Actually go back and watch all of the dark knight movies. Batman puts more effort in one fight saving innocent bystanders than superman does in any movie starting with man of steel
I mean, Clark saves those kids in the bus as well as all those oil workers from the flaming platform. I totally get the criticisms of the last fight, but people forget the earlier stuff.
The big difference I've noticed between the two is that Marvel has always felt more planned out, while in the DC universe, things 'just happen'. In Marvel, we have vastly better and more detailed world-building. For instance, once we have SHIELD, there's no real need for another global spy agency. Various editors and authors just use SHIELD, which incidentally adds to the entire SHIELD mythos and background. You mention Project Pegasus. and later on someone remembers to use that in their story.
DC, on the other hand, just willy-nilly creates one-shot stuff that we never hear from again unless you have some minutia-loving writer that unearths it later. Instead of a SHEILD, for instance, they eventually had so many independent international spy agencies running around that they had a mini Crisis on Infinite Earths to pare them down.
I
really disagree with this, because I find both companies to be roughly of the same consistency: sometimes they are consistent, sometimes they just make more stuff up.
For example, using S.H.I.E.L.D. for everything just gives rise to a number of problems as to what the agency's focus, who runs it, and a bunch of other stuff. The movies really have this problem, where S.H.I.E.L.D. is simultaneously a US agency but also has international oversight? It's quite weird. At a certain level the jumble of different agencies that DC occasionally has like S.H.A.D.E, D.M.O. and the D.E.O. feels real to how damned clumsy and scattered the US Government can be.
But honestly, the best fictional spy organization in comics is basically Greg Rucka's version of Checkmate. S.H.I.E.L.D. can be good, but nothing ever came close to the proper politicking that Rucka and Trautmann had in that book.
But if you want one of the worst-integrated parts of Marvel, it's mutants. The hatred of mutants comes off as weird because it doesn't really extend to other metas, which doesn't really make sense. People just seem to
know who are mutants and who aren't, so no one really hates the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man doesn't really get anti-mutant hate despite no one knowing his origin. It's part of why I think the MCU feels so much cleaner in that regard, though I wonder how the hell they are going to be able to integrate mutant hate in a universe where metas have been around forever and are generally viewed as heroic.
If I find anything really different, it's that structurally the DC setting is more dispersed, but the hero community is much more centralized, while the Marvel setting is much more centralized but the hero community is dispersed.
In DC, most heroes do not live in the same city: generally-speaking, most cities have a single hero or team who are the focus of a city. Gotham, Star City, Ivytown, Metropolis, etc... everyone has their own sort of "playground" to play in. However, the hero community itself in DC is much,
much more closely organized, with the Justice League at the center of it. You certainly have more teams, but ultimately it feels like there's a relatively central hero authority that has most heroes linking up to it directly or indirectly.
In Marvel, while there are other cities that are in play the classic setting is New York City: you can have teams out in Los Angeles, or the X-Men moving out to San Francisco, but for the most part the action in Marvel is going down in NYC. However, there's not quite the same strong sense of community that DC has: the Avengers have kind of become the top team at Marvel, but they still compete with the X-Men at a power level, and it wasn't until recently that everyone started joining the Avengers team. The hero community itself feels like it's broken up into a lot of small sub-divisions, but there's no central organizing figure or group like DC has.
Personally, I like both: they present different flavors that manage to work really well in their respective universes.
