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Shawn Kane
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Joined: 04 November 2010
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Posted: 24 June 2018 at 5:55pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply

Marvel. So much in fact that I felt guilty buying Man of Steel #1 when JB took over. I can probably blame my older brother. He bought Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Captain America, The Avengers, Star Wars, and Conan every month. I remember how cool it was watching him pull those issues out of the brown sleeves that they came in the mail. He only bought G.I. Combat from DC. Of course like anyone who bought comics in those days, he'd have a Batman or Superman comic that he'd bought. G.I. Joe was my gateway comic into buying monthly, who knows how much of a Marvel guy I'd be if DC put out that book?

Edited by Shawn Kane on 24 June 2018 at 6:02pm
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Mike Norris
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Posted: 24 June 2018 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

My first up tick for DC was post Crisis. Picked up the Superman titles on a regular basis for the first time. (wonder what made me do that?) 
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Phil Kreisel
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Posted: 24 June 2018 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply

Marvel all the way.
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Christopher Frost
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Posted: 24 June 2018 at 8:42pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply

Simply based on what is in my collection, I'm clearly a Marvel guy (though I do have a lot of DC stuff as well).

Both companies have a lot of characters/concepts/books that I like and stuff that I don't. 

A few years back, I was laid off from my old job (of 13 years) and while I soon found work, I had to make major cuts to my comic budget. I dropped pretty much everything I was collecting at the time and turned to basically just picking up the odd tbp or hardcover here and there as my budget allows. The funny thing is that most of what I pick up these days is from DC. Some of the Rebirth stuff has caught my interest and I've been following some of them as a result. Modern day Marvel hasn't been putting anything out that appeals to me of late, though I'm curious to check out Marvel Two-in-One and the upcoming FF reboot.

I guess this all means that I'm a Marvel guy who is turning into a DC guy.
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Brian Hague
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Posted: 24 June 2018 at 8:50pm | IP Logged | 5 post reply

DC, without question.

Classic characters, parallel worlds. These guys were the originals, the ones my Dad read as a kid. Krypton. Kandor. Batman. Wonder Woman. The original Captain Marvel. Just amazing. 

Marvel books were inevitably "to be continued" whereas DC's often had multiple stories in each issue. Without any guarantee I'd ever be getting that second part to the story, or the part after that, or the part after that, I was more than happy to enjoy a full tale rather than fractions of one.

Fight scenes that raged for pages seemed like padding. If the Thing hadn't been punching Darkoth for twelve pages, the writer might have been able to finish his story in this issue. Ah, but he never intended to, did he? Finish this one, you have to come up with another next month, and another the month after that. We keep stuffing this one with fight scenes, and hey, it can go indefinitely. I've always been too intrinsically cheap to ever get on board with that. 

Also, Dad was a police officer, something I took seriously as a kid, and still do today. That is not an easy job, and it is deserving of respect. Spidey was wanted by the police a good deal of the time. So was the Sub-Mariner. Why am I reading about criminals and people who won't stand trial? There were no "good cops" in Marvel books. (Cpt. Stacey was dead before I got to Marvel.) They were all stooges of the Daily Bugle or cannon fodder for the inevitable, five-page fight scene. See also: the Military.

Quite the reverse of many here, for me, Marvels were the ones that looked nothing like real life. Villains had stooge armies filled with nobodies in matching outfits all carrying ray guns, and they never ran out of these guys. A.I.M. and Hydra were sheets of wallpaper featuring matching nobodies in matching outfits. 

Speaking of wallpaper, what was up with every wall in every laboratory or villain's base being covered in useless machinery? Nothing in real life looks like that. Who puts a plug for some gizmo way up there? What's with all the conduits and wires? Guys, you could put some of that IN the wall, you know. No? Whatever. I guess it all looks pretty when in blows up into fragments, as it always does...

Marvels were same-old-same-old month in and month out. I didn't bother to familiarize myself with the characters early on because I didn't want half a story featuring a bunch of people in a villain army's HQ, lined with techno-paper, having just escaped, battling an bunch of matching straw men, then a robot, then maybe facing the villain before we... continue it next month! Be here, true believer! Thanks, no.

And then there were the Bullpen Bulletin pages with that sneering, derisive tone towards the competition. I didn't like bullies and smart alecks then. I don't like them now. If you want to run down your competition, even in friendly, wink-wink terms, do it on your dime, not mine. The Squadrons Sinister and Supreme; The Imperial Guard; The Grapplers... Was Marvel thinking no one noticed these bits of creatively barren appropriation, or was it all just in wink-wink, sneer-sneer fun? I'm guessing the latter, and again, too childish and mean-spirited for me even as a kid. Marvel was clearly a place filled with punks.

DC, conversely, had places of limitless imagination and a genuine respect for the work done by its creators years ago. Lyra Lerrol might show up and holy moley! This isn't just someone they made up this month! The character had genuine history behind her. You could go back and read those classic stories. These people Batman was teaming up with in Brave and the Bold had series at one time; supporting casts; themes. Each issue was a window into a comic that used to be.

There were multiple planets and parallel dimensions. There were elders and youngsters and hey, not every single goddamned person had super-powers and latent telekinetic abilities. Yes, unfortunately the need to try to match what Marvel was doing was in play, giving us H.I.V.E. and S.K.U.L.L., but whatever... they were at least drawn by Curt Swan, so not everyone matched exactly. There were actually people in all those matching outfits. 

Marvel seemed incredibly generic throughout most of my childhood, and I did visit there now and again out of curiosity or a genuine interest in the Thing or Sub-Mariner. I didn't hate the place, but it didn't offer me anything like the world I knew outside my window, or any convincing human relationships. A house style certainly seemed in effect whereas DC had Curt Swan, Jim Aparo, Dick Dillin, Ramona Fradon, and Joe Staton. None of those people's work looks like any of the others, yet the characters were all on-model. Kirby and Ditko were gone, and everyone else looked more or less the same at Marvel.

There was a pivotal moment way back when, early in my comic reading days, when I had a chance to buy a reprint of Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2 off the stands. I remember flipping through it agog, seeing things I'd never seen anywhere before. Had I actually bought that issue (a treasury-sized thing, as I recall) everything might have turned out differently. On the other hand, maybe not. At that age, I was never going to buy Spider-Man, a character repeatedly wanted by the police. Yes, Batman was occasionally wanted as well, I know, but those stories... wait for it... had endings. Even the five-part Bat-Murderer storyline, which I discovered in the Eighties, was compiled into a single volume when I read it.

Eventually, I began buying What If and the X-Men and the memories of those random Spidey Super-Stories I'd been buying to keep a toe in the Marvel pool began to click. (hey, complete stories; Romita covers; team-up book; an origin every issue, not a bad introduction to who these people were) I also bought random Richie Riches and Caspers to see what those were all about. Archies as well. A Disney here or there. When you're sick and your parents get you comics to cheer you up, there is no telling what they're going to come back with. Gold Key was the usual (shakes head sadly) but there were also Ghost Rider comics, Vampirella, Starlog, and issues of Warren Publishings' 1984 (with Frank Thorne's "Ghita"!!.) 

It took a while, but I did find a taste for lots of different companies' output, Marvel included. But the laughing-up-their-sleeve tone of their Bulletins pages? Fingernails on a chalkboard. Always has been, always will be.

And yeah, I get how it's supposed to be funny. It just isn't. 

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Jeffrey Rice
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Posted: 24 June 2018 at 10:07pm | IP Logged | 6 post reply

Marvel all the way until Wolfman and Perez started The New Teen Titans. Then the lines started blurring,.
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Robert Shepherd
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Posted: 24 June 2018 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | 7 post reply

I read everything I could get my hands on, both DC and Marvel, and all the independents. I bought whatever I could afford, but my favorites have always been Marvel characters.

Captain Mar-Vell and Iron Man were my favorite super heroes.
Wonderman and the Beast had the best friendship.
Avengers in the 100-200 issue run, favorite group. Best time in all my comic book fan years.
I know 2 of the biggest reasons I liked Marvel most was JB and George Perez on Avengers.
Marvel-Two-In-One was a great book as well. Who drew the issues I like most? Yep JB and George Perez.
JB on FF was awesome.

In DC I liked Barry Allen Flash and Hal Jordan Green Lantern but I never really got hooked on DC characters the way I did on Marvel characters.

I liked the Teen Titans art and stories (George Perez again), but I can't say I was hooked on the characters much. Raven was the most interesting of the bunch.

So in the end, I think it's safe to say that for the most part, it was JB and George Perez who got me hooked on Marvel. If they had both started at DC, it's possible my preferences would have been all DC.



Edited by Robert Shepherd on 24 June 2018 at 10:47pm
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Bill Guerra
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Posted: 24 June 2018 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | 8 post reply

Marvel for me!
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Drew Spence
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Posted: 24 June 2018 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | 9 post reply

I never had a split.
Star Trek verse Star Wars.
Mac verse PC....

I always thought DC had the better stories, but Marvel had the better art.
There was  time when Marvel was drawing teens and current clothes, hoodies and jeans and sneakers and DC was still showing men in fedoras and yellow button-down shirts and green pants...purple dress shoes...

I got tired of the cheap paper and started looking to First Comics and that whole fresh batch of new comic publishers....and reading Heavy Metal magazine...
That was a huge break, for me, from the big two.

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Eric Jansen
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Posted: 25 June 2018 at 1:31am | IP Logged | 10 post reply

I always loved them both, for different reasons.  And it's good to have a "spare"--the last two years (since "Hail Hydra") I've hated (present-day) Marvel and I was glad I had at least a few DC's to pick up.  Before that, DC ticked me off with its latest "reality shift" but Marvel was giving me at least five books a month to buy.

I probably liked DC better when I was younger (late 70's) and Marvel better in my early teens (early 80's).  The late 80's, I drifted away from DC (in the post-CRISIS aftermath) and Marvel too (it just seemed lackluster) and I got really interested in the independents.  After the promise of Image's new universe faded, the 90's just seemed like a vast wasteland.
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David Schmidt
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Posted: 25 June 2018 at 4:22am | IP Logged | 11 post reply

Marvel.
Because the series were easier to follow in french.

DC Comics french editions were chaotic and not easy to read.

And I really fell in love with The X-Men old (Lee/Roth) and new (Claremont/Byrne) that was published at the same time...
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Greg McPhee
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Posted: 25 June 2018 at 5:47am | IP Logged | 12 post reply

DC. Because it was Marv Wolfman and Gil Kane's run on Action that got me in to comics in a big way and Superman in particular.

As an aside, looking back on his work on Captain America, Quasar and Squadron Supreme, I always felt Mark Gruenwald would have been a perfect fit for Superman, The Flash and Justice League of America.
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