Soda or Pop, Pepsi or Coke, Jelly or Butter on toast, Marvel vs DC; these are all battles that have raged on and will continue to rage on for decades to come. In an attempt to fan the flames I sat down and came up with 5 reasons that DC is better than Marvel.
1. Villains Matter - While Marvel presents their latest in hero vs hero combat DC is focused on bringing you more and more villains. The thing about Marvel villains, as I've said before, they just don't matter anymore in the long run. Not DC villains, DC villains will fuck up your whole day without thinking twice about it. People like to talk about the New 52 being watered down but how can we pretend that We Are Robin didn't include a multitude of people getting shot in the head at point blank range. Welcome to the world of DC where the heroes rarely die but the villains are killing everybody.
2. Diversity - Don't get me wrong, Marvel has done a lot to diversify their roster of characters but DC has gone above and beyond that. They've also began to diversify their staff of writers and editors. Not just by reaching out to established creators but through their workshops. Additionally DC does not do a press release every time a legacy character is turned over to a minority hero. There was no press release when it was decided that Donny Fairchild will become the latest Vigilante, a hero title passed down between several white men. There was no press release for Simon Baz being one of the stars of the newest Green Lantern book, nobody knew until the solicitations came out. For all the complaining people do about comics not creating new minority characters, they sure do a lot of it over at DC and nobody ever notices because there's no press release to pat themselves on the back for making Duke Thomas Lark.
3. Minimal Resets - I swear Marvel reboots every year and there's a whole batch of new #1s. At least when DC does it, it's a soft reboot. DC You didn't erase New52 and most books kept the same numbering, the same thing happened with convergence. DC has only now reset the book numbering with rebirth, and it's still not every book being renumbered. They say the best time to pick up a comic is when a new number 1 drops, but Marvel drops more new number 1s than anyone else. They actually give stories time to play out instead of rushing to finish them because the next big event is resetting the whole universe.
4. Multi-book stories - DC has events that span every book, just like Marvel. The difference is that sometimes DC has stories that only span a few books. Maybe it's a story that covers a few books for the Batfamily. The difference is Marvel doesn't know how to do this so a story is either fully contained in one book and completely out of sync with the events in another book. For instance, in Amazing Spider-Man right now, Peter is feuding with Tony Stark and Miles Morales has been injured in captured. In Invincible Iron Man, Tony has no beef with Peter. In All New All Different Avengers Miles is in space right now. But Tony is also in the middle of a civil war. So how is all this going on at once? I ask because Marvel refuses to go with the DC idea that comics are a snapshot in time and not necessarily presented in chronological order. But Marvel wants everything in chronological order.
5. No Movie Focus - I'm not saying they make bad movies or they don't focus on movies like Marvel. I'm just saying movie politics don't come into play with the comics. You won't have DC cutting Suicide Squad comics like Marvel did the Fantastic 4 just because they can't get the rights. DC isn't going to kill off all of The Flash's rogues because they make too much money. They aren't going to strong arm anyone to get the rights to Green Arrow back. Meanwhile Marvel continues to kill off X-Men at a rapid pace and is attempting to replace them with Inhumans despite X-Men still outselling them and Inhumans doing poorly.
It's okay if you like Marvel, people might laugh about it behind your back as you buy the latest #1 or way on the new issue of Hawkeye that's released once every year. Liking Marvel is perfectly fine, I just wanted to make sure you knew DC was better.
You can hear Darrell on the CP Time and Powerbomb Jutsu podcasts. He also plays classic arcade games on The Cabinet
Follow @OriginalKingD
