A comprehensive Universe works for Marvel, but the DC Universe has mostly failed. DC’s characters have always worked better in their own separate stories and their continuity. But the Marvel movies have been so successful DC wished to emulate that.
So let me ask….
1. How many DC movies have been produced with characters created at DC? The answer may surprise you. Only ONE DC movie, Aquaman, was made from a character created at DC.
2. And how many Marvel movies have been created with characters created by Marvel? Marvel has created ALL of them.
Now you’re saying that’s impossible. These are all DC characters. Well, these are characters BOUGHT by DC, they are not created in house. Superman was created by Siegel and Shuster as a newspaper strip. DC bought it. Batman was created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger and brought to DC. Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, the Justice League (a/k/a Justice Society) and many others were created at All-American Comics, later bought by DC. The original Captain Marvel (Shazam) was created by Fawcett Publications, put out of business by DC, who licensed than bought the character in 1972. Blackhawk and Plastic Man Come from Quality comics.
DC characters kind of all lived in different universes…Metropolis, Central City, Keystone City and so on. They really didn’t intermingle. This was because each of their different characters had different writers, artists and editors. Even in the Justice League there originally was no personal contact between the players, they just were brought together to fight villains. The Avengers often lived together. World’s Finest featured separate Batman and Superman stories until 1955 when the cut their page count from 56 to 32 pages. They then made the pair a team so they can still have the pair selling the comics. But a Martian looked different in Superman comics than in Green Lantern comics. So at Marvel, Martians looked the same.
The Marvel Universe was created Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Don Heck. They created almost ALL the main characters you see on screen and they placed all of them in New York. Later, Roy Thomas (writer) Gene Colan, John Romita and John Buscema (artists) joined the fold but they continued to be edited or written by Lee. So the Marvel characters fit together much better.
Let me give just one interesting example: None of the group I mentioned created the Captain Marvel you saw in the movie. But Lee and Kirby created The Kree, The Skrulls, SHIELD, Nick Fury, The Supreme Intelligence, the Tesseract and Lee and Colan created Marvel’s original Captain Marvel.
James Gunn, who wrote and directed the Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel, is now in charge of the DC movie Universe. We’ll see if he can deliver .
3 Replies
398 Views