Dr. Fate-love: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love DC Comics

I love DC Comics way more than I love Marvel. Here's why.

So, I’ve talked about my love of the X-Men and Wolverine here, telling long, loving stories about how they’ve affected my life. I wouldn’t blame any of you for thinking that I like Marvel more than DC. However, that’s not been the case for a very long time. In fact, I have a lot of disdain for Marvel outside of the X-Men. We’re not going into that here, because today we’re talking about DC Comics and why I think it’s the best when it comes to superheroes, comic books, and superhero comic books.

Let’s begin, shall we.

So, for Constant Readers (yes, I’m stealing that from Stephen King forewords), you might know about my history of loving superheroes, but I’ll go into it again because it’s important to my overall thesis. I was born in 1980, so my first exposures to what we now call geek culture were Star Wars, SuperFriends, and the 1960s Batman TV show. SuperFriends was a big deal for me as a kid. I had a lot of SuperFriends action figures and I loved the show. I can remember my Superman, my Batman and Robin, my Hal Jordan, my Hawkman, my Lex Luthor, and my beloved Firestorm figure. I remember having the SuperCar toy, and the Lex Luthor equivalent. I remember the Kryptonite ring that had a magnet into it and how when you put it up to Superman’s chest, the magnet in his chest would push against it and he’d fall down. I’d remember how angry I’d get at the punching action that the figures had because I wanted to be able to pose them and control their arm movements.

I remember Darkseid becoming the big bad of SuperFriends, and the line of Burger King toys that coincided with this. I remember an Aquaman toy that I got from a Burger King in Brooksville, Fl that was still there the last time I was in the area a few years ago. I remember a Darkseid cup holder. SuperFriends was my first exposure to superheroes as a child and I loved them. Sure, the show doesn’t at all hold up today, but for a young boy in the early ‘80s, SuperFriends and the toys from the show were manna from Heaven. I also loved the 1960s Batman show, which was still re-run on multiple channels in the 1980s. The first DC comic book I can remember reading is from the story Batman: Year Two, a story that took place in Batman’s second year of superheroing, and dealt with him dealing with a fellow vigilante known as the Reaper. I think I was in 2nd grade, but it may have been 4th because I can remember the classroom I was in when I read it and it wasn’t my 3rd grade one. I loved the story and the art - by Todd McFarlane and Alan Davis - stuck out to me. I would later encounter them both at Marvel when I started reading comics and remembered how much I loved their Batman art.

Fast forward a few years, and I would begin reading comics in earnest in 1991. While the X-Men were my preference, I would basically buy anything at the spinner rack. Back then, it was easy to get Superman and Batman comics at the spinner racks of gas stations and I would buy them. I loved the Marvel trading cards that I had started collecting, and soon saw a DC set. I began buying the DC card set and I can still remember the first card in the first pack I opened - Hourman I, Rex Tyler.

DC was kind of like apocrypha to me at the time. The DC Universe has always been seen as more complicated than Marvel and there’s good reason for that - it is. Back then, I would read Wizard magazine and see phrases like “pre-Crisis”, “Earth-One”, and “Multiverse”, which would kind of cause my mind to glaze over. However, I always had an esteem for Superman and 1992, the second year of my comic love affair, would see the biggest Superman story of them all - The Death Of Superman. I was enthralled by this story and of course had every issue. My Dad’s girlfriend had to wait in line at the comic store on the day Superman (Vol. 2) #75 came out to get me two copies of the black polybagged special edition. I would have waited in line myself, but my mom wouldn’t let me not go to school just to wait in line for a comic book.

Yes, in 1992, comics were popular enough that you sometimes you had to wait in line to get them. It was a different time.

However, after The Death of Superman, I really didn’t read much DC. I was all in on the X-Men and other Marvel books, and most of my knowledge of DC books came from the comic book magazines that I was reading and my friend Shane, who read pretty much every comic. I would still buy some DC books, but it wasn’t until 1996’s Kingdom Come, which was hyped up in Wizard magazine, that I would begin to give DC a chance again. The story - set in a future where Superman’s retirement spurred his generation of heroes to go away and be replaced by a more violent breed of metahuman - was a reaction to the ‘90s Marvel and Image comics I had been reading for years and I feel in love with it. My old love of Superman was a big reason for this - Kingdom Come is very much a Superman story - and it gave me an in to what DC should be.

So, the Marvel Universe is a place that is basically the world outside your window. The heroes of the Marvel Universe are human in the ways that count. People see themselves in Spider-Man and his failures. I see myself - and my father - in Wolverine. Generations of people have seen their struggles in those of the X-Men. Iron Man’s alcoholism brings the billionaire genius playboy down a peg. Most of Marvel’s biggest characters have these little foibles. DC is different.

DC is full of archetypes, of the heroic ideal and it can be very hard to see ourselves in ideals. So many people say that Superman is boring because he’s perfect. Batman is called Batgod because he always wins. The Flash can defeat anyone. Wonder Woman is a princess from a perfect place. Hal Jordan is the greatest space cop ever. The power levels in the DC Universe are much higher than those in the Marvel Universe. It’s the gods clashing. It’s mythology. And that’s why DC is amazing. Mythology is an important part of the human experience. Characters like Superman are basically the Hercules of the modern days. Marvel has Jason and the Argonauts, DC has the gods of Olympus and their demi-god children.

Kingdom Come led to me buying JLA, the first Grant Morrison comic I ever read. JLA was a reboot of the Justice League, bringing together Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Lantern, the Flash (although these were the ‘90s versions of the classic characters - Kyle Rayner and Wally West respectively), and Martian Manhunter again for the first time in years. The SuperFriends were back in my life and they were fighting battles unlike anything I had ever seen in Marvel or in the old SuperFriends cartoons. However, even in the latter years of the ‘90s, I was still buying more Marvel, although that was still mostly because I read a lot of X-Men comics. The only DC books I read on a monthly basis were JLA and Preacher, the Vertigo classic from Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. I remember reading a friend’s copy of DC One Million in 1998 in the high school gym in senior year. My senior year would also been when I finally read Wacthmen and The Dark Knight Returns, after years of reading about them.

My local comic store closed down in 1999 and after graduating high school, I ended up moving in with my Dad for a few years because he got cancer. There was a comic store by his house but it closed down by 2000, so I was back to buying comics from newsstands at grocery stores and spinner racks. The problem was that most places stopped selling new comics and I was mostly forced to buy collected editions from bookstores. There was still Wizard magazine, and that helped. I would also start buying collected editions of The Sandman, a comic I would share with my friend Danielle. Eventually, I found a new comic store and it was back to having a pull, which was, of course, mostly X-Men books.

2004 would see Identity Crisis drop, a book that is now controversial and looked down on. Back then, in the edgelord early ‘00s, it was a favorite of, well, everyone. It got me into DC again, and after that DC would take my comic-loving heart. My pull would become mostly DC and I was obsessed with the build-up to Infinite Crisis. I had recently read Crisis On Infinite Earths and gained an esteem for the pre-Crisis DC Multiverse. Grant Morrison’s New X-Men made me love them as a writer even more, and I started buying collected editions of the ‘90s Vertigo classic The Invisibles (I got volumes one, two, and four at MegaCon in 2004 or 2005 and had to order volume three and the rest from my LCS). DC Comics became the lifeblood of my comic obsession. JSA brought back the classic Golden Age superteam, my memory of my Hourman I card from the early ‘90s DC trading card set coming back as I read what was at the time considered the best team book out. Geoff Johns was king and DC was firing on all cylinders.

Since then, things have changed a lot for DC and for me. DC went from the highs of Infinite Crisis and the years after to the New 52 and the five years of that disaster, and the diminishing sales returns that leads us to today. I’ve had my bouts with addiction and unemployment, sometimes because of addiciton, as well as good years that made me into a writer and a family man to now, where I sit here without a job because Jon Arvedon is a dick (teasing the future here, folks). Things changed but one thing that has stayed the same is my love of DC.

One thing I’ve learned over my years of reading comics is that while Marvel has the sales and the plaudits, DC has the better comics. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the biggest seems to be that DC has often focused on getting the best writers and letting them tell amazing stories. The only reason you’ve ever heard of Alan Moore is because of DC Comics, for example. Watchmen is a comic that never could have been published by Marvel. And that was only the beginning. ‘90s Vertigo, which I missed out on although I know a lot about it because of Wizard magazine, has a lot of amazing comics from the best writers and artists of all time. The ‘00s are full of brilliant DC superhero stories - JSA/Justice Society Of America, Green Lantern, Justice League Of America, Grant Morrison’s Batman, Kurt Busiek’s Superman, Geoff Johns’ The Flash and Action Comics, All-Star Superman, Manhunter, Dial “H” For Hero, Green Lantern Corps, Final Crisis, 52, Infinite Crisis, and just so many more. I could go on. The New 52 had a few gems, but mostly sucked, and since then loving DC has been like being in an ocean storm - being tossed into the sky by the waves and then crashing down.

I’d go back and read ‘80s DC, both pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths and post-Crisis On Infinite Earths, and watch as the publisher redefined what comics could be. Now, that’s not to say that Marvel doesn’t have some groundbreaking books - the 1980s were a great time or superhero comics in general - but DC truly changed the game when it came to comics back then. Now a days, the DC books I’m reading are way better than the Marvel ones. DC’s sales aren’t great right now, but that doesn’t mean their books are bad and I wish that more people gave them a chance.

It took me time to get into DC and I realize why it’s hard for other people. DC’s multiple reboots can make it inscrutable for new fans; sure, I can tell you about great books and series that you should read, but they aren’t always in continuity or they were in continuity, then weren’t, and then were again. There’s also how hard it can be to relate to DC characters. Superman is a god in human form. He always does the right thing and is more like Jesus than any other superhero out there. Superman and I have little in common, but do you know why I love Superman? Because he’s the person we should all be. Superman loves us and wants us to succeed. He sees the best in everyone and will help even his greatest enemies. I read Superman comics and love them because it’s great to read about someone who will do anything to help the people of the universe.

However, I’ve learned to trust where DC takes me and that’s the important part. I get wanting a hero like Spider-Man, who is “relatable” (you know, the super genius with amazing powers who’s dated supermodels and the most beautiful women imaginable, whose elderly aunt can’t die) and the difference between him and Batman, but I would much rather read a well-written Batman comic than a well-written Spider-Man comic because Batman comics can be any story; they can be mysteries, they can be horror, they can br crime comics, they can be straight-up superheroes, they can be psychological thrillers, they can be comedies, they can be sci-fi, they can be fantasy, basically anything you can think of. Spider-Man stories are just superhero comics. Marvel’s stock in trade are superhero stories and that’s pretty much it. DC has all kinds of comics telling stories from every genre, starring all kinds of characters. There are superhero books, sure, and I would argue they’re the best out there, but there’s also so much more.

When I see a DC logo on a book, I know I’m in for something special. I get into a lot of arguments on Reddit and someone asked what I would do to make DC books sell better and my answer is I don’t know. I think that DC books are better - I’ve loved Superman, Action Comics, The Flash, Green Lantern, Detective Comics, World’s Finest, Nightwing, Justice Society Of America, and many more miniseries and one-shots over the last four years more than basically all of the Marvel books I’ve been buying - and I feel like DC’s biggest enemy is usually DC. The publisher feels like it’s constantly shooting itself in the foot. The history of DC is still confusing compared to Marvel and the company’s comics have a reputation with fans. Then, of course, there’s the MCU. One day, we’ll get into my feelings about the MCU but it feels like the world has chosen Marvel like it was a sports team, making DC the vilified underdog. This has affected the comics adversely, and I hope the upcoming DCU under Peter Safran and James Gunn can change things. Maybe if that works, than DC’s comics will sell better.

Marvel was my first comics love, but DC was my first superhero love. DC has made a lot of mistakes, especially during the years I’ve loved them the most, but the stories that the company has given me have kept me loving them. Even when things turned bad, like the Rebirth era, there were still a lot of amazing DC comics that kept me going. I will always give DC another chance, even when they fuck things up. Which, unfortunately, happens more often than I’d like.

Give DC a try. Give the company your trust. You might like what you read.

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Sorry it took me so long to write another one of these. Depression and all that. I’ll be back with more soon.