2020 Reflection: DC Comics

 

DC Comics, first named as National Allied Publications was founded in 1934 by Malcom Wheeler-Nicholson. It's had too many writers to count. So when comparing DC Comics to the other series of my favorites list, one thing clearly stands out: it's WAY longer. As in, you could put all 31 other series together in length and it would still not be DC's size. THAT'S how big it is. This makes talking about it as a whole kind of difficult, except in relation to the only other series of similar size it's competitor Marvel Comics. I'm going to try to avoid making every good and bad point about how it has x thing in it, because it's so large that it has examples of almost any good and bad thing you can imagine. It's also the second oldest series on this list by a wide margin being decades older then third oldest, although that's not really fair as the parts of DC I love most are newer then that. My favorite time in mainline DC was last post-crisis era, like late 00s. I also like the Vertigo imprints of the 80s, many of the live-action DC films, and the early rebirth stuff of mid to late 2010s Those are my favorites. If you're wondering, my favorite time for Marvel was really late 90s to early 00s, the time when the JMS Spider-Man stuff was going on. It's a bit hard to give good points and bad points without basically just saying in a different tone "it's a really giant franchise" or comparing it to Marvel, but I'm going to try to give statements that are not just those.

3 reasons I love it:

1: It's archetypal-ness. So DC characters are without a doubt some of the most iconic and universally recognizable in the world, especially Superman and Batman. I think DC does an incredible job in capturing an archetypal nature, and it's writing of conceptual entites is amazing. It has been said superheroes are the modern mythology, and if so I think DC does an amazing job of capturing the metaphysical nature of legends, how they are representations of deeper truths. Characters like Superman and Batman have an immediate strong presence and versatility due to their sheer archetypal-ness. Like you feel like you're reading a story about concepts.

2: DC has an incredible sense of legacy. This is not the same as it's length, but does rely on it. DC has a sense of grandeur and sense of history in everything that can't be achieved by a series that is so much shorter. Having read a LOT of DC, it makes moments like the magicians arriving to save the superheroes in Crisis on Infinite Earths or basically everything in Final Crisis hit a lot harder because you feel the sheer amount of events leading up to it. Simple phrases like "This looks like a job....FOR SUPERMAN!" or "I am Vengance, I am the Night, I am....BATMAN!" have the weight they do because of the sheer legacy they have. It's something not replicatable without an immense amount of buildup. There's also whole teams of retired superheroes, superhero titles passed on between generations etc.

3: DC is shockingly humanistic. For a series full of demigods that could obliterate the Earth with a sneeze, DC loves the common man, something which resonantes with me greatly, as part of it's general idealism. Some of the best moments of DC are emphasizing that beings of incredible power and awareness are really just like us or showing how great humans can be. 

3 Flaws:

1: It's ocassional pretentiousness. I think I'm probably like most people in that I am alright with messages I don't agree with if they aren't being preached at me or messages I do agree with even if they are. Some of my favorite series have messages that don't resonante with me, but I appreciate the series for the passion they endorse them and for other reasons. If a series preaches at me something I do agree with it gets kind annoying in a preaching to the choir kind of way. But when a series preaches something to me that I think is wrong, then it's really bad. And DC sometimes will try to preach morally questionable things with a really annoying sanctimoniousness. I think this is a result of the character beings so archetypal that it feels like if you want to write a good story with them, that it has to be using them to send a message, instead of letting the message naturally flow from the characters' actions.

2: It's lack of direction. DC is a massive franchise of many series that stop and start, sometimes feeding into each other like a massive river system. There's some advantages of that, but it can make it very confusing to try to start and hard to keep up with everything. It's not an easy to experience linear experience, but a mass of series that sometimes feed into each other, sometimes seem to be in different worlds and sometimes outright contradict each other.

3: DC's various sub franchises aren't highly unified. Maybe you'd expect this of a franchise of it's size, but arguably more then you'd expect. The Sci-Fi Space Opera of people like the Lantern Cores have nothing to do with the occult stories fo Justice League Dark, which have little to do with the metafictional stories of the New Gods even though you'd expect all these to be constantly interacting. 

Favorite Part:

Allow me to be pretty cliche but it's the part with Superman and the jumper in All-Star Superman. Superman is always with you, he will believe in you even if you don't.