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This post was inspired by me seeing the cover of Superman #205 on Facebook. It was the last regularly scheduled DC mag that I bought. "Why are you still reading comics?" asked Julie Schwartz of me in 2002 while we were having dinner with Carmine Infantino. "Comics are for 12-year olds!" Julie continued, "I haven't read a comic in the 25 years since my retirement."
What I didn't say is that "I haven't read one of your comics in 35 years", but I was polite and did say, "I remember growing up and enjoying your comics. There was a time I liked them very much."
I've written about why I bought Marvel comics, but I haven't ever written, fully, why I gave up on DC. You see, in the United States (I don't know about Great Britain) it was okay to buy both... even at the same time. There was no real snobbery about comics by different publishers back then - not among kids anyway.
I began reading comics with Lois Lane #1, where Lois became a witch. My next comic was World's Finest #102, "The Caveman from Krypton!". What I didn't know is that while they started me reading comics, they would also be part of why I stopped. First, I was getting older. And as Schwartz stated many times, DC in the 1960s targeted their comics to 10-15-year olds. Marvel was targeting older readers, college students.
In my day there were "families" of comics at DC: Superman family, Batman family, and the Flash/Green Lantern/JLA family among others, which all had different editors. I'd really began to enjoy comics with Challengers of the Unknown, the Jack Kirby early issues, though I had no idea who Kirby was then and probably didn't care. The Challengers went on adventures, they fought monsters and went to strange new places. You'd think Superman would do that.
Superman became formulaic. The same or similar ideas played over and over again. There was often a gimmick on the cover. Lois was witch, but we knew she really wasn't. Superman or Lois or Jimmy Olsen got old, young, fat, slow, blind, tall, short or bald. Superman was shown dying, or being poisoned by Kryptonite (often by one of his friends) or have his secret identity about to be disclosed. Well, after just a couple of years this became boring and annoying. Usually it was a prank, or Superman trying to teach Lois or Jimmy a lesson for some cruel reason. That's right, Superman comics were often cruel. And although the comic's title was Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane, their relationship never developed. You never saw them dating, holding hands or kissing. I mention that because Superman does all that with Lori Lemaris, a mermaid, and Lyla Lerrol, an actress he meets when he travels back in time to Krypton's past not long before it exploded.
DC had a goal of selling the most comics not creating the best ones. It upsets some fans but it's true. DC was in the business of making money not producing great comics, so if a gorilla on the cover sold well there would then be gorillas on dozens of covers. Marvel was not that formulaic.
The Justice League was one of the few comics that had a full-length story, but it was often boring because of formula. A crisis occurs and the JLA divide up into four or five teams of two. Then whatever happens to the first team is repeated over the next 15-20 pages to all the others. They touch something and disappear; or grow old or something. So, you can read the first few pages and the last few and get the entire story.
With gimmicks and repetitiveness there was no fun in re-reading a DC comic. The dialogue was flat and uninteresting, it just told you the plot and nothing about the characters. It was written for 12 year-olds. Marvel gave us personality, intimacy, humor and continuity in their dialogue, it was fun to re-read.
Green Lantern should have had many outer space adventures, but he had just a few and in his mag's last year, he was stationed on Earth. Batman's covers were often misleading. Robin, despite the story's title, didn't die at dawn - or even at any other time of the day. And Batman would escape all those impossible escape-proof traps. Batman would often make a scientific discovery on the first page, use it on the first page and then never use it again. And if Adam Strange miscalculates his terrifying jumps into the transporter ray by one inch or one second, he'd be dead.
There were two problems that completely steered me away; the first was the Legion of Super-Pets. A funny concept and good for a children's book, but to see them have monthly meetings, sitting at their table with clearly labelled table settings for each animal and talking perfect English told me this was for kids, not teenagers or adults. It was Superman #205, perhaps the last Superman comic I regularly bought, that finally got to me. We now use the term "retcon" meaning retroactive continuity. This occurs when comic book writers "rewrite" the history or biography of their characters. Often, instead of using a new plot, they would just adjust an old one. In this story we are shown that a mad scientist caused the destruction of Krypton. As I mentioned earlier, they retconned Krypton's doom semi-annually, all with different survivors.
Batman improved when he got his "new look", but then came the TV show and he got the silly TV show look. No change was permanent. There would be a "new" Superman, with reduced powers and no more Kryptonite. How long did that last, five issues? Or they would publicize a race between Superman and the Flash and no one would win.
Over the years I did pick up several DC comics, especially Kirby's Fourth World, but DC had run out of gas for me and I'd run out of interest.
What's your view or experience, readers? I'd be interested in reading your reaction.
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