. In a similar vein (team of 4-5 with scientist leader) was Metal Men.
I had a similar reaction to Kirby comics. Just didn’t like how they looked.
I was bigger on the war comics as a kid, and the DC ones always seemed better in my eyes. Sgt Fury always seemed like a knockoff of Sgt. Rock.
I avoided Marvel as a kid because they seemed more pandering and dark. Ghost Rider just seemed like a cash-in at the time. Chopper bikes, flaming skulls. Meh.
DC superheros were no prize either. Their stuff alway seemed to be one-shot ‘Superman has an issue to deal with’. The one I remember was an IRS agent demanding Superman pay umpty million in taxes for all the rewards he collected (but donated). It was just a big pile of superman trying to legally get things that were valuable but messing up somehow. Bah!
Hehe lots of superman/dc bashing…one thing though, batman was awesome as much as superman stank. Anybody read detective comics? The batman stories that were based on real crime stories were probably the one place dc matched marvel in the new wave of realism.
No one’s laughing. Most critics consider that era of Donald Duck comics – the Carl Barks version – as one of the best in the genre.
Early in our 44 year marriage my wife and I discovered that as children we’d both loved the 1950’s Donald Duck comics. We still drop references often.
- “Unca” Donald
- The Beagle Boys
- Scrooge burrowing through his dimes “like a grasshopper”
- Glaadstone Gander
and since we’re both hardcore campers since childhood, our favorite:
“The Junior Woodchuck Manual”
Yep! And a lot of us like the Don Rosa stories too. Barks was a genius, and paved the way; Rosa has a different style, both in the drawing and the writing, but I love his stuff also. Barks’ big stroke of genius was reforming Huey, Dewey, and Louie from being nasty little brats to being idealized “good kids.”
(Naturally, fans being fans, you’ll find a lot of Barks/Rosa feuding. Like feuding over which version of Star Trek is the best. But I say hooray for both! Both are very, very good!)
(And a kick in the shins for the idiot who developed “Quack Pack” and turned the boys back into delinquents. Phoo!)
Child of the early 60’s here. I literally bought thousands of comics as a kid. Not only did I buy them new, I used to hit every garage sale I could. Back in those days a rummage sale comic book went for a nickel, which was less than half the price at the newsstand.
There were never any characters I though were terrible, but I thought some of the things DC did with them sucked. Like that “Earth one, Earth two” nonsense. It started in the 60’s but they really got heavy handed with it in the 70’s. I think they did it to create a false continuity with super heros from the golden age to the silver age and such. I remember in the late 70’s they touted an issue of Action Comics where Superman takes a wife! But then it turns out to be the Superman from Earth 2 when all the other Superman stories are about the Superman of Earth 1. It was totally pointless!:mad:
Another thing DC would do, especially in the 60’s, is this “Imaginary Story” horseshit. They wanted to tell a story but they didn’t want it to affect future stories so they created “Imaginary Novels”. It’s a comic book. They’re all imaginary.:rolleyes:
Marvel sort of did the same thing but they did it better by coming out with a comic called What If.
But it did give that spectacular image of The Spectre holding the two planets apart when they were in danger of collision. That was…eerie! It was the “highest energy level” I’d ever seen in comics.
But then DC re-upped them by doing the “Elseworlds” stories, which were better. The Marvel “What If” stories tended to be downers. If Peter Parker hadn’t been bitten by the spider…the world comes to a horrible end. The Elseworlds stories tended to be more upbeat: Bruce Wayne is a hero at heart, no matter what universe he was born in.
But, yeah, those old DC “imaginary stories” were usually awfully crappy!
Hell I was a kid who went on summer vacations with no TV or many other kids to hang with, I read every comic book I could find but I just didn’t really get into the whole Archie thing, seemed so foreign to me as an Australian suburban boy but Silver Surfer he I got.
My comic book years were 1969 to 1975. That’s when i discovered fantasy books,
I hated silver surfer too. To me, at the time, it was a comic all the surf geeks told their friends to read, but it was essentially the hulk but on a cosmic scale and with a more attractive drawing.