Marvel vs DC

Cards on the table. I'm a bit of a Marvel bloke. I bought into Stan's whole "Make Mine Marvel" ethos in the early seventies, and mainly for good reasons. Marvel comics had a complexity and (seems odd to think of it now) realism that DC didn't even attempt to emulate. Sure, in hindsight, those comics were crude and even a bit silly at times (The Yancy Street gang, I ask you!). But the characterisations and interweaving story lines were just the right recipe for the impressionable younger me.



















In contrast, DC has some of the biggest superhero hitters, but they had a house style that seemed trivial and a little juvenile in comparisons to Marvel at the time. Some of that legacy is still there in DC mythology - the Riddler just so happens to be called E. Nigma, for instance, and much recent revisionism tries to make sense of this - but that was all par for the course in those days. (Yes, I'm well aware that Marvel had their fair share of silly names too).

Time moved on, and from the late seventies and into the eighties, DC adopted something much closer to the Marvel style, with increasingly sophisticated story lines. Some of the best work in mainstream comics has come from DC since then - Watchmen, Sandman, Hellblazer and The Dark Knight Returns, to mention just a few. And there's a telling point. Of those, only one featured an existing DC top property. With The Dark Knight Returns, Batman seems to have been the superhero big hitter most suitable for a dark, more realistic, more adult redevelopment.

Comics have moved a long way since then, in many ways. But the big business right now is the superhero movie. This year already the biggest movies have been The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man.

So, to get back to my point. I'm a Marvel bloke, deep down. I liked Spider-Man. Really good fun, well crafted, and even thought-provoking (especially if you, like I do, spend a lot of time working out how the story line does and will fit into the original Spider-man mythology and/or maybe the Ultimate universe mythology). Even better, I absolutely loved The Avengers. Spectacular. Fun. Surprisingly, not just bangs and crashes, but actually interesting too, at almost every turn. But maybe I would have always liked The Avengers. I was rooting for it before it began. By the way - I can't help but love that The Avengers' Nick Fury is played by Samuel L. Jackson - as not-so-subtly suggested by artist Bryan Hitch in Marvel's Avengers reboot, The Ultimates as far back as 2002

However, that's enough of that. I've just come back from watching The Dark Knight Rises, and it's head and shoulders above any of those. It covers every base. It's at turns, gritty, spectacular, thought-provoking, surprising (yes, there were things that I didn't see coming - when's the last time a Hollywood movie did that?), and even quite moving. If The Dark Knight was all about The Joker, and about challenging black and white morality with shades of grey, this new movie is about Bruce Wayne, and what drives him to fight on, even when there seems to be nothing to fight for. Even when it costs him everything. Even when it has maybe already cost him everything.

Christopher Nolan has done a great job with this franchise. Cleverly, Warner Brothers/DC have allowed him a great deal of control, and seem to have even allowed him to draw a line under a lucrative film series. I guess maybe they figure they can always reboot again another day, when the cash registers will roll again. To their credit, though - allowing Nolan to craft a coherent trilogy of thoughtful films for grown ups about a guy in a rubber mask...

I don't need to tell you any more. I'm still a Marvel guy deep down. I know if Galactus doesn't get us, Ultron will. Or Doom. Or Loki. But there will always be a quinjet there somewhere. It doesn't stop me thinking that the Batman movie was the best superhero film I've seen in some time. In fact, it's a good movie full stop.