Comic Books

So for anyone reading this who doesn’t follow geek culture obsessively, there are two big main competitors for comic book readers’ money: DC and Marvel. Marvel is responsible for The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, Spiderman, and The Avengers (trailer embedded below.) DC are the purveyors of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern. As with most geek culture, there’s a bit of holy war. This one is probably less vicious than say, Windows vs Mac, XBox vs Playstation vs Nintendo or Emacs vs Vi, but there’s still some hard feelings between the disciples of each comic book brand. And until recently I would have definitely chimed in as a Marvel acolyte.

Then last fall, DC did what they call a “reboot.” They decided to kind of start over with a lot of their characters and re-examine what makes them tick. Basically, they conceded that Marvel just had a better grip on what made young geek hearts palpitate and they decided they needed to rethink things in an effort to make it easier for new readers to jump in. So they announced their “New 52″ initiative and made a lot of hubbub about how they were changing their ways and could everybody please buy some dang comics from them, we promise they are even more awesome than before.

I’d gotten a little burned out on Marvel and hadn’t been picking up comics for a while, but they convinced me with this very sophisticated sales pitch (I know, I’m a marketer’s dream – that’s probably why I work at an ad agency.) It’s been six months of comics (each hero generally has one 20 page issue per month) and I am completely sold. I’m definitely not a total DC convert to the point of hating Marvel, but at this point I’m only buying DC comics (However, I am super excited for the Avengers movie coming out in May.) Really though, the greatest thing DC has done is to make Aquaman seem cool even when standing next to Batman.