Started out as a Marvel kid in the 1970s. I picked up a few DC books but didn’t understand what the heck was going on with all that Earth-2 stuff. Also, Superman, with a superdog, and supercousin, and stuff seemed really silly. Besides that, my only exposure to the DCU was the Batman tv show and Superfriends. I quit reading comics around 1980 and didn’t pick them up again until I was given a Watchmen TPB around 1995. Now, I read about half and half Marvel and DC, but I like the DC books more. Come to think of it, I only read Marvel Ultimate. As for DC, I read Green Arrow, Green Lantern, JLA and a few others. If I get tired of the Ultimate line, I could see me going over to DC completely.
DC fanboy from waaay back. Blame Alan Moore.
I used to be quite the Marvel Zombie, back in the early 80’s. I was mainly hooked on Fantastic Four (having enjoyed the TV cartoon…not the Herbie one, the earlier one), and my interest in them easily expanded to the rest of the Marvel Universe. John Byrne was writing the book then, and everything seemed perfect. I had a friend who was into the DCs, and we used to swap-read out comics, so I developed a knowledge of DC’s characters, but never an attachment for them.
Then Marvel started to deteriorate. First, my core obsession, Fantastic Four, fell into the hands of total bunglers. Then the highly-touted New Universe turned out to be dumb (except for Nightmask, which was cancelled after a year). X-Factor changed from an interesting premise into an expansion of the X-Men franchise, which was suffering (in my eyes, obviously not in the eyes of most others) from overexposure. New Mutants stopped being about kids learning their way in the world, replace by “yet another mutant super-team.” In the fall of 1988, I went away to Israel for a year of study, and hardly missed my comic books.
Then, in 1991, I discovered DC. I saw the new loose-leaf “Who’s Who,” and I was blown away by the art and the format. (In contrast, the loose-leaf “Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe” royally sucked.) The entries on the grown-up Legion of Super-Heroes intrigued me, and I began buying that series. Then I started amassing Legion back-issues, and began compiling my Legion.hlp file. In the mean time, I expanded my knowledge of DC, and have since become totally DC, hardly paying any attention to Marvel at all.
[Hijack] Chaim, I’m curious as to what you think of the new Legion series. I’m liking it surprisingly a lot despite having been a confirmed DnA fan (although their early stuff was much better than most of “The Legion”).
[/hijack]
–Cliffy
Aardvark-Vanaheim 
I’ve always thought Marvel didn’t quite measure up to their Distinguished Competition.
I’m cautiously optimistic. I loved issue # 2 and the second story of issue # 4. I liked issue # 3, and am lukewarm about issue 1 and the lead story of issue 4. I’ll keep the faith with Mark Waid, who is not just a great writer, but a big Legion fan.
However, I will say that unlike the post-ZH reboot, this feels like a set of totally different characters. Colossal Boy as a giant who shrinks? Triplicate Girl actually three pieces of “Multiple Girl” from a planet populated only by herself? Very very different.
So how many reboots dose that make for the legion?
Three…the replacement of Superboy and Mon-El with Valor, the one at Zero Hour and this one.
I mostly read DC (through the 80s and early 90s). I like the Avengers, but never followed it regularly.
I got into a huge argument with someone about DC vs. Marvel kind of early on in my comics reading and was tainted against Marvel ever since.
I read a few issues of the X-men but couldn’t get into it I think I’m the only person who would describe Wolverine as a blah character.
I was mostly a Marvel reader as a kid, with Uncanny X-Men being my main book. This was 80-87. Read the Avengers, X-men, Cap, and Hulk. Never cared for the FF. Only DC book I would read was Detective.
Now, I mostly end up with DC books. From Watchmen to Sandman to Preacher to Transmet, I really became a Vertigo fan, and I love Authority and Planetary. Only Marvel books I pick up are the Ultimate series.
DC characters were just too inconsistently powered for me. Superman could bat meteors out of space. He could use his heat vision to snipe a flea off of a dogs ass from low earth orbit. How in the hell does he get into trouble? So the writers would make ubervillains and Supes would have to get more powerful to beat the ubervillain. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Then I realized that every DC comic was like that. They could beat godly villains and then next issue have problems with clever bank robber #7. :rolleyes:
And how about the alternate timelines/earths/towns/heros plotlines. I imagine it’s gotten better but for a while I had no clue what heros went where and knew who.
Being a hero was also very easy in the DC universe. Just change out of your costume and you were done for the day. It was like being a hero and being a person were two different universes that never touched each other. Never affected jobs or relationships with loved ones. Never even affected grades. At least Peter Parker’s job/grades/love life suffered from time to time. How in the crap does Clark Kent keep his job?
And when the hell does Batman sleep anyways? Runs a multi national corporation by day. Fights crime by night. Does he know some sort of ancient ninja power nap?
That said, Batman still kicks ass.
Actually, yes, he does.
That, and he’s very hands off with the day-to-day operation of Wayne Enterprises. He lets Lucius Fox handle all that and lets the world think he’s a male, tragic Paris Hilton.
I read comics from late 70s til somewhere around 88-89. I was pretty much Marvel all the way. The exceptions were Sgt. Rock and the Haunted Tank (in G.I. Combat).
As to why, I can’t really say, but I’m going to guess that since I was a teen then, as somebody said above, Marvel appealed to the teen element (especially true of Spidey). DC seemed kiddy to me I suppose for the reasons others mentioned above (particularly the overpowered heroes thing). I never really paid all that much attention to the drawings.
“What If…” was probably my favorite series, though I devoured everything Marvel put out. Yes, even Dazzler.
I started out reading mostly Marvel. DC started appealing to me shortly after they lost the compulsion to write out gasp and choke and the like in the dialog balloons.
Much of Marvel stopped appealing to me right around New Mutants 100. I just couldn’t take the explosion of X-books any longer. I still read the spider-books, Hulk and a few other titles but I mostly read DC.
Then I became impoverished and could no longer buy my stacks of books each month and by the time I was in a financial position to start buying them again I didn’t want to. I had a boyfriend shortly thereafter who read mountains of comics every month so I’d read whatever he brought home, until we broke up and I went back to my non-reader status (it’s been about 6 years).
I was a die-hard Marvel fan through-out the 80’s and into the early 90’s. I enjoyed some of DC’s work product such as the New God’s and some of the Batman titles. I did respect DC though for producing the Dark Knight Returns though they should be damned for the vastly overrated “Killing Joke”.
I always felt that I could relate a lot better to the Marvel characters than to the DC ones. The 90’s just killed comics for me in general. Marvel’s Ulitmates line is quite impressive but who knows how long that will last.
I never really bought into the notion that the DCU’s heroes were more powerful. Superman can no longer fly at faster than light speed whereas in Marvel you have Gladiator flying at 100 times light speed and fighting in nano seconds. Marvel have Jesus Christ on a surfboard in the form of the Silver Surfer who resurrected life on a planet in his last series. Quasar was like the Green Lantern except many times more powerful . Marvel’s cosmic characters tended to dwarf DC as well.
:: Imperiously :: EXPLAIN YOURSELF, HERETIC.
(Although to be fair, Alan Moore thinks it’s one of his weaker works, too. But vastly overrated?? Ouch.)
I found it to be gratuitous, sleazy and just very weak. The ending really wasn’t that profound either. It tried to be something that it wasn’t and indeed was only something that Moore pulled off with the Watchmen. I wasn’t enamoured by that either but I can now appreciate its merits.
Contrast that with the DKR which crafted an incredible story with real pace, verve and some meaning all while encompasing the DCU and comics in general. A great book.
I dunno. I’m not going to sit here and say it’s THE KILLING JOKE is unflawed gem, but there are some intriguing ideas behind the story: it’s the first human and sympathetic look at the Joker’s backstory, it posited that insanity as a condition that everyone is one bad day away from, it correctly had Joker savvy enough to peg Batman as an obsessive compulsive personality disorder and it crippled Barbara Gordon (and how many superhero writers write a character who receives a crippling injury and they STAY crippled?)
You are comparing a little 44-page one-shot to a 4 issue magnum opus.
Stll, there’a a little part of me that likes to sing that ditty the Joker belts out when Jim Gordon is on the Ghost Train: “When the world is full of CARE and every headline screams DESPAIR, when all is rape, starvation, war and life is VILE… There’s a certain thing I DO that I shall pass along to YOU… and it’s always guaranteed to make me SMILE…”
I was hardcore Marvel over DC. It was that way for years. Marvel seemed more realistic in their portrayal of characters, despite the obvious silliness of their super powers.
DC was too much a little kid’s comic. I was like ten years old. What does that mean? I dunno, but Marvel always seemed more serious and DC seemed more Family Circus.
I did start buying a few DC comics later. Teen Titans seems more “adult.” So did Green Lantern sometimes. I always thought they belonged more in the Marvel universe than DC.
Sometimes it had to do with the artist too. Marvel had kick-ass artists, and if George Perez did something for DC, I was liable to buy it.