Slugfest: Inside the Epic, 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC

by Reed Tucker

As a result, my generation became the first who didn’t need to age out of superheroes.

Gonna love this book!

“At DC there was a tendency sometimes to resist learning from the competition because it was the competition,” says Mark Evanier, a screenwriter and former DC freelancer. “And when they did learn, they frankly learned the wrong things.”

And I'm a full fledged Johnny DC....

At stake is not just sales but cultural relevancy and the hearts of millions of fans.

The modern-day Marvel that arrived in 1961 quickly shook up the comics industry in a way that mirrored the dramatic cultural and political upheavals the entire country was experiencing.

Marvel represented change. It was counterculture, the scruffy underdog to DC’s establishment. Its covers announced adventures for “The New Breed of Comic Reader.”

Publishers had been reprinting flimsy collections of Sunday funnies since at least the 1920s, but New Fun Comics is considered the first modern comic book.

What Lee and his gang had done—as counterculture newspaper the Village Voice suggested in a 1965 article—was bring the antihero to comics.

While DC’s editors came off in print as what they were—middle-aged, uptight, management types—Stan brought goofy wit and a friendly personality.

They treated their competitor with total contempt.”

The writers’ purge ultimately left more work for the young bucks. The upheaval marked a generational transition at DC, as the old-timers who had helped create the superheroes in the thirties and forties were giving way to fans who’d grown up reading their work. The shift also marked the arrival of Marvel’s sensibility at DC.

Hawk arguing for aggressive action and Dove favoring nonviolence. The concept was a not-too-subtle take on the political climate of the day, when the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War were dividing America.

“I remember Denny [O’Neil] came down the hall in 1969 and said that the Kinney board had a vote to shut down DC,” writer Mike Friedrich recalls. “And they voted not to shut it down because of the ancillary revenue, which was already enough by 1969 to make it worth keeping going a publishing entity that was in the red.”

Forever People, New Gods, and Mister Miracle. “They’re sensational. When is Marvel putting them out?” Infantino asked. “They’re my creations, and I don’t want to do them at Marvel,” Kirby said. “Would you make me an offer?”

Stan Lee may have been the public face of Marvel, but Kirby was the heart.

“Back in the seventies you really perceived yourself as playing for a team—either Marvel or DC,” Conway says. “Going to DC, especially after Kirby’s move in 1970, it really felt to the people at Marvel that I was betraying the company.”

leading to the standing joke at DC that by the time the company got around to following a trend, you could be sure the trend was over.

A venerable company in a field historically populated almost exclusively by men was now going to be led by a woman.

National Periodical Publications soon officially became DC Comics, and the change was reflected in the books on sale in late 1976.

Warner Bros. let them go for cheap, with the then head of production saying dismissively, “It’s not a good property for a film.”

The DC staff attended a screening at a Times Square theater four days before the movie opened to the general public. What they saw blew them away. The film had understood the essence of Superman, embracing it instead of rejecting it for fear that it might turn off mainstream audiences. Here, on the screen, was everything that made Superman great, and it filled the DC staff with pride for their character and the company’s long history. For the first time in a while a sense of optimism and community filled DC’s halls.

The same year Marvel—encouraged by Dazzler’s success—converted three of its titles that were struggling on the newsstand, Micronauts, Moon Knight, and Ka-Zar, to direct-only books. “At the time the focus was the newsstand. That changed gradually,” says Marvel’s former publisher Mike Hobson.

Camelot 3000, a twelve-issue limited series released to the direct market in fall 1982, was a futuristic spin on Arthurian legend that tackled heady issues such as gender identity and incest. It was written by Mike Barr and drawn by acclaimed British artist Brian Bolland. Barr had conceived of the tale of the reincarnated Knights of the Round Table after taking a literature course in college.

The Omega Men (April 1983) was another direct-only title that made waves for its adult content—in this case graphic violence and cannibalism. The comic spun out of Green Lantern and featured a rag-tag team of extraterrestrial mercenaries. Its extreme content unnerved some store owners and had a few industry veterans publicly calling for a ratings system to be imposed on comic books, similar to what movies had.

DC’s gamble on creators and unique voices paid off, producing what is perhaps the most fertile period in the company’s—and the industry’s—history. This was the moment comics finally grew up and began to be taken seriously.

As Stan Lee would say, Nuff said.

The trade paperback changed the game.”

(Nomad, anyone?)

I was a Nomad fan.

Todd McFarlane was a brash, young Canadian artist who’d broken into comics in the early 1980s before landing his first regular gig drawing DC’s Infinity Inc. in 1985. McFarlane’s unique visual style was evident, even on his earliest jobs. He hacked a boring rectangular page into experimental panel layouts and had a way of rendering capes in such a dramatic, billowing way that it made the lamest hero look plain cool. He was clearly a star on the rise.

McFarlane drew the hero in a stylized, exaggerated manner, giving him eyes so large that they rivaled Amanda Seyfried’s. He posed Spidey in acrobatic positions impossible for a normal human and drew his webbing in a more realistic, three-dimensional way. He made Peter Parker’s then wife, Mary Jane, look like something out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

Sales were certainly strong. There was only one problem, however. In its hunger to drop this hot new title on the market, Marvel had overlooked a small but crucial detail. McFarlane had never written anything in his life, and it showed. Spider-Man #1 was loaded with McFarlane’s unique artistic stylings, but the story, to put it charitably, was incomprehensible.

Spider-Man seemed to represent a cynical new low, a triumph of product and commerce over artistry.

Rob Liefeld, a self-described “young punk,” had gotten his big break at DC drawing a 1988 Hawk and Dove miniseries that established the penciler, like McFarlane, as an artist with a unique and recognizable style—in this case, hyper-muscled men, pneumatic-chested women, floppy nineties hair, and faces slashed with lines, straining from effort. And also like McFarlane, Liefeld would defect to Marvel, where he would attain superstardom.

Like Spider-Man, it too was not great literature, but look at that really cool gun!

Comics were die-cut, embossed with foil, tinted in gold, and made to glow in the dark in a desperate bid to throw something novel onto the stands.

DC lagged because the company, with its entrenched corporate culture and aspirations of literature, was less prone to cash in on the fads. It also continued to suffer from the chronic popularity deficit, in comparison to Marvel, that had plagued it since the 1960s.

The initial twelve Amalgam titles landed on shelves in February 1996, leaving the fanboy community trembling with joy at seeing the universes mashed up. If readers only knew how far the original plans extended. The initial proposal called for one particularly unprecedented piece of cooperation: The publishers would actually exchange characters for a year. Someone from the Marvel universe—She-Hulk was given as an example—would appear in DC’s publications, and someone from the DC universe would cross over into Marvel’s.

Howard the Duck, released in 1986, was Marvel’s first modern-day big-screen adaptation, and the title earned just $16 million domestically against a $36 million budget. It was such a spectacular loser that it supposedly led to a fistfight between two Universal executives over who was to blame. The Punisher cast Swedish lunkhead Dolph Lundgren as the guntoting vigilante for a 1989 dud that went straight to video. Also skipping theaters was 1992’s Captain America. The bargain-basement thriller—sorry, “thriller”—from director Albert Pyun got hustled into production following the success of Batman, but he didn’t have the budget (a reported $7.5 million) or script to do the story justice.

Fantastic Four was the perhaps the biggest black eye of all. A German company had optioned the property in the mid-1980s, and it was put into production more or less because the option was set to expire in 1992, dashing Marvel’s hope of reacquiring the potentially valuable property in the wake of Batman’s success. In the contract Marvel had failed to specify a minimum budget, so executive producer Bernd Eichinger went ahead with a rock-bottom level of reportedly just $1 million. The cast, which included Jay Underwood and Rebecca Staab, was paid a measly $3,500 a week, and the on-set catering consisted of little more than bologna sandwiches. The special effects budget was just as skimpy. Mr. Fantastic’s stretching was accomplished in one shot by attaching an empty glove to a pole and pulling.

The comic book adaptation that kicked off the modern-day obsession is a movie that many don’t even realize is from a comic book. Men in Black, the 1997 Will Smith–Tommy Lee Jones blockbuster, was adapted from an obscure black-and-white comic published in 1990 by indie press Aircel. Aircel was later acquired by Malibu, which was then bought by Marvel in 1994.

New Line Cinema’s Blade followed the next year.

The real game changer would come in 2000. Marvel and its various partners had been trying to adapt its most successful print property, the X-Men, into film for nearly two decades. Comic writer Chris Claremont had written an outline in 1982, and Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas had taken a crack at a screenplay in 1984 for Orion Pictures. Like so many proposed adaptations before them, they simply sat in a drawer.

July 1993—was reasonable. At the time comic book properties were commanding around $100,000 to $200,000.

The problem for Marvel came with the contract’s language. Rights contracts are usually written with ridiculous specificity to try to define exactly what the buyer is getting. The language in this particular contract, according to sources, was too broad and ended up transferring a larger-than-expected swath of Marvel’s intellectual property to Fox. In short, instead of a limited number of X-Men, the movie studio ended up landing the rights to all things mutant in the Marvel universe in perpetuity. That windfall includes not just the X-Men we all recognize, such as Professor X and Wolverine, but also dozens of other characters from Marvel’s numerous X titles.

“They were good deals at the time, in that they got us into the movie business. We didn’t have the money or the expertise to do it,” says Marvel’s former publisher Shirrel Rhoades. “Now, they’re bad deals because Marvel is doing so well with The Avengers and the other stuff. The people running Marvel wish those deals had never been made, but back then it got our foot in the door.”

The thing that separated them from other superheroes was that they were outsiders, shunned by society for being different.

the X-Men and the persecution they suffered for being mutants was an allegory for the mistreatment of every marginalized group in society. If you were gay, a minority—even a comic book reader who’d been made fun of—you saw yourself in the X-Men.

Fox immediately started planning sequels, and the movie’s runaway success also helped jumpstart other films based on Marvel characters, including Daredevil at Fox and a long-gestating Hulk movie at Universal.

But it was to be a movie based on another Marvel character that would become the genre’s biggest hit to date: 2002’s Spider-Man.

the company gave audiences 1997’s Steel, starring basketball lug nut Shaquille O’Neal in a suit of armor.

That’s not my idea of what I want to see in a movie,” Downey said. “This is so high-brow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie. You know what? Fuck DC Comics. That’s all I have to say, and that’s where I’m really coming from.”

If you went to see, say, Catwoman and loved it (assuming there was something very wrong with you), you really had nowhere to go from there.