When I knew of the Secret Wars action figures and the Super Powers action figures I tried to figure out what the criterion for choosing the characters for each collection was.

Somehow I felt that the characters chosen for Super Powers were more legendary, more archetypical.

When I discovered that there were DC and Marvel, and that my 2 favourite superheroes, Superman and Batman, were DC and my number 3, Spider-man, was Marvel, it was clear to me. I liked both, but DC better.

When I begun buying comics, I bought a few "Batman" and "Batman and the Outsiders" comics, and a lot of Superman. Man of Steel was one of the big events in my life and I kept buying Superman titles until a few years after his death and resurrection.

But I also read and enjoyed Spider-man, the Invaders, the Fantastic Four, etc.

Today, all in all, to me it is a tie. 

I've lived on both sides of the train tracks. In my comics-reading prime, I was a Marvel zealot, probably to the point of obnoxiousness. I loved Superman and Batman as characters, and I really liked the concept of the Legion of Super-Heroes, but most DC stuff in the late seventies/early eighties always seemed to be missing something (irreverence? excitement? cleverness?) that you could find in any random Marvel book you picked up. Although I'd get Action or Detective once in a while, my Marvel-to-DC ratio probably ran 9 to 1.

I have our gracious host to thank for leading me over to DC in the post-Crisis days. I had enormous fun meeting characters like the Metal Men, the Green Lantern Corps, the New Gods, the Doom Patrol, etc., through JB's work, and over the next couple of years my Marvel-to-DC ratio more or less reversed itself.

Nowadays, I don't read anything new from either company on a regular basis. If I do get something from the Big Two on a lark, it's 99% certain to be a DC title. 

The post-CRISIS confusion at DC and the glut of pseudo-Image art at Marvel in the 90's drove me and a lot of people on this board (and elsewhere, I believe) away from mainstream comics.  And endless reboots at DC and dour "epics" at Marvel are still driving people away.

Again, looking at the answers above, we mostly seem to like the fun and energy of the first couple of decades at Marvel and we like the characters' iconic timelessness at DC.  If the Big Two would only grasp this, we might see a new generation of KIDS arguing "Marvel or DC?"!

I liked Batman but didn't read him. New Teen Titans was my first regular DC comic and that led to a fair bit like Batman and the Outsiders and LSH but I bought a lot more Marvel than DC.

Like JB says above, the characters were so much better and could weather a lot of bad stories. But now the characters have changed and continue to change to the point I have no idea what's what and who's who (from what I read on the web), I can't see me going back.

Which is a shame.