Millarworld is taking up the important issues of the day, with two polls: Is Marvel Starting to Loose It? and Can DC Ever Get It Back Again? It’s interesting to see the reasons why starter of both polls, Jim Ohara, asked the questions in the first place. On Marvel:
Marvel have had a tremendous run of the past 10 years, turning around their properties and now dominating the market like never before. But with most companies, when you have a run of success things start to go wrong. It’s a factor of thinking everything you do is right, not thinking through the big ideas, letting standards drop when you have such a big lead, and just the natural course of things. It feels like over the past year or so, Marvel have really started to slip from their great run… Basically it feels like Marvel is relying on it’s B tier characters these days. It’s great to be reading them, but this can’t last forever. At some point they need to fix their headliners. It’s like DC being successful without WW, Batman, Flash, Supes and GL.
On DC:
They’ve had a crisis to try and correct things, they’re running year long events that most people can’t understand, and they struggle to get a comic selling over 100k issues a month. Their main properties seem to be without direction, and their overall universe is a mess that’s impenetrable for new readers. It seems they’re relying on gimmicks to drive numbers, and there really is no end in sight… Even their ‘All Star’ brand seems to either be hit by scheduling issues, or it’s just a bit silly. They’ve really lost it from their peak in the early 90’s and have sat sadly on the sidelines as Marvel has taken their market share year after year after year.
I love the bit where “it’s a bit silly” is used as proof that DC’s All Star line isn’t working. That’s actually a scientific term, you know.
October 12th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
LOL at the notion that DC was at its peak, either creatively or in terms of market share, in the early 90’s. Even when Knightfall and Death of Superman were big, the rank-and-file DC titles were struggling.
October 12th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Which finger is in the wind?
October 12th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Marvel today is doing the much of the same as DC in the early 90s. So to decry one and hold the other up as the example is ‘a bit silly’.
I do agree DC is a mess. At this point I wish they would just relegate their ongoing continuity to an Earth 2 or something and then just reboot the whole damn thing.
Marvel’s not so far gone but I do wish they’d stop taking themselves so seriously.
October 13th, 2007 at 8:33 am
I’m a huge DC fan. When they are on, they are on, but when they blow it, they really, really blow it. 52 was complex, satisfying, and proved that story is king. One Year Later pretty much uniformally sucked. It was disasterous, leaving most of the monthlies in worse shape than before. Countdown started out badly and worked its way up to okay. Not the best scenario for a monthly $12 investment. On the other hand, anything Geoff Johns related has been kick-ass.
So please, DC, drop the gimmicks and just focus on the best storytelling and art that you can deliver. Look at Marvel. Sure they can get gimmicky (death of Cap), but when you have a high-caliber writer like Brubaker, you can walk the high wire a bit. (And yeah, I think DC really dropped the ball by losing Bru to Marvel.)
October 13th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
The thing is though, no one knew about Brubaker until he was at Marvel. Its another case that if you want to make a name for yourself in superhero comics, go work at Marvel.