Epilogue

So who won?

It’s the question that gets asked most often when it comes to this or any other rivalry, and it’s only natural that onlookers would demand a victor. No one wants to invest their precious time and attention in a competition only to walk away unsure who came out on top. This isn’t a soccer match.

But in the case of Marvel and DC, declaring a winner can be complicated because not everyone may agree on what the rules of the game even are. What are the yardsticks for “winning?”

In terms of sales Marvel is clearly the victor. The company’s titles generally dominate the direct market and have for decades. When it comes to the box office it’s pretty clear that the films from Marvel Studios have been better received than those of its competitor, and in terms of lifetime box office Marvel owns DC ($8.9 billion to DC’s $4 billion). In the crucial area of licensing revenue Marvel now also comes out ahead.

But then there are the intangibles—those factors that can’t be quantified with simple numbers. Superheroes are almost always discovered during youth, and as a result these characters have a powerful emotional connection. Superman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, and the rest remain forever wrapped in a comfy blanket of nostalgia and bathed in the golden hue that seems to color everything from childhood. They are gateways to another time.

To read a Superman comic book or to watch a Batman movie is to experience the character in the now but also to relive the fond memories of the character in the then. That is a power that both Marvel and DC have, and it’s far more valuable than money.

In the end declaring a winner maybe isn’t all that important. The winner is whichever means more to you. It can’t be measured, argued, or debated.

Can’t we just celebrate the extraordinary achievements of both companies? The artists, writers, and editors who’ve worked for Marvel and DC over the years have given us a rich cast of characters who have endured for decades and are now recognizable around the globe. And the companies have survived for some eighty years, through recessions and wars, changing tastes and shifting habits, by finding new techniques to freshen their properties and new ways to deliver them to an audience. That’s a remarkable run for companies in an industry in which every one of its contemporaries, aside from Archie, has long since died. Let’s just tip our hats to their accomplishments and thank them for the entertainment they’ve provided over the decades—and for entertainment yet to come.

These characters aren’t going away anytime soon. Superheroes are now as lasting a part of culture as Odysseus or Sherlock Holmes, and they’ll likely be with us for years to come—maybe forever. It’s all a matter of what form they will take. Stories about the great heroes of antiquity were passed down orally and survived long enough to be written down. The great superheroes were born on newsprint and have made the jump to movies and television, avoiding being dragged into obscurity by the decline of print media.

But when the current superhero movie boom ends, as it inevitably will, what then?

When it’s no longer profitable to publish a monthly paper comic book, what then?

And what will become of the Marvel-DC rivalry? For rivalries to matter, they require opposing entities with easily identifiable traits and characteristics that fans can latch onto. And they also require that something of value is at stake, be it money, position, or prestige. As Marvel and DC continue to lose the unique identities that were built in the New York publishing business over the decades and continue to become subsumed within larger corporate entities, what then?

What happens when Stan Lee is gone and the face of Marvel becomes some executive VP of publishing? What happens when the culture moves on and a whole generation of children decide that Superman holds no interest for them, no matter how much his costume is darkened or his personality tweaked?

We’re at the end of an era. Marvel and DC, the companies we’ve all grown up with, are changing. And so is their rivalry. It’s moving from the battlefield where it was born and has been defined for more than fifty years—print—and is heading in new, uncertain directions. In the coming decades Marvel vs. DC may no longer hold the same meaning it once did. But as Death, the Gothish Grim Reaper from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, once said, “It always ends. That’s what gives it value.”