Marvel vs DC

[ART!]

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You mean Hard-Drinkin' Kal?

Hard-drinkin' Red (?) Kryptonite-influenced evil Superman - so evil he breaks mirrors with peanuts!

 

[Ryujin]

If I remember correctly, the Donner cut is a bit better compared to the original.

Personally, while Reeve was part of my introduction to Superman, George Newbern and Tim Daly were my iconic version.

I can understand that. DC Animated has done amazing work that I wish their live action teams could match.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I can understand that. DC Animated has done amazing work that I wish their live action teams could match.

Two of my three favorite extended superhero universes are animated DC projects.

 

[ART!]

Lego Batman is my favorite Batman, and I mean that post-ironically.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Honestly I think the best Supersman have been live action TV.

 

[trappedslider]

The on-screen Superman of my formative years was a different Reeves: George.

Which was in the words of Howard Stark "Limited by the technology of its time"

 

[Ryujin]

Which was in the words of Howard Stark "Limited by the technology of its time"

You want "limited by the technology of its time"? I'm currently watching the 1941 Republic serial "The Adventures of Captain Marvel: Curse of the Scorpion." Flying was done with a mannequin, on a wire.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

You literally just made my point for me. You have a personal resonance with the depicted locations, and 75% of the time they’re NYC. Thank you. It was getting tiresome being berated for saying exactly that.

As a slight contrast, I have always assumed that both Gotham and Metropolis are just two different versions of New York, or maybe one is Boston and the other is New York (which is which is up for discussion), but this chiefly because I live in the southwest and have never visited New York, so the real New York is about as "real" for me in the comic fiction as Metropolis and Gotham.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

My own take: I personally was very in to Marvel in the early eighties then jumped ship largely to DC in the mid to late eighties, and embraced the Image comics movement of the early nineties before getting out of comics until around 2012 when I jumped back in feet first and have been avidly collecting a mixture of DC, some Marvel and indies ever since. Most of the chararcters I like are the more "grounded" ones, the humans with skills over powers (Batman, Green Arrow, Nightwing) which ironically is a majority of DC's offering these days (they have plenty of iconic demigods, but the most popular DC comics seem to remain the Batman and his associates types). Marvel's got fewer "normal" characters but their superheroes tend to be balanced with flaws and troubles....they would work well in a GURPS Supers campaign because they are all pretty balanced on average, and as a result I tend to pursue Wolverine, Moon Knight (when he's got a book) and Daredevil. I used to love X-Men but the X-Men of today are barely recognizable from the X-Men of my youth as Claremont wrote them.

The biggest distinction I personally see between Marvel and DC, though, is the extent to which a character's identity is tied to the story or legacy of that character. Many Marvel characters change, sometimes dramatically, over time. As I mentioned, X-Men is hard to follow today if you're used to X-Men from twenty years ago; the current storylines and feel of the book is so off kilter from the X-Men I grew up with that I just find it oddly alienating. But Batman, in contrast, remains very much the same character for better or worse; changes they occasionally make to the character (and they are experimenting with such changes right now in Future State as an example) are rarely permanent as it is the iconic nature of Batman that is the draw....the consistency of the character's mythos, if you will. Change it too much and it no longer feels like Batman. X-Men, in contrast, are insanely mutable to the point where even though I don't recognize the X-Men of today as being even close to the majority of characters from when I followed them in the 80's and 90's, they are still stories of mutants.

A big component of why DC characters change infrequently and remain iconic with their mythology is because DC frequently reboots. Since Crisis on Infinite Earths it is common (and even canon in their own storyline it was recently revealed) that the DC universe periodically resets the clock for its characters to continue. Marvel however has long maintained that its own continuity is always crammed into the last ten years or so of "real time" and occasionally revisits older themes and attempts to clarify anachronistic elements.....this means that the characters of Marvel's books today are technically the same exact characters as Marvel 30 or even 50 years ago, just with "updates" to fix anomalies based on when the original stories appeared. In DC....Batman of 50 years ago is literally an alternate prior universe, one of the many alternate universes in the DC continuity, and the current Batman is not the same guy. Ironically that means DC tells a lot more "alt history" what-if stories that are technically considered canon "somewhere" in the DC multiverse.

TLR - to me, the more relatable "skilled crimefighters" are the most interesting on both sides of the DC/Marvel spectrum, and the key differences between the two are actually in how they handle continuity. But I'm a comic junkie and YMMV.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

It wasn't the ending that killed it for me. It was when he let his father die to preserve his secret identity. No Superman I can respect would place that secret above the life of even a complete stranger, let alone a loved one.

This is why I also intensely disliked that movie (plus the overly long, panic-inducing fight scenes).