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PEOPLE/ARTS Thursday 5 OcTOber 2017
Review: Superman, Spiderman

creators slug it out for decades

By MICHAEL HILL In the early years, Marvel power comic heroes have
Associated Press creators were like the cool is that they are cash cows
Marvel is arguably king kids to DC’s stuffy, establish- for movie and TV produc-
of the comics world now. ment types. Marvel staffers ers. Even a minor charac-
But it used to be a bottom would joke that DC heroes ter like Ant Man can get his
feeder, pumping out unin- were so blandly similar that own movie. Tucker notes
spired titles that exploited you could swap the word that the genre took in $1.9
popular trends — romance, balloons among them and billion in 2016, almost 17
monsters, whatever. Rival no one would notice. Exec- percent of the movie mar-
DC, the home of Superman utives at DC looked down ket share.
and Batman, was the clear their noses at the upstarts, With money from a global
leader in the field. until they couldn’t any- market at stake, movies
That changed starting in more because they were with both DC and Mar-
1961. getting clobbered at the vel characters tend to be
A comic-biz lifer named newsstand. based on the hero arche-
Stan Lee took a different Then they started copying types perfected decades
approach when coming their competitor. ago: the solemn one, the
up with an answer to DC’s The intervening decades cheeky one, the internally
popular Justice League were marked by the two tortured one.
superhero team. With the companies poaching art- Sometimes, you could al-
Fantastic Four, Lee be- ists and writers from each most swap out script lines
gan scripting characters other, swiping comic con- among the different stu- This image released by Da Capo Press shows “Slugfest: Inside
for Marvel who had feet cepts and often acting dios’ heroes and no one the Epic, 50-year Battle between Marvel and DC,” by Reed
of clay in their thigh-high petty about the whole would notice.q Tucker.
boots. thing. When DC revived an Associated Press
Heroes like Spider Man, old character named Cap-
Iron Man and the Hulk wor- tain Marvel in 1972, Marvel
ried about money, getting asserted its legal rights to
dates and being different. that name based on its
They talked like neurotics own character. DC had
and wise guys. And they to call its new comic book
were drawn in a dramati- “Shazam!”
cally over-the-top style, The story of Marvel’s David
most notably by Jack Kir- toppling DC’s Goliath is a
by. Characters throwing fun one, and Tucker tells it
a punch looked like they well. He packs it with anec-
were hurling a javelin. dotes and insights from the
Marvel’s ascendency editors, writers, artists and
started a decades-long assistants who were there.
battle with DC. “Slugfest” If the story loses its zing after
author Reed Tucker calls a while, it’s only because
the competing companies the early buccaneer spirit
“the Coke and Pepsi of was smothered by increas-
Spandex,” and their long ing corporatization. Today,
struggle for supremacy Marvel Entertainment is
played out first in candy part of the Walt Disney Co.
stores, then specialty com- and DC Entertainment is
ic shops and finally on the part of Warner Bros.
big screen. Turns out, the greatest