DC Comics circa 1970 - what happened?

I was an avid comic book kid in the 1960s, and for some reason I was entirely devoted to DC and ignored Marvel. I think it must have been the Batman TV show, which debuted when I was at the impressionable age of 5, that sucked me into the DC universe where I was held by megatronic forces.

In the late 60s, I noticed a newfound social justice consciousness suddenly taking hold of the Justice League. Over 30 years later I can still remember the speech an old man in the ghetto gave to Green Lantern: “I been readin’ how you work for the BLUE SKINS … and how on some planet you helped out the ORANGE SKINS … but what did you ever do for the BLACK SKINS? Can you tell me that, huh, Mr. Green Lantern?” The superhero’s shoulders sag in shame as he stammers, “I … I can’t …” So he decides to leave off fighting crime and go fight poverty and racism.

Then about the same time (circa 1969) Green Arrow goes down South to coal mining country and battles a redneck fascist empire. It was every decent-thinking liberal’s perfect nightmare fantasy. There was a folksinger who sang protest songs and the goons had dragged him off to prison. The redneck fascist-in-chief employed actual NAZI guards complete with German accents. “Zose missles… fire zem!” Green Arrow compared himself to Robin Hood while defeating the bad guys.

I noticed that DC had taken off in a startlingly new direction, but I’d had a certain social consciousness instilled in me by Catholic nuns during the Civil Rights movement, so it was all right with me.

But then circa 1970, DC Comics suddenly mutated into something that was utterly incomprehensible to my 10-year-old mind. I never could grok exactly what they were getting at. There was a radically new, darker, heavier, graphic style, and all the familiar characters were replaced by unrecognizable alien entities. Something about “New Godz” and “APOKALIPS.” Huh? Where are Superman and Batman? What IS this stuff? They lost me completely. As a result I simply quit reading comic books altogether. I had, anyway, reached an age where I would have quit comix regardless.

Sounds like the moment when the late Jack Kirby jumped from Marvel to DC for the last time. He’d had a falling-out with Marvel boss Stan Lee in the early seventies (and this after Kirby had created or cocreated most of Marvel’s post-1961 characters) and when he set up shop at DC (he had worked there intermittently) he started cracnking out all that New Gods junk, including Darkseid, Apokalips, Boom Tubes and all the related stuff. It was a leftover blip from the age of aquarius, I guess, complete with superhuman space hippies. Comic books were (and are) typically several years behind the social curve.

Arguably, DC didn’t really get “serious” again in a major way (though Batman got pretty close to his original grim self when they send Dick “Robin” Grayson to college) until they hired Moore & Gibbons to produce “Watchmen” in the mid-eighties. And then there was that whole Crisis thing…

Proving that Denny O’Neil can’t write. The correct (for the character) and more interesting response would have been to have GL say “I save the planet daily. You are currently alive because of me. What the hell have you done for yourself?”

Blech.

ANYway, the upshot of what happened can be summed up in three words: Marvel outsold DC.

Since the 1940s, except for (briefly) Fawcett and Disney (which didn’t count) DC was the 700 lb gorilla. No-one could touch Superman in sales.

Then, sometime in the late '60s, early '70s Marvel did. Carmine Infantino was booted upstairs to Editor In Chief and started hireing new guys. He swiped Denny O’Neil from Charleston, he scored a huge coup (PR wise) in grabbing Kirby after Kirby and Lee had their falling out (in part due to the Silver Surfer) by promising (and, in retrospect not entirely delivering) a free hand to Kirby. They started intern programs (Walt Simonson, Jim Aparo(?), Michael Golden, etc) came out of those programs, to name a few.

And they realized, finally that the younger kids who were starting on DC were moving to Marvel and reading them in college. DC wanted some of that market share and started writing books for an older audience.

In addition, Stan Lee had scored MAJOR publicity and good will by taking a giant risk and producing a brilliant 3 part story in Spider-Man where Harry Osborn dealt with a drug addiction. It was the first Marvel comic (and the first mainstream comic since the '50s) to come out without the comics code seal (at the time, you couldn’t mention drugs even in a negative light). Lee’s excellent story (and real bravery: back then the comics code meant a LOT of sales) made him the hero of the hour and he was on TV shows, etc. DC decided to swipe that with the maudlin, “Snowbirds Can’t Fly” story in GL/GA, again to try to cacth up with Marvel.

It produced some (bad, IMO) classics like the GL/GA series, it produced some interesting, if strange stuff (Kirby’s Fourth World series) and it produced some horrors (Lois Lane 105: I Am Curious (Black), where Lois seriously worries that Superman might not love her if she were black.) :rolleyes:

It was a major period of growth for DC but (again IMO) many of the “relevant” and “adult” books that DC produced back then are just bad: They were trying learn what Marvel had been doing for about 10 years. It took 'em some time.

Fenris (who loves DC, but doesn’t think the late '60s/early '70s were their shining moment of glory)

It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized that all along the consensus had been: Marvel was the Cool one, and DC was strictly Squaresville.
Ironically, it was only a few years before I got into drugs and welcomed every sort of weirdness and freakiness in the arts.

But it was too late for DC!

What did the super space hippies use “boom tubes” for? Blowing reefer?

Basically, they were interdimensional conduits used by the bad guys. Whenever the end/terminus would manifest itself at its destination, it would always go BOOM!

During the 70s, Marvel led by its flagship titles like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and The Hulk could do very little wrong. I do remember Kirby came back to do Captain America at one point. Frankly, nothing to write home about. His attempts at dialogue and narration (I mean, he had narration in cause every panel – what is this, radio?) cause me to believe that Stan Lee was the true genius behind the creation of the Marvel Age.

**DC ** during this time could barely give away its comics, except for the real die-hards and even they were dwindling. Frankly, it wasn’t until Frank Miller did Dark Knight and John Byrne re-invented Superman in the mid-80’s that I got interested in them at all. And frankly, Marvel at this time was creatively comatose, mostly because Jim Shooter was running the company…right off a cliff.

If any single word describes Kirby’s artwork, it’s “doughy”. He could have the Avengers squaring off against the X-Men and they’d all look like tubes of slowly-melting goo.

His early writing is hysterical, though. The first Captain America comics featured him hunting down German saboteurs who were all ugly and who all had thick German accents. “Ach, Hauptman Amerika. Die schweinhunt! Schnell!”

These guys were able to operate in the U.S. without anyone noticing?

Actually, the worst artist I can remember from either DC or Marvel was Trevor von Eeden, who went through about eight gallons of ink on each page. I can understand moody, but please don’t strive for blackout conditions; it’s not like the Luftwaffe is about to attack.

Dare I say it …
BAND NAME!!!

And today, Marvel is the House of No Ideas. :rolleyes:

And DC with it’s “No Man’s Land” tour-de-force cleans up all the prizes. :cool:

Don’t you be dissing Jack “King” Kirby. His Fourth World stuff, while a bit ham-fisted in its social commentary, was brilliant. He’s the force (and Lee admits that he pretty much just wrote the dialogue) behind virtually every Marvel powerhouse (excluding Spidey, and even there, I’ve read rumors).

And the Space Hippies (and yes, I agree, they didn’t age well, but they had a cool bike) were called the Forever People, dammit.

Were you high? The Shooter-era Marvels were consistently solid, there were more than a few real gems, they made money, and creators began to receive royalties. Nothing’s ever going to match what Stan and Jack (and Ditko, Heck, and a handful of others) were able to accomplish in the early to mid-60’s, but Shooter’s Marvel was the second-best going concern in the comics industry since the end of World War II.

–Cliffy

Can anyone take current Marvel bashing seriously?

Marvel has pulled itself up and is without a doubt the most innovative comics company around.

They revamped the X-books.

They created the wildly sucessful Ultimates line.

The grew up a little with the MAX line.

They are putting out more indy-inspired books like X-force, Deadline, and the B-Sides.

I’m not saying DC sucks or anything but they are definitely having problems.
The quagmire of the multi-book corssovers that throw off the momentum of the regular books.

IMAGE…are they even a real company anymore or just an imprint?

As a former die-hard Marvelite, I’ll just say Marvel these days doesn’t suck as much as they used to. :wink: Kurt Buseik’s doing some great stuff (The Order is creeping me out in a good way), Ultimate Spider-Man is far superior than its cheeseball name would suggest, the company is mending bridges with ostracized creators (Steve Gerber!), and overall they’re willing to take risks again.

On the other hand, they can also be rather mind-numbingly stupid. Peter David’s recent “But I Digress” column about how Marvel has ham-handled Captain Marvel is a classic case in point. And the Max like just strikes me as a failed attempt to be “kewl” more than anything else.

But hey, they’re trying. And anything’s better than the days of the Spider-clones…

I disagree that they’ve ham-handled the book: It spun off the most successful mini series of the previous year, it got a Zero issue giveaway in Wizard, it’s had a trade paperback collection, I believe it’s had several posters and house ads.

I’d have been a lot more impressed by David’s column if David had mentioned somewhere that in addition to the fact that the book doesn’t sell not only because A) The fans JUST DON’T GET IT B) Marvel JUST DOESN’T GET IT and C) Everyone else JUST DOESN’T GET IT, but maybe, just MAYBE it’s his writing. I mean, I enjoy Captain Marvel and all, I’ve been buying it since issue 1, but this current, dreadful 4 part story where he’s dredging up 10 year old characters I didn’t like at the time (Spider-Man 2099 and Maestro) had me very close to dropping the book. And it’s FAR from a healthy jumping-on point. Neither was the previous storyline with depressed Old Rick. It’s like he’s writing stories designed to make new readers NOT try the book.

I also thought that the column was pretty self-serving, since by printing/publicizing his offer BEFORE discussing it with Joe Quesada. (sp?), he knew that Quesada. would have to turn it down. Can you imagine telling everyone where you work that you’re gonna force your boss to give into your demands or you’ll quit? Even if he thought your demands were reasonable before, you’ve just made it that much harder to do because if he gives into that kind of crap once, it’ll keep happening. It was an obvious attempt to bully Quesada. I’d have been more impressed if he’d gone to Quesada privately first and THEN, if turned down, publicized the issue.

While it takes guts to put your salary on the line, I think it would’ve taken more guts to put your salary on the line in a way that it would have actually been at risk.

(For those not following this, Quesada announced that several books, including Captain Marvel weren’t selling all that well, so they’d have to raise the price of the books by .25c. Peter David, the writer responded by writing a long letter/rant saying that low sales were everyone’s fault but his, but he’d take a salary of 20.99 per issue (well below his regular rate) to make up the difference and avoid the price increase.

Quesada responded that he was pretty pissed that David made his offer in public rather than discuss it privately first. And pointed out that David had blamed everyone BUT himself for constantly diminishing sales.

David wrote a (IMO) smarmy response where he said (paraphrased) “Gosh! I’m Jewish! So of course I feel guilty and responsible for low sales! All Jews feel guilty all the time! I thought that went without saying” :rolleyes: (I was horribly embarrassed that he’d play the Jewish card. As a Jew, I imagine the feeling would be similar to a Black person hearing another Black person saying “I can’t do that because I’m lazy and shiftless”). “And golly! I understand you’re upset but gosh! I hadda do it! I hope I haven’t hurt your feelings”

Quesada responded with “Sorry, nope. I’m not gonna set this prescedent. Bye.”

I hope the book continues to sell and I think David’s arguments about why it’s not necessarily a good idea to raise prices are well thought out. But by indulging in a public pissing contest with his boss was bad form.

**

I really like Alias. Other than that, I can’t think of a Max title I read anymore or that I’m signed up for.

Fenris

Heelllloooo? The New Universe line? Secret Wars? (Okay, the first one wasn’t that bad, but the second one – ecchh!). And the no-brain prize goes to…X-Factor! Gee, what a great idea, reuniting the original X-Men in a new book. Never mind that the original team really wasn’t that popular. Never mind that they had to undo and/or revise the end of the most powerful storyline in late 70s Marvel: Dark Phoenix. “Oh, Jean Grey didn’t really die, that was just some mysterious sentient force that made itself look like Jean while the real Jean Grey was kept in suspended animation.” Gee, why didn’t Cyclops wake up and find her in the shower a la Dallas? :mad:

Okay, nowadays, Marvel’s pulled out of the valley. But after the X-Factor betrayal, I stopped buying comics. Permanently.

First, the New Universe wasn’t a total loss. D.P.7 was quite good.

Second, part of the problem with X-Factor was its original gimmick: the X-guys would pose as mutant hunters so that reg’lar folks will snitch on the mutie next door. Instead of exterminating the problem, they’ll contact and train the wayward child of the atom. The idea was so retarded they basically had to chuck it and apologize (I think it was around #24).

Still, I liked X-Factor, especially after the Simonsons took over. Then they left, and the book became one of the horriblest stinkpots of all time. Until the “Strong Guy” revamp.

Speaking of “Secret Wars II” – who drew that? Al Milgrom, I guess. That was some of the worst comic art I’ve ever seen. Even worse than Herb Trimpe.

Regarding the initial post:
Too bad you were sucked into DC by he Batman TV series. I’m a little older, and I hated the campy TV Batman series. And one rason I hated it was that it derailed the Batman reforms.

Back in the 1950’s comics retreated from crime stories in the wake of Frederic Wertham’s book Seductio of the Innocent, and the Congressional investigation of comics as an inspiration for juvenile delinquency. The Comics Code authority was set up, the crime was toned down. Batman became a parlor detective, or spent his time fighting really fake-looking aliens.

Around 1964 they came up with the “New Look” Batman. The Batmobile he’d been using – a huge clunker that must’ve gotten 5 miles to the gallon – was replaced by a sleek sports car. Batman and his costume were tuned up, made hipper and slicker. He ditched the aliens and started fighting crime in the night again.

Then tht amned seres came along, and the comics started aping it, right down to ditzy Aunt Harriet.

Bleah!

It took a while for it to recover, but by the mid-1970s Batman had shaken off the effecs of the TV series, an as becoming the Dark Knight. Definitely longer and leaner, with serious bat ears on his cowl and a tough attitude. This predated Miller’s Dark Knight series by over a decade.

Even in the early 1970s, DC wasn’t all social commentary" stories. Joe Kubert took he “Tarzan” franchise that had been liberated from Dell/Gold Key and made it a thing of eauty, and DC started doing John Carter of Mars and the inner world of Pellucidar, too. It was apparently so successful that Marvel started imiating DC, adapting Edwin Arnold’s “Gulliver Jones of Mars” as a comic (Richard Lupoff and others claimed it was the inspiration for Burroughs’ Mars stories).

And I liked Kirby’s The Demon and Kamandi, dammit!

New Universe? D.P.7, to use the nomenclature of today’s comic book community, rawked! Psi-Force was pretty consistently good, as was Justice until about the last six months. And while Nightmask, Spitfire, Merc, and Star Brand had some execution problems, there were occasional gems in those series, especially the first few Shooter-penned issues of Star Brand. (I’ll grant you – Kickers, Inc. had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.)

I haven’t read Secret Wars yet (I’m slowly accumulating a Shooter-era collection whicih is as yet about 1/3 done), but at least some of the tie-in issues were pretty good, especially the effects on the New Mutants. (Which itself was a fantastic series.)

X-Factor was a good series for a couple years under the Simonsons. It suffered from the crossover-itis that infected all the X-books after Shooter left, but before that there was some very good stuff, especially the death and rebirth of the Angel. You’re right that they never should have erased the Dark Phoenix saga, but good did come out of it. (And anyway, nobody in comics dies forever except Bucky, Ben Parker, and Martha and Thomas Wayne. Jean Grey stayed dead a long time.)

–Cliffy

Must be my bad luck, then, because I haven’t seen any sort of promotion or acknowledgement from Marvel that this title exists. And counting its spin-off roots doesn’t count, IMO. Then again, I also devoured Spider-Man 2099 and enjoyed Future Imperfect, so what do I know? :wink:

At least we agree that the Max line has been rather disappointing.