Two lead-in points: if anyone perceives this topic to be racist or deteriorating into poor stereotypes, then that’s bad and we can shut this down. Also, I did some searching and haven’t found this particular topic - if I have lousy Google-fu let me know.
So, legendarily, Superman was created by a couple of Jewish guys in Cleveland, and whether done consciously or not, Kal-El’s tale of galatic immigration has been framed as a powerful metaphor for the Jewish/immigrant’s experience.
That is NOT what I am talking about here.
I am talking about the basic feel of the world that the heroes live in. Yes, Marvel’s core heroes were created largely by a few other Jewish guys, but more importantly, the feel is New York Jewish, yes? Peter Parker is kind of an enhanced Alexander Portnoy or Woody Allen: neurotic, smart but a shlub, a wisecracker, etc. And that feels like an essential part of the Marvel brand that has shaped the balance between character vs action, serious vs witty, etc.
So - what is the equivalent sensibility be for the classic DC world? It doesn’t feel neurotic and witty - it is young and innocent in the 50’s and 60’s then gets gritty and morally gray in the 80’s.
Is there is basic sensibility that captures the feel? Could it be WASPy? Have a sunny surface that covers a seething cauldron of complex emotions?
If this question doesn’t work, no worries, and sorry, just noodling about it on a random Sunday. It feels like there is a core feel to each brand, and whatever DC’s is, it is different vs Marvel’s. ???
Yeah, I mean, sure, there’s a bit of a “feel” to some Marvel characters, but is Peter Parker/Spiderman’s “feel” due to being “Jewish” or being from New York? Marvel does have explicitly Jewish characters like Ben Grimm/The Thing and Kitty Pride/Shadowcat (or whatever her name is this year). Marvel also has explicitly Catholic characters like Matt Murdock/Daredevil and Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler and explicitly atheist characters like Piotr Rasputin/Colossus. Most of the characters don’t have a stated religion, don’t act in ways typical of a particular religion, and could probably be described as “secular, nominally Christian” at least for the American crowd.
If anything, DC mentions religion even less often than Marvel. As noted, much as been made to Kal-El’s supposed “Jewishness” but whatever might have been borrowed culturally from his creators background, as much of his story that is supposedly Jewish could be applied to many immigrant groups.
Totally fair - that’s why I am putting it out there to discuss.
And I suppose the feel could be characterized as New York vs New York Jewish but I have always felt that the NYC feel has a big Jewish component.
And again: I am not discussing the religion at all, just the cultural trappings. This has nothing to do with a character’s religion or what they discuss about faith, it is the general feel.
It’s hard to say. While the important early creators were mostly Jewish, the characters in the 40s were not (Is there a more goyishe name than Carter Hall?). Its like the Jewish immigrant kids from 1930s Brooklyn fantasized about what goes on in those exclusive society clubhouses, and projected that onto stories about the Justice Society.
On into the 1960s, all the men in DC Comics stories stories were sharp, conservative dressers (There was allegedly an in-house policy requiring this in stories; think Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson as setting the house style); compare that to the Kirby and Ditko background characters in seedy, ill-fitting sport coats and Trilby hats. The DC universe of the 1960s was a very aspirational Don Draper-y place, and the Marvel universe was all an extension of a not-very-exclusive city college campus.
There was a great JSA story (written in the 90s, but set in the 40s) that tackled the class consciousness within the group. the clubby millionaires (Charles McNider, Alan Scott, Terry Sloane) lived a very different existence than the blue-collar regular Joes (Wildcat, Johnny Thunder, Al Pratt). But even the upper-crusters were looked down on by actual society bluebloods, one of whom asked Dr. Mid-Nite to kindly remove his owl from the dining hall.
This is exactly the nature of noodling I have been doing, but without your expertise. Yeah, I totally get the DC = Mad Men kinda vibe. Especially because of the dysfunction and grittiness below the surface!
This will no doubt come off as … off … but the simple fact is that major influences in the rise of Hollywood and comic books both were Jewish writers unavoidably writing with some of what were then clearly American Jewish themes and sensibilities. So much so that they are no longer “Jewish” themes and sensibilities as they have melded as a major part of the “American” self image, no hyphen. The perspective of the neurotic, smart but a shlub, wisecracker as the viewer’s lens is no longer identifiably “Jewish.” IMHO.
My impression is that Marvel’s universe began with more complicated and troubled characters than the DC universe had at the time, and that the DC universe, beginning with Batman, followed suit. I think Marvel aimed for young adults before DC did as well. But my impression is also that both have changed lots over the years and both have played with new perspectives.
All good and yeah, I can see how the U.S. and even globally, the neurotic smart shlub has transcended its Jewish roots. But, arguably for the purposes of this thread, it got its start from a Jewish sensibility, IMHO.
And yes, Batman got gritty, but with, now that Horatio Hellpop mentioned it, more of a Mad Men feel vs a Jewish feel. The Dark Knight Batman feels like he could be conflated with an old, bitter Don Draper.
Well, Marvel in the 70s was aimed at teens, while DC was aimed at college age.
Marvel was never very emotionally sophisticated in the era, but they were very attuned to the primary colors of adolescent angst. DC was aspirational. Marvel was concerned with day-to-day problems. It came across as bad soap opera.
Another difference was that DC heroes were smart and Marvel heroes weren’t. Superman and Batman and the Flash would have to use his brains to defeat the villains, while Marvel heroes just punched their way to a resolution.
Wow, I disagree with that on a lot of levels. I would argue that Marvel’s “being attuned to the primary colors of adolescent angst” gave their heroes more emotional complexity, but that’s not the topic here.
The inherent “Jewishness” of comics is well-documented and shouldn’t be tiptoed around. As with Vaudeville and Hollywood, comic book publishing was invented by Jews who were shut out of more respectable professions.
Comics were invented by M.C. Gaines, who was hemorrhaging money from owning idle presses. He had the great idea of reprinting newspaper strips on the cheapest paper imaginable, and transitioned into original material soon afterwards. Martin Goodman, across town, copied his successful formulas, and the seeds of DC and Marvel Comics were planted. Both Gaines and Goodman hired friends, acquaintances and relatives (Goodman’s wife’s nephew was Stan Lee), so it’s not a coincidence that so many key players in early comics were Jewish.
Gaines’s son William took over the family business and started EC and MAD. An outsider attitude is what made both of these great. MAD in particular benefited from a New York Jewish skepticism of mainstream values. When Harvey Kurtzman quit, it switched to a magazine format under Al Feldstein, who took a lot of stylistic elements from a 1930s left-wing (and Jewish) humor magazine called Americana.
Oh yeah. But factual origins and overall feel of the comic’s brand are two different things. But I realize through the thread so far - so good! - that I am seeing a “Don Draper vs Woody Allen” sort of contrast. Robert Redford vs Dustin Hoffman.
DC and Marvel both may have been established by (predominantly at the start) Jewish creators, but target very different feels.
Others may disagree, but this is what I started this thread to explore.
Another voice that sees this take as way way way off, pretty much the exact opposite of what I had seen. Marvel’s material was far more complex and mature than was DC’s in that era.
Yeah the Woody Allen vs Don Draper sense does resonate some but another bit that I sense is the who the true identity was. In the DC world the heroes “true” nature was when they put on the costume and the “secret identity” was more of a performance, epitomized by Clark Kent pretending to be afraid. The Marvel world had characters who were more fully their regular identities and who were to some degree often acting the part in the costume, or minimally both were different aspects of their true selves. The degree to which early Peter Parker was jealous of Spiderman was a bit pathologic but you never felt that Peter Parker was a role he played.
Not sure how that plays into the themes you are getting at though.
The Fantastic Four were pretty much built around the just survive the first go-round, and then figure out how to win the rematch approach, and Spider-Man got plenty of stories that fit that bill likewise – blending up a modified web formula, or rigging up an electromagnetic counter to a villain’s invention, or whatever. (And at least they had the option of muscling through problems; Ant-Man spent his first year just sneaking around, spying on bad guys or hitting 'em with a virus or whatever.)
Iron Man was always tinkering with his armor, breaking out new James-Bond-esque gadgets at need; the X-Men kept going up against villains that called for brainpower, because when your most recognizable member is a guy who could punch a hole in a mountain by looking at it, your team will pretty much only ever face challenges that involve forcefields, or illusionists, or getaway specialists, or whatever; and the whole point of Captain America is that, yeah, okay, the skill and the serum and the shield keep him in one piece long enough to MacGyver the surroundings into some kind of combat magic, but it’s all on him to supply that something extra. And so on.
Well, they were aiming at the same demographics, really, and in the 70s both skewed to kids far more than college age. The age skew varied more by title and storyline than they did by broad imprint. If I were forced to oversimplify, I’d say that Marvel targeted adolescents more and DC skewed more to kids, but again the variance of both was larger than the difference in averages.
Oh, and if I were to choose a Claremont X-Men character who was most notably athiest it would have been Wolverine rather than Colossus. (Admittedly this is 80s rather than 70s.) Wolverine and Nightcrawler’s discussions about faith and the lack thereof were notable and interesting at the time; Colossus was ex-Soviet and thus culturally athiest but the only time it came up that I recall was basically that he wasn’t Jewish for purposes of possibly dating Kitty, not for any actual philosophically interesting content.
This is nice. Hmm, does this relate to the thing I’m exploring? It feels like it does. The Don Draper archetype has an explicit alter ego; Dustin Hoffman’s Ben from The Graduate is integrated - a puddle of neuroses, but integrated. The explicit split feels like it is more on that WASP/Redford side.
How I’ve heard it said before was that in previous movies Jewish characters were written but then given a WASP veneer and played by WASPs as WASPs. This was a WASP character being played by a Jew. It made the movie what it was.
Trying to play around with how the regular person identity being the more true self, not just a cover, vs the superhero hiding out in a playacting role of regular person, fits with your op, and I am not sure. Maybe the superhero as a metaphor for “passing” as something else, like Bernard Schwartz was the real person but the famous identity was Tony Curtis? It was something many in that era dealt with, even my father pretended to be of Italian descent when he went on sales leads. But it’s a stretch.
re DC characters being smart, they were usually pseudo-smart. Superman tricked Mxyzptlk into saying his name backwards by something that had the most superficial resemblance to intelligence – say, by writing it on a mirror – but which was actually not smart at all, but a writer’s contrivance.
Once, Jimmy Olsen revealed a hoax by exclaiming, The speed of light is different from the speed of sound! You’re a hoax! The villain cringed and confessed. That looks a little smart at first glance, until you realize how incredibly dumb such a thing is.
(The villain should have bluffed. “Of course it is, you dolt! Don’t you think I know that? I compensated for it in my machine!”)
