The Marvel Age

I don't know, the 70s and 80s at Marvel brought us the Kree-Skrull War, the Dark Phoenix saga (as well as most of the Claremont/Byrne X-Men run), Walt Simonson's Thor run, arguably the most successful licensed comics ever done that also worked as comics in their own right (Conan, Star Wars and Micronauts), Miller's Daredevil stint and Wolverine limited series (which arguably vaulted the character to where it is now), the original Squadron Supreme miniseries, The 'Nam, and yeah, some pretty damn good runs on Spider-Man (at a time when DC's flagship character was sort of adrift) that defined the character for years to come.

And financially, you can't argue that they didn't dominate the market pretty much until DC hit it big with Teen Titans.

Now I'll give you that by the mid- to late-90s, DC was rolling over them creatively, but I don't think you can dismiss them in the period you're talking about.

James Sturm's Unstable Molecules, Morrison's New X-Men and part of Peter Milligan's X-Statix would be about it for standing the test of time. There are other notable stories, but nothing truly outstanding. Note that these all came under the regime of Bill Jemas... as did U-Decide and Rawhide Kid. Experimental Nu-Marvel was the best of times and worst of times. Now NeoConservative Marvel rules the day... and other than Brubaker's exclusivity and Powers at Icon, I don't like the current output.

Marvel dominated the Hostess Fruit Pies ads of the 70's.

Secret Wars 1

Infinity Gauntlet

Squadron Supreme

Kravins Last Hunt

Cosmic Spider Man

1st Punisher mini series

Peter Davids run on Hulk

Captain America gets fired

Armor Wars

Personal favorites were the West Coast Avengers series (untill the art got shitty and they started fighting people dressed like spiders) and Defalco/Frenz Thor (cheesy as hell and fun).

oh and that whole run of avengers with the mansion under seige by the Masters of Evil then the fight with the Olympic gods....man that makes Disassembled look like Impact Comics.

I wouldn't necessarily bring up Secret Wars as a high point. Sure it was a big cash cow, but really, all it served to do was 1) get Spidey his black costume; 2) get Thing out of the Fantastic Four, paving the way for She-Hulk; and 3) introduce the star of probably the WORST limited series ever (the Beyonder and Secret Wars II).

Well here's my take on that list:

Secret Wars: innovative for the crossover gimmick. Asstacular story. And occurred in '84, so: No.

Starlin's Infinity Blah-blah: cosmic, but will it stand with highwater books of the 90s? No, but some nice moments for fans ala Secret Wars (Wolvy vs Thanos, etc.). No.

Squadron Supreme: I hope you are erroneously referring to the Gruenwald run in the 80s, because I don't think the current book is going to stand the test of time. A maybe for the original series, the current one: No.

Kraven's Last Hunt: good Spidey story. Doesn't rise above the genre in my opinion, though. A no from me.

1st Punisher mini: hmm, not a fan of the character. Didn't read this.

Cosmic Spidey: no.

PAD's first tour of duty of Hulk: a long run, and lots of great story threads, but again, it didn't redefine great comics. A good score on the worthiness scale, but not in the "significant" category that Prankster seemed to point toward. For example, will anybody point to the PAD Hulk like we do with Miller's DD: Born Again, Batman: Year One, or Alan Moore's Swamp Thing? No, but I think you could argue the merits of this one.

Cap gets fired: was this when he became Nomad during Englehart's run? This was pretty cool. Superlative or significant? A recommended read, but a pinnacle in superhero storytelling? No. If you are referring to the Cap story that Mark Waid did before the abortion on paper that was Heroes Reborn: also a no.

Armor Wars: *shrug* not my cup of tea. I would say that Iron Man never had a run that defined the highest levels of artistic achievement in superhero comics. No.

Sorry to crap in your cornflakes, AW.

To be honest though, DC didn't have many seminal superhero works in the same post '86 period either, so don't feel bad.

To defend my earlier suggestions a little further:

Unstable Molecules tells a pretty compact bomb of a story intertwining the real-life generational forces aswirl in the '60s when Stan and Jack created the FF, as a Fantastic Four story. A slice of Americana.

Morrison's New X-Men: Added as much to the tableau of the X universe as it took away (which was all carefully erased by the powers that be immediately after his run ended). Successfully intertwined the modern with the nostalgic and tried to get beyond the stasis that plagues the soap-operatic adventures of the X-folk.

X-Statix began as an edgy and subversive commentary on pop culture and superheroes and sputtered near the finish with editorial interference (with the Princess Di storyline that got changed). The first few arcs were gold.

And finally, because I forgot earlier:

Marvels. Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross told a smashing street level perspective origin of the Marvel Universe circa '63-'64 story. This one's good to last, but heavily reliant on the legwork of Stan, Jack, and Ditko.

Good DC projects since 1985:
Watchmen
DKR
Animal Man
Killing Joke
Sandman
Preacher
JLA, both Morrison and Giffen
The Invisibles
Doom Patrol/Flex Mentallo
Hitman
The Authority
Kingdom Come
Morrison and Millar on Flash/early Geoff Johns Flash
etc

Marvel projects since 1985:
Daredevil
NXM
Black Panther
Marvel Boy
The Sentry... kinda
That's about all I can think of

However, DC does have bigger travesties than Marvel in the past 20 years, too. Close, but DC edges 'em out. Crisis, the Hiroshima of comics, starts it all (though it did lead to the aforementioned Animal Man, still the Best Thing Ever) the Superman death, return, power removal, new costume, personality split... I mean, he's still be written awfully, perhaps more awful than ever with Austen/that alias that I'm pretty sure Austen is writing under now, but atleast Action Comics 775 came out along the way. Then there's the mishandling of Batman, the botching of the Green Lantern character (I'll warn you, I think Hal going kwazy was actually a ballsy move, that was mishandled with horrible writing and a horrendous replacement in the form of Kyle Rayner.)

Not that Marvel is innocent, with Spidey clone, Heroes Reborn, Thing wearing a helmet/any FF story in the 90s, pretty much all the X-books for pretty much all the time, all those awful books that eventually bankrupt the company in the early 90s... okay, kidding, this is about a wash, I just have a greater affinity for DC's characters.

Back to the point: Marvel sucks.

Marvel currently has really strong runs going in Captain America, Iron Man and The Ultimates. I don't know that they'll turn out to be landmark stuff, but you never can tell. Millar seems to have more to say in this second volume of Ultimates.

With Vertigo and special projects, DC tends to put out great works. However, I think Marvel generally has a higher standard with its regular series. (The midnineties being a notable exception) DC probably comes off a little better because their works tend to have closure. Continuity was never the company's strong suit, and as early as the fifties they got into a habit of telling "imaginary stories". Marvel's strength, at the time, was creating stories that did have a drastic impact, and characters that did change. And they were remarkably better then DC throughout the sixties and seventies, and while DC was improving by the early eighties, Marvel was continuing to raise the bar. But we're still talking about a medium that was inherently a product. It had deadlines, a fixed market audience, and a scrutinized distribution. Once the specialty shops came along, publishers could put out damn well whatever they wanted, not having to worry about another Wertherm. Also, larger shelf space meant more room for experimentation. Marvel got off to a great start with their epic line, but the imprint was pretty aimless. And Jim Shooter made a point of setting a pretty solid precedent of keeping very marketable characters marketable. Likewise, DC had more solid plan with Vertigo. Of course, Vertigo is sort of an imprint of DC, operating under different rules, and to say DC has it over Marvel becuase Vertigo is probably like saying Disney puts out better films then Dreamworks because of Mirimax.

It should also be noted that Marvel probably held a more interesting stable of characters then any other company until the tail end of the eighties, when characters like Morpheus (and moreso, Death) and Constantine started taking center stage. You might have noticed my leaving out Animal Man. The reason is, Animal Man is not a character that took off. He was a fourth string superhero. Well above Ultra the Mult-Alien, but less signifigant then Rip Hunter, Time Master. Grant Morisson made him workable because he had a "classic" aura to him, but at the same time did not have a personality to play around with. Cyphers are in an odd way a dream for the modern comic book writer-it allows their work to be more story driven, less constraining. Morrison's work on X-Men, and Peter David's on Hulk were very rare examples of writers being given the ability to writer the books carte blanche, and if the characters were drastically altered from their already pronounced archetypes, so be it. It's probably why Daredevil has lasted so long, despite completely unremarkable beginnings, and characters like the Silver Surfer and the Submariner, come and go in the publishing landscape. In short, circa the eighties, DC's weakness for the last twenty five years became their strength.

But Prankster, I don't get your criteria of whether it's been heard of or not by a large amount of people. I know of no one who doesn't read comics that is familiar with Dark Knight Returns or Watchmen. And I'm not sure casual comic readers, if there is such a thing anymore are too familiar with the latter. A reader of Sandman may not be too familiar with Armor Wars, but then again, a fan of X-Men could very well not have heard of Like a Velevet Glove Cast In Iron.

Seriously?

Yeah, I think so. I might have butchered my grammar with double negatives, but here goes: if that person does not read comics then that person is unfamiliar with either, save in cases where someone who is a comic book reader personally mentioned it.

Wow. I know a few people, including my film teacher. Maybe more with WATCHMEN because of English creators.

I keep this short, and just say that I pretty much agree with Prankster. When it comes to expanding their line, Marvel just isn't willing to take chances. They came close with the first Epic line, which showcased some great titles (notably Moonshadow, now published in trade by Vertigo/DC, ironically), which was axed before it really had a chance to take off (like it very well could, and should, have).

I think that Marvel is taking a step in the right direction with their Icon line, but even then I'm not so confident that they'll take any risks with it.

As far as superheroes go, I'd still give DC a slight edge. True, I am somewhat biased towards DC's stable of characters, but they took a chance with Robinson's Starman, which paid off tremendously. They've managed to reestablish a lot of their Golden Age characters in interesting ways, and capitalize on the legacy aspects of these characters.

(Sidenote: Marvel does get some bonus points for Christopher Priest's Black Panther run, though.)

The Marvel Universe just seems kind of stale by comparison (although, Brubaker's Cap run is currently going swimmingly, and the Ellis/Granov Iron Man is a treat whenever it comes out). I think that Marvel needs to take some chances with their lesser known characters. It worked with Daredevil, why couldn't it work with, say... Iron Fist? That could be a trippy kung fu/philosophy book, something no one's ever seen before.

EDIT: I forgot to add that Runaways is a step in the right direction. It's arguably one of the best team books on the market. It's fun, accessible, and has a fresh concept. If this were a TV show, it would be huge.

Icon is purely a "happy-ending" style signing bonus to ameliorate exclusives like Bendis and Mack who had creator owned work elsewhere (namely Image). I can pretty much guarantee that you will see nothing other than Powers and Kabuki coming out of that imprint unless they convince Kirkman to shift Walking Dead and Invincible over to the house of M.

Since Avi Arad is only interested in the publishing side of Marvel as a testbed for concepts and characters to be licensed, the powers that be will definitely not want to "waste money" publishing creator-owned stuff that they can only get reprint profits from. The hope that Icon will be a clearinghouse for edgy new material (other than what Powers and Kabuki brings to the table) is slim to none.

Marvel isn't trying to create a new Vertigo-style line or recreate the old Epic with Icon. Although one of the experiments of nu-Marvel was an attempt to revive the Epic imprint, that project got shitcanned once Marvel Entertainment was buoyed with the Spider-Man movie profits. Now the name of the game at Marvel is work for hire, licenses for sale and no risks will be taken (that won't be undone by the next creative team).

Don't get me wrong, Marvel's still got talented folks putting out books: for example, artists like Cassaday and Hitch, and writers like Ellis, Brubaker, and Vaughan (Bendis and Millar are shackled in the penalty box and are pending league review for demotion to hack status).

I'm not looking for the next critically acclaimed masterpiece in comics to come out of Marvel. And I'm definitely not holding my breath for Marvel to do anything risky... unless you count the risk they take to further damaging the industry by bringing back alternate covers.