2022 - Marvel vs DC - The Difference????

[ZuLuLu]

Given that there is not a lot of sales data in the public, no one outside these companies actually knows how well DC is doing, it is just the vibes from fans are more negative around DC than it is around Marvel right now.

DC right now is Marvel 2014, the desperate need to replace heroes with diverse replacements.

What DC characters have been replaced?

Right now anyone can still buy the original Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman. Jon's Superman and Yara's Wondergirl (before it was cancelled due to continuing delays) were selling better that the original all the original characters except for Batman.

It's just weird that people will blame the existence of 4 to 5 'diverse' books for tanking the sales of a company that publishes over 40 books per month when half of the line is dominated by one character.

It didn’t work for marvel (Alonso getting fired spectacularly) and it won’t work for DC, people love the originals and it’s unfair on these new characters to be expected to replace them just so DC/Marvel can get a news article on entertainment weekly or the view.

Diverse characters deserve their own identity, it’s lazy writing and marketing to just make someone gay or bisexual after all these years and then throw them back into obscurity once the media hype is gone.

Alonso, most likely did what the company wanted because the fact that so many of these characters are transitioning to movies and tv shows so quickly shows this is the direction the company wanted to go. Sometimes someone is let go because a company wants to present the image of change while continuing in the same direction. Since then Marvel has created diverse 'replacement' or legacies for Black Knight, Iron Fist, and Darkhawk they have gone back the Sam Cap, Jane Thor has a mini etc... this tells me that from the companies point of view they have benefited from this strategy it is probably the reason why their closest competitor is copying it.

Looking back, Marvel replaced Thor, Hulk, Captain America, Ironman, wolverine, Spider-Man, all at the same time and wondered why sales tanked.

While I agree that replacing so many characters at the same time did cause a backlash by fans but Marvel sales never tanked, just look at Marvel's market share during Alonso. The only year the industry had decreased sales was 2017 and Marvel was still dominating.

Unit Share
2011: Marvel 40.93% DC 36.77%
2012: Marvel 37.59% DC 36.75%
2013: Marvel 36.97% DC 33.35%
2014: Marvel 36.78% DC 32.47%
2015: Marvel 41.82% DC 27.35%
2016: Marvel 39.30% DC 33.71%
2017: Marvel 38.30% DC 33.93%

Dollar Share
2011: Marvel 37.29% DC 31.41%
2012: Marvel 34.06% DC 31.94%
2013: Marvel 33.50% DC 30.33%
2014: Marvel 34.38% DC 28.86%
2015: Marvel 38.74% DC 25.75%
2016: Marvel 37.44% DC 30.02%
2017: Marvel 36.36% DC 30.07%

[Gaastra]

No one asked for the new stuff,

Star wars force awakens was asked for in fact it's the highest grossing movie in history domestic beating avatar for a reason. Watch the trailer reactions. People were excited. The other two films were "eh" to me but both made a billion and have good audience scores.

DC right now is Marvel 2014, the desperate need to replace heroes with diverse replacements.

But half the dc heroes are replacements. Hal, barry? Replacements. Red tornado. Replacement. (plus a man replaced a female hero to boot.) Hawkman, hawkgirl, atom? Replacements. Supes, batman and ww were younger versions from another universe while the original batman was killed off in the younger ones book. How would that go over today?

Marvel--torch, black widow, thing, hulk, dr doom, ka-zar, angel, ghost rider, vision. All replacements. If internet was around in the 60s would hal and barry lasted a month from backlash?

[scribbleMind]

To me the most noticeable difference, and this has been the case since I started reading DC comics during Villains United, is that DC fetishizes darkness. They bleed edginess. It's like the edge of Batman and Vertigo have bled into many of the other titles. There are waves of lighter titles, usually during the relaunches, and with imprints like Young Animal. Unfortunately these titles quickly fall off and are not replaced until the next relaunch or imprint. At DC it very much feels like they equate maturity with grimdark.

This isn't to say Marvel doesn't do the same. I simply don't find it nearly as rampant. At Marvel equating darkness to maturity or quality feels like a writer issue. At DC it feels like a DC issue. It really feels like DC thrives on it.

[Digifiend]

But half the dc heroes are replacements. Hal, barry? Replacements. Red tornado. Replacement. (plus a man replaced a female hero to boot.) Hawkman, hawkgirl, atom? Replacements. Supes, batman and ww were younger versions from another universe while the original batman was killed off in the younger ones book. How would that go over today?

Marvel--torch, black widow, thing, hulk, dr doom, ka-zar, angel, ghost rider, vision. All replacements. If internet was around in the 60s would hal and barry lasted a month from backlash?

Earth-2 Batman died in Justice League of America didn't he, not in Batman or Detective Comics? During one of their annual JSA team-ups?

You're right though, both companies have a lot of replacements dating back to the silver age. While Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Captain America and Sub-Mariner are the same heroes from the golden age, there was indeed a bunch of replacements - Flash and Green Lantern being the first ones at DC, and obviously Human Torch at Marvel. Shazam is an subversion of this trend, as he was completely dormant in the silver age and only returned in the 1970s, yet was still the same character. Though thanks to Mar-Vell debuting in the meantime, DC couldn't call his book Captain Marvel! Which of course eventually led to him being renamed.

[Anthony W]

Talking about a DC Marvel rivalry is like looking at two short people and trying to find out who is taller.

Sigh....but okay.

The worst decade of Marvel Comics was the 2010s. You can breathe easy 1990s you're off the hook. DC is in the midst of it worst decade RIGHT NOW. So the winner is Marvel.

[Username taken]

Actually Thor sold BETTER under Jane for a good long time and has improved since Odinson came back.

Excluding Bruce Banner-Odinson, Tony, Logan, Peter & Steve were around in some form.

Where were all these FITS being thrown when Doom was calling himself Ironman (Riri wasn't).
Winter Soldier as Cap America?
Dr Oct as Spider Man?




Well when Marvel and DC have TRIED original diverse characters -who are the FIRST folks to throw fits about it?

Who are the first to look for any and all excuses to NOT try or read those books?
Who are the first to THROW blame on sales or their favorites NOT getting page time? Rogue fans HATED Synch in that X-Men book.
Who screams these books should NOT exist?

It actually did work for Alonso and it wasn't lazy writing imo it was purposeful. You would have to be blind to the concept of how many far right people fell for the notion in real life that replacement theory was real and instead of introducing diverse characters with their own identity marvel played heavily into the concept of replacement and used it as a vehicle for what i call a false diversity push which on paper and just looking at it was doomed to failure. At least DC is keeping Bruce Wayne around and as batman while they diversify the line showing they can exist together but marvel went out of it's way to literal replace it's characters with diverse ones, even going so far as taking characters that already had their own identify like Sam wilson and erasing them to fit into what they were trying to accomplish. IMO once that movie money started coming marvel in the mid to late 2000s showed exactly who and what they were and while i don't encourage the firing of people i would not miss a single one that played a part in that or didn't speak up.

One only has to look at the material marvel definitely went backwards and used that as an excuse with the help from shops to say these kinds of characters are what is popular and the only thing that sells and successfully created that false narrative that diversity doesn't sell and pushed it over into their movies and pretty much every branch of the company imo and this is just from an observer viewpoint. I mean how many movies have marvel made? How many actually have diverse casts? I mean even jessica alba called them out recently. Now look at the comics. You couldn't rub together two people of color in this eternals crossover.

It has gotten somewhat better but it's still worse than it was before the company wide decimation of diversity. Again JMHO

The big sales of jump the Marvel Now (2013) line wide relaunch was attributed to the success of the movies. In this case it was largely lapsed readers or readers that only read a handful of titles branching out to others...like you had fans that only read Spider-Man comics picking up Iron Man and Captain America because they liked those characters in the movies.

One thing that did attract new readers was Ms Marvel. Kamala and a lot of the wave of new diversity heroes like Miles Morales and Jane Foster did attract people who liked the movies but felt a bit daunted at the prospect of jumping into characters with decades of history but here was new characters they could get into Day one.

As someone else mentioned on this thread sales of Black Panther trades were huge in the wake of the movie (really Marvel should have had more BP related ongoings ready but at the time they seemed to concerned doing so would upset the comicsgate crowd) and the movie helped Carol Danvers get a decent bump in sales.



Untrue. It was only natural that some readers would treat the end of Secret Wars as a jumping off point but the drop in sales during the All-New, All Different era wasn't anymore than comic books sales in general were falling and continue to fall as the industry dies. Thing is those diversity characters were still among Marvel's best sellers during this period. Ms Marvel, Miles Morales, Squirrel Girl were of course big sellers in digital and trade. Even stuff like Wolverine (Laura) and Totally Awesome Hulk were decently successful in these mediums and of course Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur sold huge amounts via book deals with Scholatic.

What happened is a lot of anti-diversity youtubers jumped on the narrative that Marvel's sales were tanking and that diversity was the the cause and they beat that to death. Truth is Marvel's sales were not tanking and if they were cancelling books of diversity characters that were selling in mediums that netted the company more money was surely not the answer. Any kind of integrity they had with this argument went out the water when they went after the Jane Foster Thor series which was not only selling phenomenally well in digital and trade but also in monthly singles. That's when I knew they were being disingenuous to support their bigoted agenda. This went on for years and eventually Marvel seemed to take the attitude that they could make this go away by cancelling some of their lesser selling diversity characters as a way to appease both sides...they paid a price for it. Sales didn't spike up and the anti-diversity crowd didn't go away. Marvel didn't do their usual strategy of having a bunch of new titles of a character that has a movie out when Black Panther was released and sales of previous Black Panther trades sky rocketed. They cancelled newly launched books like Iceman and Unstoppable Wasp that hadn't sold only for the trade sales to also be impressive. I think they regret capitulating to the comicsgate crowd and are correcting some of their mistakes and so they should.

Yes to all of this.

A lot of the "comicsgaters" didn't really and haven't really looked at sales data carefully.

Jane Thor in particular was very successful (hence why it lasted so long). Same with all the other "diverse" characters. Miles Morales Spider-man is actually one of Marvel's higher-selling titles right now.

Looking closely at sales data, the top non-Marvel and DC selling titles feature a WHOLE LOT more diversity than traditional superhero comics. See books like House of Slaughter for example that has a gay black man as the lead. As Orbus pointed out, Marvel looks to be correcting the over-correction it did before because diversity wasn't their a problem, if anything the complete absence of it is a more severe problem.

And yes, movies and tv shows actually lead to MASSIVE increases in trade and graphic novel sales.

[Ultimate Captain America]

Marvel--torch, black widow, thing, hulk, dr doom, ka-zar, angel, ghost rider, vision. All replacements. If internet was around in the 60s would hal and barry lasted a month from backlash?

There was no internet back then, but they got mails (not e-mails, just mails), and that allowed them to stay in touch with fandom reception just as fine. For example, the Human Torch once fought in his solo against an evil Captain America that was the Acrobat in disguise, and by the end the narrator made it clear: this was a test, if you want the real Captain America to return say so in your mails... and Avengers #4 arrived a pair of months later. On the other hand, people often protested that the Invisible Girl was useless, so Reed got angry, broke the 4º wall Deadpool style and compared with the mother of Lincoln (what in the actual F***?). But later on, they accepted the fandom got a point, and made her more powerful, with invisible forcefields and the power to make other things invisible instead of just herself. There's also the newborn son of Reed and Sue, whose name was open to proposals from the fandom, Franklin was probably chosen because that's the name of the late father of Sue and Johnny.

The difference was that back then there was still a distance between creators and fandom. Creators may accept the input of the fandom from time to time, or when they specifically ask for it, but they were still in charge of everything that happens in the comics. I have seen in interviews that Stan Lee and Jim Shooter were aware of the backlash over Peter's love life and the wifebeater saga at the time, but continued anyway because sales were strong. Then, as now and ever, there is a tiny portion of the fandom that shouts a lot over minor things, and a silent majority that does like them (or does not mind) but just consumes the product and does not shout. Lee, Shooter and co. knew that. The guys in charge nowadays, not so much.

[inisideguy]

Someone can correct me if they disagree. But I have read both Marvel and DC for years on an off. If you just look at Marvel they have more characters who people want to read about in general. I mean Batman is a great superhero arguably the best of all time. And of course Superman. But Marvel has such a massive diverse group of heroes that have had runs on books for long period of time its not even comparable. It really isn't. Just what Marvel does for example and this is just one. Moonknight was a character they came up with in the 70s, and had some decent runs here and there but the character always sort of faded. But its now one of Marvels hottest books. In 2022 thats amazing. The actual characters that Marvel has come up with especially on the Hero side that fans are interested in just blow DC away. Thats just a fact. I think DC attempted to bring a lot of their creations which were interesting back into something during the new 52. But after 2 years no one cared. Maybe it was to much at once I don't know. But Marvel is just better at this stuff. Period.


I will even edit that and compare the boards on this site and the topics. On the Marvel boards you have people starting threads on so many different characters and teams


You don't see that on the DC boards. You don't.

[milton75]

Why are these threads always Marvel vs DC?

I buy a lot of books, comics, music, etc. I don't see folk regularly comparing two smaller comics publishers. Or different book publishing houses, or how different record labels compare.

Whenever I read one of these threads it seems like folk are looking for either positive confirmation that "their" publisher of choice is indeed the best, or wanting to put the boot into its rival(s) for the same facile reasons. It's childish, and moreover no-one actually running these companies is going "dang, you know what, we better change our philosophy guys. I've just been on Twitter and @username19836572 says we're idiots and keep hiring rubbish writers."

[scribbleMind]

Why are these threads always Marvel vs DC?

I buy a lot of books, comics, music, etc. I don't see folk regularly comparing two smaller comics publishers.

Because they're small and out of the pop culture zeitgeist.

Or different book publishing houses.

Because most people couldn't even tell you the publisher of a book they're reading or have read.

how different record labels compare

Idk what type of music you listen to, but this happens in rap all the time.

[Gaastra]

If you want to learn about marvel vs dc they did a doc on it. Have not watched it yet but it's from a older book.

[Digifiend]

There was no internet back then, but they got mails (not e-mails, just mails), and that allowed them to stay in touch with fandom reception just as fine. For example, the Human Torch once fought in his solo against an evil Captain America that was the Acrobat in disguise, and by the end the narrator made it clear: this was a test, if you want the real Captain America to return say so in your mails... and Avengers #4 arrived a pair of months later.

That sounds like they already planned to bring Steve back. The lead time means Avengers #4 should've already been planned (nowadays it would've already been solicited) by the time that issue (of Strange Tales?) was published, if it really was just a couple of months before.

[Nomads1]

IMHO, both companies are going around like headless chickens, looking for that mythical new audience, while pissing on the ones they already have (never a good strategy, in my book). However, all in all, while both seem aimless, I think DC compromised more its identity as a company than Marvel. It lost its own sense of wonder.

Peace

[Dreaded Porcupine]

IMHO, both companies are going around like headless chickens, looking for that mythical new audience, while pissing on the ones they already have (never a good strategy, in my book). However, all in all, while both seem aimless, I think DC compromised more its identity as a company than Marvel. It lost its own sense of wonder.

Peace

This sums it up in a nutshell. The mythical new reader. I cracked up when I read your post because this is so true.

[Marvell2100]

DC right now is Marvel 2014, the desperate need to replace heroes with diverse replacements.

It didn’t work for marvel (Alonso getting fired spectacularly) and it won’t work for DC, people love the originals and it’s unfair on these new characters to be expected to replace them just so DC/Marvel can get a news article on entertainment weekly or the view.

Diverse characters deserve their own identity, it’s lazy writing and marketing to just make someone gay or bisexual after all these years and then throw them back into obscurity once the media hype is gone.

Looking back, Marvel replaced Thor, Hulk, Captain America, Ironman, wolverine, Spider-Man, all at the same time and wondered why sales tanked.

Thor - Thunderstrike

Steve Rogers Cap - John Walker Cap

Tony Stark Iron Man - James Rhodes Iron Man

All of these changes were in the late 80's - early 90s, way before 2014.

Peter Parker got replaced by Ben Reilly in the mid 90s.

So, characters being changed is nothing new.