DC and Marvel: A Difference of Worlds
Images property of DC Comics (left) and Marvel Comics (right)
12 minutes
What makes Marvel and DC different? To me, this is more interesting than the question of which is better? That’s because, at their core, the Big Two approach heroism from different ends of the microscope. Not in every case, of course. Copycat and parallel characters, special circumstances and alternative approaches contribute to muddy the waters of classification. Still, I think most people would agree that each world presents its own unique sense of heroic reality. Without getting too far into the weeds then, I will try to find their basic natures in order to contrast them. To accomplish this, I’ll explore the matter through two lenses: the drama of limits, and the heroic identity.
The Drama of Limits
Marvel heroes are finite. Their powers, in principle, can be quantified. Their virtues are real, but have real limits as well. Their spheres of influence, even geographically speaking, tend to be small and focused. They may even have morally questionable qualities, like Wolverine, but they are struggling to work through them. Both individually, and in the teams they tend to form, they are specialists. Even a character with as far a reach as Charles Xavier can only do one good thing at a time. With obvious exceptions, Marvel heroes and heroines are generally not demigods. They are men and women to whom something has been added.
X-Men, Volume 1, #1, Len Wein, Dave Cockrum (Marvel Comics)
DC characters are colossal. Their powers are much harder to quantify, and they tend to have more of them. While they may have a home base, their mission often extends toward the whole human race. They have fewer obvious character flaws, though they need to acquire wisdom — especially wisdom about non-super people — in order to fulfill their vocations. They are often demigods for all practical purposes (and no, the Pointy-Eared One is not really an exception.) They may or may not have been men at one time, but even so, they’ve undergone a transformation which puts them properly outside of and above mankind. This last point is rather crucial.
Superman and The Spectre, Len Wein, Jim Starlin, Romeo Tanghal (DC Comics)
When Bruce Wayne became the Batman, he started down a path that led him ever-further from being Bruce Wayne. The Green Lantern’s powers are essentially unlimited, and the one that wears the ring is set apart from the human race by virtue of the immense power he wields. The Flash’s speed makes him practically omnipresent, since he can effectively be everywhere at once. In becoming Flash, he became something permanently more than an ordinary man, and, as a result, responsible for him. I will save the more obvious examples of DC “colossality” for the section on heroic identity.
My, what lovely eyes you have, Batman!
Returning to Marvel, we may note that the Marvel hero tends to have one or more related powers, and these powers are generally well-defined. The Hulk is stronger than Spider-Man, who in turn is physically stronger than Wolverine, who can obviously kick Cyclops’ ass, etc. Now the first guy on that list is extremely powerful, but not even in the classic era was he move-an-entire-planet powerful. ( I mean, Wolverine can hurt him!) And Logan’s several powers, though impressive, are far from unlimited. Even his claws come with a personal price-tag.
Wolverine; Volume 2, #75, Larry Hama, Adam Kubert (Marvel Comics)
A practical consequence of Marvel’s approach to limits is that its heroes (and villains) tend to form teams. True, there are also some well-known DC teams, but a Marvel team tends to play a more crucial role in its members’ personal development, as well as in maximizing their heroic effectiveness. I would go so far as to say that Marvel groups are a lot like surrogate families, while DC teams are something more like the 92 Olympic Dream Team; an assembly of the best-of-the-best, the standalone champions who can be persuaded, on occasion, to work together. Now both approaches can yield great stories, but they’re obviously quite different.
The Pseudo-Transcendent DC Demigod
As has been frequently noted, DC heroes are like gods among men. More specifically, they are demigods, beings who stand in a class just above the human race, but who mingle with and live among them, sometimes forming very close relationships with these mere mortals. If the DC hero is colossal, his mission and responsibilities are correspondingly huge. This is because he’s been chosen by Fate or Providence to occupy a role that no mere man or woman can occupy. The difference between his powers, and those of the ordinary human (or even of the strong meta-human) are of kind, not of degree. For that reason, his relationship with the human race is far more remote than, say, the relationship of a police officer, a general, a president, or, even an Iron Man to the people he’s charged to protect. Those humans may have power and responsibility, but they cannot take in all of the problems at once, nor do they have the reach or force necessary to solve them all. On the contrary, because they are men, their attempts to play god are as likely as not to make things worse. If Superman tries and fails to save the human race, he will take it hard, but the only lesson for him is that maybe he can’t save absolutely everyone. On the other hand, if some Marvel hero attempts an ultimate solution to all problems, the effort is likely to have unexpected and disastrous consequences.
Not so for the demigods; Wonder Woman, Batman, the Spectre, etc. These Powers and Principalities drop in from on high to solve the problems that even an enhanced person couldn’t solve, and they normally have both the strength and the wisdom to do so without generating hidden costs. Heck, Wonder Woman has a lasso that makes you tell the truth!
The prototypical DC hero fills an eschatological slot that we leave open only for gods, angels, or messiahs. We seem to need and want this role to be filled, for we recognize that there are forms of goodness that we cannot preserve without divine intervention, and forms of evil that we cannot oppose without it. The sheer number of pop songs calling for Superman, or lamenting his absence, demonstrates this intuition. Indeed, it is no coincidence that DC villains tend to be either vengeful madman or master connivers, for these represent two types of evil for which we have no rational response. Just who could fight the Joker, if not the Batman? Just who could fight the untraceable, invisible, robber-baron connivances of a Lex Luthor, if not for a plain-spoken, all-American, omnipotent Superman? Flying above his city, and listening with his super-hearing for the cries of the unwashed needy, he is an obvious figure of Christ — or at least a very sturdy Moses.
The same pseudo-transcendence applies, by the way, even to Batman. The point about Batman is that he is not a man. Not really. Bruce Wayne is just a costume now. The avenging angel that is Batman emerged from a cocoon whose first threads were spun in Crime Alley, and this creature keeps Wayne around as a means to disguise its true identity. That’s why Wayne’s eyes disappear when he puts on the cowl. The eyes are the windows to the soul.
Batman: Year One, Frank Miller (DC Comics)
Now we could multiply such examples ad infinitum, but they are more than sufficient to make the central point that the DC hero is a necessary demigod, a higher being, set apart from man for the sake of man. He is an adult; we are the children. And if his powers and privileges are great, the accompanying burdens are equally so. But this is a very different approach to the heroism than we generally find in Marvel Comics.
Marvel, and the Drama of the Man-Hero
In New York City there lives a man with a a job, a widowed aunt, and a woman that he loves. His name is Peter Parker. Sometimes he dons a mask, becoming Spider-Man, yet Peter is always there beneath the costume, a man making use of an icon. True, chance gave him powers no normal man has, but neither chance nor fate made him something other than human.
Elsewhere in Marvel Land, there lives a troubled scientist who would like to live a normal life, but the monster inside him wants out as much as Bruce Banner wants to keep him in. The monster’s powers are god-like, and the cause of much destruction and sorrow, but since Banner is a decent fellow, he can at least aim the monster at decency and justice. The man beneath the monster will not be healed until this duality is resolved into some kind of wholeness.
“What’s a matter, Bruce? It’s just me, your heroic alter-ego…”
Somewhere in Europe, a warrior with a mission drives forward behind his star-spangled shield, bowling-over a crowd of twelve strong men. His strength may be greater than all of theirs combined, but not greater than fifty of these goons. He still requires strategy to win, and he can still be killed. His muscles give him the best chance to behave heroically, but it is mostly his spirit, the aura of decency, purity, and leadership he exudes, that makes him seem as invulnerable as the Hulk. On occasion, this American spartan has teamed up with another super-solder of a decidedly different character.
Logan is the man without a past, a hero with a secret identity that not even he knows. (Yeah, okay. He’s James Howlett, but still…) Like Captain America, Logan’s power stems partly from his nature, and partly from what was done to him. Unlike Marvel’s white knight, the man called Wolverine has seen too much of the dark side of power to ever look on the world with rosy eyes. He chooses to do good, to try to spare others what he has suffered, but he’s no golden boy. He’s one of the walking wounded.
Ororo Monroe. Reed Richards. Charles Xavier. Jean Gray. Ben Grimm. I don’t want to beat a horse to death, but in case it’s not obvious, each and every one one of these characters is himself, with or without disguise. He or she is not an imperishable icon. He cannot escape membership in the human race. And often that human race holds him in suspicion. The mask is almost never a metamorphosis of his being into something else, something higher. (And when it is, as with Jean Gray and Dark Phoenix, this is usually a bad thing.) Reed Richards is just as much himself when stretching his mind, as when stretching his body.
Fantastic Four, Volume 1, #380, Tom Defalco, Paul Ryan (Marvel Comics)
True, the icon Captain America is something more than the man, Steve Rogers; but for Steven, as for most of Marvel’s man-heroes, the human actor still drives the icon. He or she makes use of its totem-like power. Meanwhile, in the symbolic New Yorks of Gotham and Metropolis, the icon subsumes the man. He changes into the icon, and, in doing so, becomes a living myth.
Yes, you will find exceptions to these observations about gods (Thor!) and masks in Marvel and DC. Well-read fans can produce counter-examples to all of the above. It complicates the matter that both companies borrow from each other, not just explicitly (Deadpool/Deathstroke!) but in more subtle ways. Marvel has a number of “supermen”, and DC has tried its hand at un-perfecting its own icons, and importing Marvel-style mutant-hating. Yet I would argue that these experimental divergences are the exceptions that prove the rule. The core of the two worlds is still the heroic struggles of the demigods (DC) and the human struggles of the heroes (Marvel). Neither ethos is absolutely uniform in-world, and there are many degrees of difference even within the different suburbs of each shared comic universe. Yet it remains true that DC’s is the more “vertical” story realm, and Marvel’s the more “horizontal.” These dynamics become clearer when we compare the images of good and evil that each tends to present.
Good and Evil in Marvel and DC
We’ve already alluded to the fact that DC heroes and heroines, at least in their classical/iconic incarnations, have a certain moral purity. They tend to embody the highest secular values of the society they are protecting. Also, and not entirely unrelated to this, the DC hero tends not be psychologically complicated. He tends not to suffer from intense emotional trauma. His role in creation is well-established, even venerable, as if he were part of creation’s noble class. His god’s eye point of view and noblesse oblige, make him generally lovable to the people — at least to all of the decent people.
Kingdom Come, Alex Ross (DC Comics)
Marvel also has heroes like this — Captain America and Spider-Man come especially to mind — but they are in the minority. And when Marvel heroes aren’t haunted by some kind of enduring psychological or social trauma, they still tend to clash on the level of human values. Captain America may be pure of heart, but there are problems he’s blinded to precisely because he hasn’t been at the receiving end of certain kinds of evil. Spider-Man may be loved by the people, but he’s only a man under that mask, and must deal with the persistent difficulties of his own life, and endless attacks from an unreliable and muckraking press. Wolverine and Cyclops are both firmly on the side of good, but one has been through a living hell, and has had to walk around and live inside it constantly, dishing out the violence dealt to him, while keeping himself back from a crossing a moral line. Cyclops — whose last name is Summers, for crying out loud — has the cheerful ignorance of the rich and beautiful, and problems that seem big to him, but can be managed with a pair of fancy, rose-colored sunglasses.
So a scenario like that which is found in Civil War, where hero fights hero over the correct emphasis and application of certain common values, is much more natural to the Marvel than to DC. DC’s demigods may disagree, but at the end of the day, they are still members of the same council of philosopher kings. Men, meanwhile, even super-powered men, tend to be limited by their perspectives. One of the evils typical of the Marvel Universe is the evil of these irreconcilable points of view; that is, the unsettling disunity of good men and women. Yes, DC has also explored this concept in very notable ways — the enduring tension between Superman and Batman, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and so on — but it’s not nearly as common there, nor should it be. The DC hero, even one as traumatized as Batman, generally knows what’s right, and generally has the power to make it happen. The Marvel hero suffers limitations of vision, scope of influence, and of temperament. It’s hardly coincidental that Charles Xavier, who sees truth so clearly, is also crippled.
But if there is at least some overlap between Marvel and DC when it comes to how it’s good guys embody goodness, there’s less overlap in their respective pictures of evil. DC heroes, as noted here, deal with insanity. More specifically, the D.C. villain tends to be some kind of extreme. Destructive insanity and malevolent connivance are the two poles of DC villainy, and its rogues’ gallery is filled with extremes at one end or the other — and sometimes both. Even a mere mortal like Lex Luthor fits the bill, for he is that persistent internal enemy of democracy, the well-moneyed string-puller. Doomsday is the pure destructiveness of evil; Darkseid, its demonic cold-hearted tyranny; the Joker, it’s vicious, flippant insanity. Even sympathetic villains like Two-Face and Mr. Freeze tend to be madmen, rather than ideologues. (Poison Ivy is a notable exception.)
Magneto, he is not.
Contrast this with Magneto, whose villainy is rooted in a partially accurate assessment of the human race. He knows only too well what humans would do to mutants if they could, and he’s willing to do evil in order to put mutants in the driver’s seat. He can admire Xavier’s moral purity, but he sees it as naïve. Thanos would solve the problem of hunger by getting rid of the hungry. His villainy is rooted in the evil of bad ideas, and too-simple solutions. Other Marvel villains are demigods who wish to assert their rights as higher beings. It seems notable that there is not much room in the ordinary Marvel Universe for übermenschen, for super-men that is — unless they’re villains, while the same beings occupy a natural space within the DC Universe. (I am leaving aside here the high gods of both universes, at which scale these distinctions begin to break down.) Finally, the worst kinds of evils encountered in the Marvel Universe are forms of mindlessness and banality. Prejudice. Indifferent and destructive cosmic forces. Predatory bio-organic viruses. Even terrible pieces of legislation. Things, in other words, without faces. These are disturbingly modern forms of evil, and they help to account for Marvel’s reputation as the more “realistic” of the two comic universes. With exceptions, it’s generally true that the worst evils in DC are quasi-demonic beings, whereas the worst evils in Marvel are demonic (or banal) structures.
Exceptions to the Above
Now any comic fan who has read this far has already thought of a dozen individual cases that don’t fit the above generalizations. And there are many such exceptions. Marvel has it’s DC-like villains, and its supermen. DC has its egalitarian moments, and its wounded-heroes. Generalizations like those above are not categorical statements. They are meant to capture the overall sense of things, and the distinct difference in flavor between the two worlds. And I would still argue that the general differences hold partially true, even in the exceptions. While it would take too many examples to illustrate the point, I have noticed that even when Marvel imports a DC-typical character, or when DC imports a Marvel-typical theme, they do so with implicit reference to their own norms. Batman fighting Superman, or Superman struggling with doubts, are interesting ideas precisely because, like shadows, they cast the normal state of affairs in relief, and by doing so, better illustrate the moral universe these characters inhabit. As a matter of good Aristotelean reasoning, we should try to use observation to discover the typical case first, rather than make a rule out of borderline cases. Borderline cases are most clearly seen in light of the archetypes from which they vary.
Another possible objection to the considerations above is that they are outdated. After all, haven’t both comic book universes become morally muddy? Haven’t the heroes become champions of wokeness and relevance? Aren’t they tormented by “ableist” guilt? Haven’t some of these characters been killed off, replaced, severely limited, or morally compromised in recent years? My answer is the same: exceptions — and that includes fads that drive down sales and repel future fans — do not make a rule. In evaluating what’s typical of Marvel and DC, we naturally take as examples the more stable incarnations of these characters over time. For all I know, Superman may now be a fire-breathing feminist with tongue rings, and Captain America may have been re-christened Captain Anti-America. At this point, I have no idea who Spider-Man is, though I have heard that Wolverine died, but is not really dead anymore. (Shocker.)
Without getting off on a tangent, let it suffice that I am no more interested in exploring avant garde Marvel and DC than the filmmakers are in putting it on screen. Nobody can fall in love with a Superman who is dark and unnecessarily violent (yes, I’m talking to you Zack Snyder!), or a morally and patriotically ambivalent Captain America. Whatever side routes these universes have taken in recent years, it isn’t the side routes that inspire love and devotion, nor which typical fans regard as the best examples of their world. My selection of examples reflect this narrative (and commercial) reality.
In closing — if I’ve not lost you — the essences of Marvel and DC revolve around their different approaches to the drama of limits, and their approach to the nature and role of the hero or heroine. DC heroes are demigods, noble royalty, who stand apart from the mass of people, but who watch over them like gods or guardian angels. Their super identities are their true identities, because they are living myths. Marvel heroes are men and woman with real virtues but limited perspectives, blessed (and, sometimes cursed) with powers that give them a choice either to do some good, to be indifferent, or to be evil. Even when they make use of an icon, the icon still rests on the man or woman beneath the mask.
Detective Comics #33, Bob Kane (DC Comics)
Some kind of benevolent providence stands behind the DC Universe, calling heroes into being, but providence is harder to see in the Marvel Universe, a place where imperfect human judgment and human free will must make the best of things. These two worlds are not absolutely contradictory, and there may be interesting ways to combine them, but they represent distinct perspectives.
But I’d love to hear your take! Is there something big that I missed? Which of the Big Two do you prefer, and why?
© 2021 Joseph Breslin All Rights Reserved