The Rivalry Moves from the Comic Rack to the Corporate Boardroom

“They’re the competition! They’re not supposed to talk good about us and what we’re doing. And vice versa.”

—Marvel’s Tom Brevoort on DC

Much has changed at both Marvel and DC since the 1960s. The comics business, for better or worse, has grown up. Long gone are the days when Marvel and DC were mom ‘n’ pop businesses left to pursue any crazy idea they could crank out before the impending deadline. Corporate is now the word. Today both Marvel and DC are cogs within multinational corporate machines, valued less for their publishing profits than for their vast intellectual property libraries.

DC has abandoned New York—its home since the days when the publisher bought Superman from two Cleveland kids for $130—and moved to the West Coast to be better integrated into the Warner Bros. entertainment empire. Marvel has gone from a single-office operation down the hall from a skin mag publisher to a subsidiary of Disney valued at more than $4 billion. To put that valuation in terms comic book collectors will understand, that’s 14,337 near-mint copies of Fantastic Four #1.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the conflict between the two biggest names in superheroes. The employee poaching, the competing events, and the marketing gamesmanship still feature prominently. With these characters becoming global icons worth billions, if anything, the stakes are higher now than ever before.

“To me the rivalry is as strong as it’s ever, ever been,” says Milton Griepp, an industry analyst and CEO of ICv2. “The competition is really visible and strong, and when you talk to the management, you can feel it. It’s in the DNA at these companies so strong. It’s bigger than one person.”

The comic book fanbase, who began to cleave in the 1960s with the emergence of Marvel, may have become more polarized than ever before. That schism that manifested itself decades ago via playground arguments is now being taken to a new level online, where social media makes it easier than ever to throw stones at the opposition. And the success of the movies has added a very high-profile impetus to pick a side. Once again an important question has become: Are you a Marvel, or are you a DC?

“There are people on Facebook and Twitter who say, ‘If you like Marvel movies, you can’t like the DC movies,’ or, ‘If you like the DC movies, you can’t like the Marvel movies,’” says artist Jerry Ordway. “It’s like this weird polarity that you’re getting in the entire world with politics and everything else in what should be fun entertainment.”

Despite the corporate takeovers, the company’s personas remain as they have been. Marvel is the eternal hipster, while DC remains the classy, conservative uncle, forever on a quest to make itself more youthful and relevant.

But the corporate ownership has changed both company’s products and the way they do business. The relentless, Wall Street–driven pursuit of quarterly earnings has, in a declining periodicals markets, forced Marvel and DC to give in to their worst tendencies. Now nothing is out of bounds in the quest for the all-important short-term profit.

“The biggest difference at DC really came when Paul Levitz was kind of forced out [in 2009],” Ordway says. “Paul was the last link to—and I hate to say this—DC being a stand-up company.”

“Paul kept corporate at arm’s length and from exploiting the properties to the nth degree,” retailer Brian Hibbs says. “I think that he knew that if you let the corporate guys, who don’t really give a shit, get in, they were just going to fuck it all up. They were going to look at DC as a bank account, which is clearly what’s going on right now.”

In years past, the corporate masters generally ignored the publishing business and might have gotten involved only when big changes were afoot—say, if Superman were getting a new costume. But the realization that anything—even a goofy talking raccoon—could potentially be worth billions has tightened the oversight. The assets must be protected.

“Now they see money in everything. Anything could be a cartoon or a TV show,” says former DC editor Frank Pittarese. “When I was there back in 2014 or 2015 we got an email once from [DC Entertainment president] Diane Nelson or her team. It was like, ‘Hey guys, it’s great to be embarking on this adventure. Yay, comics. Please remember comics are a springboard for other media like video games. That’s why you’re here.’ That infuriated me because comics are an art form all their own. Don’t tell me that I’m just an element in your thing.”

Both companies now operate under editorial-driven systems, much like the 1960s heyday of DC’s Julie Schwartz and Mort Weisinger. Gone are the days when Marvel writers in the 1970s could write a story under the influence of some strange hallucinogenic substance, and it would run as long as it got turned in on time.

“There’s more top-down involvement, shall we say,” writer Ron Marz says. “When I took over Green Lantern in the mid nineties, I was left to my own devices to come up with the new Green Lantern [Kyle Rayner]. That wouldn’t happen now. There would be somebody way up the corporate ladder, at least having pretty severe involvement. There are a lot more people looking over your shoulder in what used to be a job where you could do whatever you wanted.”

What’s forgotten is that most of the billion-dollar characters the corporations are so desperate to safeguard were created by artists flying by the seat of their ink-stained pants, just throwing out cool stuff. Today industry news reports are filled with tales of friction created by editorial meddling, with numerous big names walking off DC books after interference ground them down.

“The current regime at DC is far more strict,” says writer Peter David. “People have to do far more rewrites. Things are approved, then subsequently disapproved. It is not the best place to be a creator these days. I don’t know why they’re so concerned with the status quo. My guess is that they’ve been around for seventy-five years or so, and you have concerns that the guy who’s working with them is going to screw them up.”

“It was generally well known that DC paid better, had better insurance, and had nicer offices than us,” says one Marvel editor. “There was a general consensus that the trade-off for better pay at DC was that you had to deal with Dan DiDio running the DCU, which wasn’t a good thing.”

Marvel appears to have also embraced the top-down structure that defined DC in the 1960s.

“Marvel has imposed a corporate structure over the friendliness of the thing. It’s the old [Julius] Schwartz model now, where the editors are in charge and the writers are filling in the blanks,” writer Steve Englehart says. “You tell us what you want to write, we’ll tell you what you can write, you tell us what you’re going to do for the first twelve issues, then we’ll tell you what you’re going to have to change, then you can go write it.”

The need for strict oversight is essential, in part, due to the increasing number of events. Once considered an annual novelty back in the 1980s, events now run almost continuously (at least at Marvel), with one bleeding into the other and each promising more spectacular repercussions than the last.

In 2014 alone Marvel gave readers—among others—Original Sin, which promised to “reveal shocking secrets about every major Marvel character!” Axis, which the company trumpeted would “change everything!” and Death of Wolverine, “the single most important X-Men event of the decade.”

That same year DC had Superman: Doomed (“the super-event you have been waiting for”) and Futures End, which the company boasted would “forever alter the direction” of the DC universe.

And back and forth Marvel and DC go, releasing overhyped, dueling sagas, almost always at the same time—and occasionally with suspiciously similar premises.

DC ran a 2016 Batman epic called “Night of the Monster Men.” Marvel soon announced a 2017 event called “Monsters Unleashed.”

The most insane similarities came with the publishers’ 2015 events. That summer both DC and Marvel ran heavily promoted, mega-storylines involving a powerful villain building a single world out of various parts plucked from different dimensions. DC’s, called Convergence, debuted in April, while Marvel’s, Secret Wars, was released in May. The similarities were not lost on readers. Tech Times ran an article entitled, “Are Marvel’s ‘Secret Wars’ and DC’s ‘Convergence’ the Exact Same Story?”

Yeah, pretty much.

“When DC did Convergence I was also talking to Marvel about a Secret Wars mini that ultimately didn’t come off,” says writer Ron Marz. “I had signed [nondisclosure agreements] for both things, and I realized, ‘These are the same story!’ To my knowledge it was dumb luck. I was like, ‘I’m not gonna say anything, but I guess they don’t know they’re doing the exact same story.’ There were a few of us out there that were involved with both places, and no one was saying anything.”

“There’s no bad idea, so if someone comes up with one, everyone’s going to do it,” says longtime writer and artist Keith Giffen. “Marvel does Civil War, DC does something else. It’s that good-natured rivalry.”

The companies’ 2011 event battle was especially fierce due to a brazen Marvel marketing promotion that took direct aim at DC’s offering. That summer Marvel was in the midst of Fear Itself, a major crossover storyline that led out of the previous major crossover storyline, Siege. DC was pushing Flashpoint, a big event centering on the Flash that was running neck and neck with Fear Itself on the direct-sales charts. As per usual, both storylines unfolded in a main miniseries but were supplemented with tie-ins in the companies’ regular comics—an attempt to gently nudge customers to try titles they were not currently reading.

It was these tie-ins that Marvel targeted. The publisher made retailers an interesting offer: it would send them one rare, variant edition of Fear Itself #6, which could presumably be marked up and sold well over cover price, in exchange for every fifty covers of Flashpoint tie-ins the retailers ripped off and mailed in. Marvel was actually encouraging retailers to destroy its competitor’s product.

“In these tough economic times, [we] feel it’s our duty to help,” Marvel’s publisher David Gabriel said sarcastically in a press release.

Marvel had tried something similar the previous year, offering a Deadpool variant in exchange for fifty stripped DC covers—an effort to blunt its rival’s “Blackest Night” crossover. Marvel claimed retailers had sent in “tens of thousands” of covers during that promotion, seemingly drawn from massive piles of unsold DC comics sitting in stock rooms.

“I think it’s hilarious and a perfect demonstration of the fact that these companies still hate each other and that they’ll poke each other in the eye at every opportunity,” Griepp says. “Marvel’s goal wasn’t to send out this limited edition comic or to give the retailers something to sell. What they were trying to do was demonstrate DC’s failure, and yes, I did think it put an exclamation on that. Marvel was trying to show that DC’s product is so terrible that retailers have cases of it sitting around, and we’re trying to help them out because we support the market. That was particularly inspired.”

In another equally inspired though more scatological marketing scheme, Marvel poked fun at DC’s plan to offer fifty-two different variant covers for Justice League of America #1 (April 2013) featuring the flags of all fifty states plus Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. The same month that issue hit, Marvel released a special cover of Uncanny X-Men #1 showing every state bird … crapping all over Deadpool.

“You have to remember that if there’s a guiding light over at Marvel, it’s that you want to do the Puck-ish thing,” says Marvel artist Scott Koblish. “Marvel enjoys being a little bit of pranksters. The way of handling things has been sort of passed down. You don’t want to take things too seriously.”

In their bid to capture more dollars from a shrinking pool of customers, Marvel and DC have also gone overboard with relaunches and reboots. Titles are started over so often with a new #1 that the number has basically lost its currency. Wolverine, Marvel’s popular mutant hero, has had his title restarted three times since 2010 alone.

DC has taken that gimmick to the next level, and instead of rebooting individual titles, it’s decided to take the drastic step of rebooting its entire universe—twice within just five years.

The first revamp came in 2011 and was dubbed “The New 52” after the number of titles the company planned to release. The month prior DC canceled every one of its comic books before starting them over again, often with updated origins, in an attempt to freshen up and make the heroes younger or give them a younger vibe. (Yes, that again.) The new volume of Action Comics #1 introduced a young Superman who was at the beginning of his crime-fighting career. Its cover showed Superman streaking through Metropolis wearing a tight-fitting, S-logoed T-shirt and blue jeans.

The initiative angered many longtime readers because it seemed to wipe out some seventy years of history, essentially saying that many of the stories that had come before, stories that readers had loved and cherished, had not happened.

Despite some grumbling, the hype made the New 52 among the most successful industry initiatives in recent memory. The initial launches of the new titles sold in huge numbers and reportedly brought many lapsed readers back into comic book stores. The early months of the relaunch allowed DC its first win in a long time in terms of direct-market share. DC edged Marvel by 5 percent in September 2011. That lead swelled to 20 percent the following month.

Marvel, on top for so long, remained unfazed—at least publicly. Joe Quesada, who’d by then been promoted to chief creative officer, claimed the DC relaunch was “a response to everything Marvel’s been doing.… You don’t set fire to your entire house for no good reason,” he said.

Marvel’s senior vice president of publishing, Tom Brevoort, also took a poke at his rival’s new direction on an online forum. He advised DC to stop “trying to be a bad Marvel clone—because they’re not even getting bad Marvel right.”

DC quickly fired back. John Rood, the company’s sales chief, posted a statement on DC’s website in August 2011 praising the New 52 and castigating Marvel for its aggressive business practices and reliance on publishing gimmicks, including a February 2011 statement by one Marvel executive that the company planned to kill off a character every quarter to fuel sales.

“To be clear—DC is not a market-share-chaser,” Rood wrote. “If we were, we would not be creating a quality lasting direction across a controlled number of titles. We would instead be flooding the market with over 200 titles a month, changing your prices with abandon, killing off a character every quarter or so, and/or randomly announcing decimal-pointed event-ish thingies. We haven’t.”

Marvel soon announced a soft relaunch of its own revamp called Marvel Now! A mysterious house ad promoting the endeavor showed fifty-two red slashes on a black background, which appeared to be some sort of cheap slap at DC’s New 52.

“Marvel Now! starts with the creators, so don’t expect writer shake-ups across the line by the fourth or fifth issue, or half the titles to get cancelled and replaced by a new #1,” Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso said, piling on the New 52 in a 2012 online interview. “We aren’t throwing shit at a wall, seeing what falls off and then replacing it with more shit. We’re building books we expect to last.”

Marvel Now! would restart series at #1, but the reboot would not wipe out what had come before. Marvel’s precious continuity, which had remained intact since its modern-day superhero universe was founded in 1961, would soldier on.

“DC has this obsession with rebooting its universe every few years,” Pittarese says. “DC would say every few years, ‘Everything you knew didn’t happen, or it happened differently.’ Marvel was ashamed of nothing. So if you liked the fact that [Fantastic Four member] Johnny Storm was married to a Skrull who laid an egg and a monster came out of it, then they’re not going to say that didn’t happen.”

It didn’t take long for DC’s New 52 to stumble. Instead of cleaning up continuity, it managed to muddy it even more. The quality of the books was also uneven, as creative teams came and went seemingly on a whim.

“DC completely reconfigured their timeline to try and tailor the characters and the stories for a twenty-first-century audience, and they had some initial success,” says Robert Lyons, owner of Connecticut store Legends of Superheros. “But then they kind of lost their way. The sales started trailing off, and Marvel was quick to take advantage.”

DC’s New 52 continued to slump, and by 2015 Marvel had a commanding lead once again in the direct market, dominating with 42 percent to DC’s 27. DC’s drop-off revealed the diminishing returns of reboots and laid bare the Big Two’s dangerous reliance on marketing-driven inventions instead of good, simple storytelling to sell titles.

“Any publisher can sell #1s and #2s, but can they sell #12s and #18s?” asks Bill Schanes, a former comic book distributor. “That’s when all the gimmicks are over and you should have your core consumers in.”

With New 52 fading, what was DC to do? The solution came in a cryptic February 2016 tweet from DC copublisher Jim Lee showing an image of a theater curtain with the headline “Rebirth” across it. A message below read, “It’s not a reboot … ”

Turns out it was a reboot.

The company announced it was launching an initiative to be called “Rebirth,” basically taking a mulligan on the whole New 52 thing. The latest reboot would start most titles over yet again with #1s and try to capture the essence of the DC universe by “putting the highest priority on the direct market,” in a sense catering more heavily to the aging fanboy demographic, who had been alienated by DC’s jarring New 52. Rebirth was to return the DC universe to basically where it was before the New 52 disappointment, bringing back some fan-favorite characters and elements from the past.

To promote the launch DC allowed retailers to begin selling its first batch of Rebirth comics Tuesday at midnight—a relaxation of rules that generally forbade selling the week’s new releases until Wednesday morning. Marvel promptly countered by also allowing retailers to sell its comics the night before.

As this was DC’s second line-wide reboot in just five years and was being orchestrated by the same executives and much of the same talent who had screwed up things so badly the last time, Rebirth was met with skepticism. A website, hasdcdonesomethingstupidtoday.com, kept track of the company’s perceived blunders, and readers—weary from the endless events and reboots as well as the sunny promises that always accompanied them—took to the Internet to complain.

“DC compulsively reboots more times than Windows 7,” artist Jules Rivera wrote on Twitter.

DC had woken up to the fact that its core readership, the die-hard fanboys to whom the industry was exclusively catering, cared about the company’s legacy, cared about continuity. It mattered to them whether the Batman they were reading about that month was the same Batman who had begun calling himself “The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh” after a mental break a few years earlier. It mattered that the Flash (technically the second Flash, Barry Allen) had perished during Crisis on Infinite Earths before being miraculously resurrected in 2008’s Final Crisis. Rebirth marked a return to that original continuity.

The corporate culture manifests itself in the offices as well. Years ago Marvel was a place where impromptu silly-string fights would break out and the staff celebrated paddle ball day. A staffer played a joke on editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco by secretly changing the name on every one of his business cards to “Tom DeFatso.”

It was a place where staffers and freelancers could hang out and swap industry gossip and ideas. Nowadays just getting through the door is a problem.

“Steve Ditko and other artists used to come by and hang out in my office. I think that’s pretty much gone,” says former Marvel editor Ann Nocenti. “You can’t walk into Marvel or DC anymore without some kind of hall pass or pre-approval. Even then you get taken by someone through a labyrinth of offices to the exact spot where you’re supposed to be, then escorted back out again.”

DC is now out on the West Coast, marking the first time in the illustrious history of the medium that the major superhero publishers aren’t operating out of New York. The move means there’s less camaraderie between the staffs and less overlap.

Marvel-DC crossovers have also become a thing of the past, even with Bob Harras, a former Marvel editor, as DC’s editor-in-chief, and Axel Alonso, a former DC guy, in charge of Marvel.

“I’ve talked to people from both companies who are convinced we’ll never see another crossover again, and the reason is entirely about corporate stuff,” says writer Kurt Busiek. “There will never be a point where things are exactly even, so right now the people at Disney are going, ‘Marvel movies are doing better than DC. Why should we give them a foot up?’ And at some point in the future people at Warner Bros. might be going, ‘You know, DC TV is doing better than Marvel. Why should we give them a foot up?’”

Add that to the fact that with a crossover—no matter how successful—DC and Marvel will receive only half of the profits. It’s a deal the corporate masters are unlikely to make.

The corporate rivalry has also affected the monthly comic books. Marvel canceled Fantastic Four in April 2015 amid rumors that the company was trying to punish movie-license holder Fox ahead of the Josh Trank–directed movie’s arrival that summer.

“The relationship was fine until Disney bought us,” says Chris Claremont. “There was no problem between Marvel and Fox and the X-Men and Fantastic Four as long as Marvel was an independent company. The minute Marvel became a subsidiary of a rival studio, that changed the whole parameters.”

When Marvel licensed the Fantastic Four to Fox years ago, the studio argued that a successful movie would drive comic book sales, so Fox demanded a royalty on sales of Marvel’s Fantastic Four, according to artist and Image cofounder Erik Larsen. Marvel opted to cancel the book, preferring not to pay Fox and to promote a rival studio’s property.

Perhaps the biggest threat to superhero comics is sales. The characters have become global icons at the box office and on TV, but that increased exposure hasn’t boosted monthly comic book sales much. Marvel and DC have seen their circulation numbers dwindle considerably over the decades to the point at which they’re now turning out product for a niche audience consisting of a handful of aging, hyper-devoted readers. Where popular titles once sold in the hundreds of thousands or even millions, many DC and Marvel books are lucky to break fifty thousand. Plenty of titles sell a paltry twenty thousand copies, meaning that the estimated twenty-five hundred comic shops in America order just eight copies each. Eight.

“I think Marvel has figured out a way to make those movies accessible to the public that DC hasn’t. I don’t know what that is. I don’t know why you can’t get Batman and Superman or people to get as juiced up to be a part of that.”

—Samuel L. Jackson in 2015

“I ain’t afraid of Sam, I ain’t afraid of you! You don’t think we know you got a lazy eye up under that patch, bitch, you lazy eye-patched bitch!”

—Kevin Hart at the 2016 MTV Movie Awards

Both companies have responded to the drought by once again flooding the market with more than eighty comics a month each as well as publishing popular titles twice as often in an attempt to capture more dollars from whatever readers they have left.

Unfortunately for Marvel and DC’s future publishing prospects, the comic book industry is changing. Superhero comics aren’t even mainstream anymore. The irony is that the push to improve superhero comics over the years—with The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and other revolutionary leaps forward—helped open the general public’s eyes to the possibilities of the medium and went a long way toward making comic books an accepted and respected art form. Civilians were no longer embarrassed to be seen reading them. Those changes opened up the medium to different kinds of material, which has since shunted the superhero genre aside.

Marvel and DC are no longer the leaders when it comes to graphic fiction. That honor belongs to offerings from traditional publishers that move far more units than the average issue of Superman. Scholastic’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series has sold more than 164 million copies, and cartoonist Raina Telgemeier’s autobiographical books aimed at a younger audience have topped the New York Times best-seller list. The breadth of material now stretches from kiddie to crime, manga to memoir.

“I think comics are in the best spot they’ve ever been in the entire history of the medium,” retailer Hibbs says. “There’s not a person who walks in my store that I can’t find something that they will enjoy. That’s phenomenal. But I don’t think that those things are the Marvel and DC superhero universes anymore. Marvel and DC used to be 90 percent of our sales, and now they’re 70 percent. They’re not the conversation that’s happening anymore.”

Lucky for superhero fans, the genre’s diminishing publishing prospects hasn’t put a damper on the conflict between the Big Two.

“There’s still a rivalry, but it’s more of a corporate rivalry,” says former Marvel editor-in-chief Gerry Conway. “There’s always going to be a competition between them. They’re the two big dogs, and they’re going to keep fighting.”

And we, the readers, will gladly go along for the ride.