The aliens have landed and are making us poor earthlings decide which franchise will disappear forever. You must vote as to which one you want to keep. The other will never be seen again.
Which are you voting to keep?
- Marvel
- DC
0
voters
I like some of the writing at DC, and I love their iconic characters (the most recent comics I bought were Superman, Batman, their sons, Green Arrow, and a vintage Batman). But I’d never want to lose the amazing things that’ve been done with the Marvel movies.
Superman and Batman are more iconic than any of the Marvel characters, despite the success of MCU. It would be an easy choice if the people in charge of DCEU didn’t keep doing a horrible job, but they have done so, and so my decision is difficult. I vote to keep DC, almost entirely on the strength of the performances of Christopher Reeve and Adam West (yes, I went there 
).
In an alternate world where Chris Evans as Superman and Robert Downey Jr. as Batman had led a successful DCEU franchise, there would be no contest. But we don’t live in that universe.
But whatabout the various crossovers my new Alien Overlords?!?!?!?
Marvel revitalized a moribund genre that might have otherwise completely fallen off the cultural radar by the 70’s. Batman was largely seen as a joke since the fifties; only the shift to a darker, grittier vibe, inspired no doubt by the competing comics company that was beginning to outsell them, saved the character from ending up on the scrapheap of lost Jeopardy categories.
The answer is simple.
I pick—Archie.
Are you Team Betty?
Or Team Veronica?
100% Betty. And Mary Ann.
In the spirit of the thread, I would choose Marvel though it is not an easy choice. Actually, it’s a fairly easy choice. About the only DC properties I ever cared about was Batman and to a lesser extend Superman. The animated Batman and Superman series from the 1990s makes this an especially painful choice.
But the truth is I grew up reading Marvel comics more than I ever read DC. I can’t really tell you much about what was happening in DC comics in the 80s or 90s other than Crisis on Infinite Earths and Death in the Family. For Marvel, I’ve got Secret Wars (I & II), The Brood Invasion (I can’t remember the real name of the storyline), Days of Future Past, Kraven’s Last Hunt, Acts if Vengeance, the death of Tarantula, various Venom/Spider-Man stories, etc., etc.
I’ve always been a Marvel faithful. I like DC enough but I grew up reading Marvel, collecting their comics, etc.
The only thing that makes this choice difficult for me is that The Sandman is a DC property. Hard to imagine my comic fandom without Death and Dream there.
Or the Amalgam universe of comics?
So much fun, with Dark Claw (a Bat/Wolverine), Super-Soldier, Bruce Wayne: Agent of SHIELD, Lobo the Duck…
My sense of the DC heroes (Superman, Green Lantern, Batman) was that they all had establishment sticks up their asses. Smug totally certain self-righteous defenders of the status quo. Marvel heroes could be a lot of bad things, including being generic jerkwads, sexist piggy jerkwads, belligerent macho chest-pounding jerkwads or whatever, but we saw them bewildered about what is right and just; we saw them up against the establishment which often disapproved of them or saw them as a threat (e.g. Spiderman, Hulk). I confess I probably bought more DC comics than Marvel comics back in the 12-15¢ era but I had a bit of a stick up my own butt in that timeframe. Gotta vote Marvel.
Marvel for me hands down.
I would have harder time deciding between Star Wars and Star Trek. I am a big fan of both but I think I would choose to keep Trek.
My family is a DC family, according to my dad and brother. So I’ll keep ‘em.
They used to pair Green Arrow with Green Lantern for a while as a kind of “odd couple” team. Green Arrow had a bit of a “fuck the man!” attitude and also thought Green Lantern had a stick up his ass.
I would miss Silver Age DC, but Stan Lee pretty much taught me to read, so I’ll always be on Team Marvel.
For me Marvel wasn’t remotely a hard choice, didn’t take even a second of introspection. When I was a comic-buying kid in the 80s there wasn’t a single DC title on my list.
Batman and Nightwing were the only DC titles I ever purchased on a regular basis. For me, one of the best parts of the DC universe were the Batman and Superman animated series from the early 1990s. To this day, I still feel as though it’s the best interpretation of Batman I’ve ever seen and to lose those shows would be too bad. (Though it’s really creepy how much Bruce Timm really wanted Batman and Batgirl to bang.)
Marvel appears to be winning by a large margin. Why? I know some people preferred Marvel because it seemed more firmly rooted to the real world. Which is an odd thing to say about a company that produced a modern version of Jekyll and Hyde but with radiation. But what I mean is that many of the characters were tied into history and current events. Magneto is a Holocaust survivor, the Punisher is a Vietnam War veteran, Hulk’s origins involves the testing of nuclear weapons, etc., etc.
Of course I think that’s starting to backfire a bit. Assuming Magneto was 5 in 1940, he’d be close to 90 today. And Frank Castle (the Punisher), has got to be in his 70s.
Why?
Because while Marvel hides some of it’s problems with age/continuity within various Marvel multiverse iterations and timelines such as the “sliding timescale”, DC keeps rebooting itself with a frequency that has gotten somewhat tedious, each time with universe level events that somehow always involves the Earth Heroes.
NOT that Marvel doesn’t do similar things, but at least not with the same frequency. For a much better analysis/list than I could ever do -
The other reason I’m firmly on the Marvel side is that the vast majority (though by no means all) of DC characters do a poor job of self-examination or analysis of their roles in their world, except occasionally from the 20,000 foot perspective (often literally!). This tends to make them look comparatively two dimensional (again, literally, heh, I know, I only -think- I’m funny) when you compare them to the often over-tortured self-analysis of Marvel characters. Which is a personal but common preference.
Plus, IMHO, Marvel does anti-heroes much better than DC, but that’s also a personal preference.
HOWEVER, there are a ton of exceptions. I don’t have a lot of DC or Marvel graphic novels, but if you asked me which I owned more of, it would be DC! As I have copies of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman the Killing Joke, and Kingdom Come (and no the damn sequel doesn’t exist). So there are individual DC stories / arcs that work better for me than Marvel, but if I have to average it out, those peaks don’t make up for the fact that overall Marvel suits me better.
ETA - For Marvel, I have “1602”, and “Earth X”, I’m also leaving out other imprints owned by the big 2, but aren’t part of their normal continuities such as Preacher.