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From commments on MGK's column on the one essential Elseworld, an interesting digression:
Fred Davis said on February 1st, 2011 at 8:48 pm
MGK lost a leg and one of his penises in the Louis/Clark vs. diana/supes shipwars of the 90′s, so Kingdom Come is something of a saw spot.
Why is Marvel so much better at doing alternate universe stuff than DC?
equinox216 said on February 2nd, 2011 at 7:48 amPoint.
@Fred Davis:
“Why is Marvel so much better at doing alternate universe stuff than DC?”
If I were going to give a one-sentence answer, I’d say: “Because the cultural space the major DC heroes have come to occupy is far more closely related to a thematic iconography than Marvel’s, making them MUCH harder to dissociate from central character traits and therefore much harder to write ‘alternate’ versions of.”
I mean, plenty of people KNOW who Wolverine is, and his salient characteristics, but ‘troubled violent loner who posits that he is, in fact, the best at what he does (which is also not very nice)’ doesn’t fill the same shape in space as “Superman” or “the goddamned Batman”. To write an alternate Superman, you have to more closely cleave to a much harder, definitive ORIGINAL ‘Superman’ concept for him to still be recognizable, whereas if you want to put the X-Men and other Marvelites in, say, the 17th century, you can more easily transfer them because they’re looser groupings of personality traits with mostly definite power sets.
(Relatedly, I think one of the multiplex causes of Wonder Woman’s lesser popularity/reknown compared to the other two DC lights is that she LACKS that hard imprint, but that’s a mess and a half to go into.)
CandidGamera said on February 2nd, 2011 at 8:40 amTrumped by this point.
I don’t think Marvel IS better at doing alternate universe stuff. I mean, What If? was one of my favorite books of all time, and I own a complete run of Volume 2 and most of Volume 1 – but the premises were often pretty thin and most of the time ended with “everyone’s dead” or “and things were pretty much the same.”
