# Which was better: Golden Age DC plots or early Marvel dialogue? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [August 3, 2016, 7:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624 "2016-08-03T07:57:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 7:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/1 "2016-08-03T07:57:32Z")
Golden Age DC plots were generally pretty light, campy, and silly, IMO. Lots of strange elaborate schemes to catch criminals easily caught with superpowers, scientists using billionaires and reporters to test his time machine, and so on and so forth. Early Marvel dialogue was pretty bombastic, IMO. From what I’ve read, there are long stretches where characters speak words that I can’t imagine anyone in real life actually saying, Sixties or no. So which was better? Or do you wish to argue that I’m misremembering either or both entirely? ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 12:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/2 "2016-08-03T12:25:31Z")
Golden age plots were more fun. Silver age DC plots were better than Mabel plots of the same vintage because they had more than just one. DC heroes and villains were also far smarter. ---
**Author:** ![Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/prof.pepperwinkle/32/13627_2.png) [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prof.Pepperwinkle)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/3 "2016-08-03T13:03:10Z")
Golden Age dialogue and characterization is pretty stiff no matter who did it. The novelty of superpowered heroes and villains was all that was needed to appeal to the kids. Marvel (Timely) gets a slight edge because they had the Sub-Mariner, who could be either a hero or a menace. AirBoy and the Heap were probably more interesting than either of the major brands, and Capt. Marvel from Fawcett had more humor. ---
**Author:** ![gytalf2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ac91a4/32.png) [@gytalf2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gytalf2000)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/4 "2016-08-03T14:04:38Z")
I enjoyed early Marvel dialogue better – especially Spider-Man’s wisecracks and also the Thing’s dialogue. They always cracked me up! An honorable mention goes to Thor’s Elizabethan dialogue – straight outta Shakespeare and the King James Bible! Why a Viking god would talk that way is utterly inexplicable, but it was entertaining. ---
**Author:** ![Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/earl_snake-hips_tucker/32/3269_2.png) [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/5 "2016-08-03T15:23:02Z")
> [@gytalf2000](#): > > . . .An honorable mention goes to Thor’s Elizabethan dialogue – straight outta Shakespeare and the King James Bible! Why a Viking god would talk that way is utterly inexplicable, but it was entertaining. Probably same reason that movies set in ancient Rome and the Middle East often use British-type accents, where the residents would probably sound more like Snooki and The Situation, and Gilbert Gottfried and Fran Drescher, respectively. ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/6 "2016-08-03T15:23:32Z")
Real GA comics have a crapton of dialogue stuffed into tiny boxes with scratch figures. ---
**Author:** ![Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/prof.pepperwinkle/32/13627_2.png) [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prof.Pepperwinkle)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/7 "2016-08-03T16:14:03Z")
Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four are not Golden Age, they’re Silver Age. Golden Age Marvel is Timely Comics, with Captain America, the Sub-Mariner and the android Human Torch, along with a Daredevil in a yellow-and-brown outfit. Silver Age dialogue and characters are much better all around than Golden Age for just about anyone (except the Archie Comics Group). ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/8 "2016-08-03T16:27:58Z")
I was there as a kid and teen, so I can give my kid and teen reactions. I was born in 1950 and started on DC comics in the late 1950s. They were fun. I read them all, not just Superman and Batman but Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen as well. In 1962 I read my first Marvel, Fantastic Four #8 (since signed by Stan Lee). Over the next couple of years I went more and more Marvel. I still read DC but that was more from habit and the small number of titles Marvel put out. (Remember that Marvel was limited to eight titles because of distribution agreements.) I picked up the 25¢ DC Annuals partly because they gave more stories and partly because they reprinted early 50s stories from before they went stupidly sci-fi, with giants, aliens, monkeys, and imaginary stories. They reprinted Batman stories featuring him as the World’s Greatest Detective, gems of fair play mystery, with a murderer to pick out from the suspects. Batman’s New Look was about all DC had to rival Marvel and it was clearly inferior. Marvel was shooting off fireworks in every issue. New heroes, new villains, new everything. I loved Stan Lee, even though by the end of high school in 1968 he wasn’t doing new stuff every day and I started outgrowing his style. It’s hard to go back and read that era as an adult. None of it can be new. I know the endings and they aren’t good. Stan might have pitched his work at slightly older kids than DC did, but that doesn’t matter now. Yet, DC tripe now looks even worse than it did then. I vote Marvel all the way. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/9 "2016-08-03T16:29:42Z")
The Marvel dialog made me a fan in the 60s. That wasn’t the time of DC Golden Age, in the 60s DC was trying to find it’s way out of the old and redundant theme’s while Marvel was trying to get more topical. Green Arrow set the bar a little higher for DC but their headliners, Superman, Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, etc. weren’t advancing. The Golden Age was a little grittier for DC, they were expanding their universe with more super-powered villains and sci-fi themes, but I’ll still take the Marvel dialog. ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/10 "2016-08-03T17:39:11Z")
Golden Age DC was the best. The plots were simple and most important you could buy one comic and not have to have read the previous 50 to know what was going on. Sophisticated? No. Fun? Hell yes. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/11 "2016-08-03T17:39:15Z")
> [@Leaper](#): > > Golden Age DC plots were generally pretty light, campy, and silly, IMO. Lots of strange elaborate schemes to catch criminals easily caught with superpowers, scientists using billionaires and reporters to test his time machine, and so on and so forth. > > Early Marvel dialogue was pretty bombastic, IMO. From what I’ve read, there are long stretches where characters speak words that I can’t imagine anyone in real life actually saying, Sixties or no. > > So which was better? Or do you wish to argue that I’m misremembering either or both entirely? “…there are long stretches where characters speak words I can’t imagine anyone in real life saying…” That pretty much describes most dialogue, throughout history. I’ve been listening to my audiobook edition of _The Iliad_, and it suffers from the same affliction, arguably even worse than 1960s Marvel comics. Homer’s heroes are given to ludicrously long-winded speeches. You can say this of most literature (not just prose, but poetry and drama, as well) until fairly recently. We now have overlapping dialogue and bland and repetitious dialogue, often laced with profanity and non-sequiturs. This makes it more like reality, but it’s still almost as stylized and artificial as the older stuff – it just seems more natural. Of course, there are reasons for it. Read a comic book without narration or dialogue – just images – and notice how rapidly you rip through it. Dialogue acts as a brake, slowing the story down, and making you pay attention. Comic books aren’t movies, and you experience them differently. You _need_ that dialogue in there to make things flow properly. (and, just to emphasize this, compare the dialogue density with that in a Marvel movie, like _The Avengers_ – it’s just not there in the same quantity, because it doesn’t have to be. As for the bombast, well, how _would_ a Norse god talk, or the Mad Scientist ruler of Latveria? You can’t have everyone talking in a Brooklyn accent, or give a comically inappropriate knowledge of Pop culture to every alien. The Shtick wears thin. As for the Golden Age plots, they strike me as pretty simplistic for the most part, and sometiumes pretty grim. ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/12 "2016-08-03T18:05:25Z")
Just read a bronze age JLA where Cary Bates became a villain. Back then that was a shark-jumping moment for me. But now its fun in a meta way. One takeaway I got…Bates’ friend goes looking for him and accompanies Aquaman to the JLA satellite and tells his story. Batman then proceeds to…threaten to break every bone in an unpowered, unarmed man??? Oh…ontopicish since this has wandered into Silver Age discussions: Marvel may have had the better stories but DC’s covers left them in the dirt. Except for Steranko. Even Adam’s X-Men covers lacked the color pop that his DC covers had. ---
**Author:** ![furryman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/furryman/32/99_2.png) [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2016, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/13 "2016-08-03T18:43:07Z")
Not to long after I started collecting comics I had the opportunity to buy Spider-Man 51-250. I read them all over the next month or so and I still feel that period was the best era of that comic. ---
**Author:** ![TYphoonSignal8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e99b99/32.png) [@TYphoonSignal8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TYphoonSignal8)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2016, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/14 "2016-08-04T02:50:17Z")
> [@gytalf2000](#): > > I enjoyed early Marvel dialogue better – especially Spider-Man’s wisecracks and also the Thing’s dialogue. They always cracked me up! > > An honorable mention goes to Thor’s Elizabethan dialogue – straight outta Shakespeare and the King James Bible! Why a Viking god would talk that way is utterly inexplicable, but it was entertaining. Roy Thomas noted this in an issue of All-Star Squadron, when The Tarantula mocks a red-headed Thor for inexplicably using Elizabethan English. I think we often look at these dreadfully unsophisticated publications, aimed at small children and, in the case of the Golden Age, bored soldiers, through the prism of the remarkably sophisticated comics of today. Image Comics are nowadays producing comics which are very highbrow indeed (a far cry from 90s image comics). I think GA plots and early Marvel dialogue are all awful, but I was never the intended audience. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2016, 3:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/15 "2016-08-04T03:54:50Z")
Hmmm, Superman frogwalking Hitler and Stalin vs. the Thing saying “It’s clobbering time!” …y’know, that’s not really a tough call. ---
**Author:** ![Mister\_Rik](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mister_rik/32/491_2.png) [@Mister\_Rik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mister_Rik)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2016, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/16 "2016-08-04T20:32:49Z")
My biggest complaint about Golden Age comics was the way they hadn’t figured out “Show, Don’t Tell”. Panel after panel with half of the space taken up by narrative _describing exactly what the picture was showing_. ---
**Author:** ![akrako1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c77e96/32.png) [@akrako1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/akrako1)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2016, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-was-better-golden-age-dc-plots-or-early-marvel-dialogue/761624/17 "2016-08-05T21:04:56Z")
> [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](#): > > Golden Age Marvel is Timely Comics, with Captain America, the Sub-Mariner and the android Human Torch, along with a Daredevil in a yellow-and-brown outfit. Sorry to nitpick, but the original (Blue & Red), Golden-Age Daredevil was not published by Marvel (Timely), but rather by [Lev Gleason Publications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_(Lev_Gleason_Publications)) Marvel’s Daredevil did premier in 1964 with a yellow and red outfit, but it was changed to the more familiar red outfit after just 6 issues.