Marvel vs DC: a Secret War in Crisis

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These days there’s so many superhero movies and TV shows that Hollywood’s starting to resemble a big comic shop that’s obscenely rich and massively out of touch with the rest of the world. While spandex-clad franchises might seem harmless enough to anyone but Martin Scorsese, their popularity has drawn attention to a conflict that’s anything but heroic. This is the dark, weird and often embarrassingly dressed world of superhero sectarianism.

Scorsese provoked a global geek-rage following an interview where he allegedly claimed that ‘Marvel movies are not cinema’, but he later said that his words had been taken out of context. What he actually said was ‘People who get into fights during DC or Marvel movies are not cinemagoers I’d care to share my popcorn with’. Scorsese, of course, famously invented the popcorn protest.

The mad-browed movie director had been discussing the recent case of Dicksplash P. Bubblecroft, the 20-year-old self-styled ‘Marvelite with an Armalite’ who’d injured himself while clumsily review-bombing the new Batman film. Scorsese described it as ‘a worrying escalation of nerd-on-nerd violence’, but to comics fans this was nothing new.

Geeky Blinders

Sequential arts historian Professor Zeppo Connery claims that the first conflict between comics fans took place outside a Brooklyn drugstore in 1939, when a DC street gang stole a pristine copy of Marvel Comics #1 from a much younger reader. The comic featured the first appearance of Marvel’s Human Torch and Namor the Sub-Mariner, which prompted the mean-spirited thugs to set fire to the book and then drown it. The victim subsequently developed a phobia of both fire and water and was later unable to sell his book at auction.

Scheduled fights between Marvel and DC fans were suspended following Pearl Harbor (the Japanese military attack, not the Ben Affleck movie). President Roosevelt urged squabbling fanboy factions to put aside their differences and swap their autographed sketches for war bonds, and many wartime comics fans began collecting war bonds which became highly collectable, especially the autographed ones. This armistice continued into the post-war years, as fans became more focused on economic prosperity, rock and roll music and the professional comic artist bare-knuckle boxing scene.

The Silver Age

Hostilities resumed in the 1960s, a decade synonymous with peace, love and comics fans tear-gassing each other on American campuses. The arrival of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the Avengers marked the start of the Marvel Age of Comics and a new generation of radicalized comic reader. These college-educated ‘Trotskyite Marvelites’ would taunt and bully DC fans who tended to be younger and therefore shorter. They wrote angry letters to Playboy magazine, condemning Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman for being ‘old, bourgeois and hyphen-less’.

This noisy subculture of ‘Four-Color Freaks’ and ‘Spinner Rack Johnnies’ had a disproportionately strong influence on the Sixties, like an uncool Velvet Underground. For instance, the popular counterculture phrase ‘Stick it to the man’ was inspired by the Merry Marvel Marching Militia’s anthem ‘Stick it to the Superman’. Of course, this was a period of intergenerational conflict that spawned the modern anti-elder insult ‘OK boomer’, although back then it was just a friendly greeting between post-war pre-pubescents.

The 1970s comic convention boom gave comic fans a safe space where they could beat each other up in costume. This ‘Bullpen Bullying’ later formed the backdrop to failed sitcom spinoff That Seventies Seinfeld. Its unaired pilot featured high school friends Jerry (Freddie Prinze Jr), George (Elijah Wood), Elaine (Zooey Deschanel) and Kramer (Henry Kissinger) attacked by a mob of angry Marvel fans who catch them buying a Superman fridge magnet, played by Dean Cain.

The Eighties

Once an unfashionable underdog, DC upped their game in the 80s by attracting top comics talent who produced books that appealed to an older, taller readership. DC soon had extremist fan gangs to rival Marvel’s notorious MCUVF, like the Provisional JLA and the Real JSA. These DC hardliners would taunt recently bereaved Marvelites during candle-lit vigils for the X-Men’s Jean Grey and the original Captain Marvel. Both had, of course, recently died for the first time.

Frank Miller’s classic Batman: the Dark Knight Returns (1986) was hailed for its uncompromising critique of notoriously ageist Marvel gangs. The story featured a middle-aged Caped Crusader subjected to elder abuse by an adolescent sociopathic collective called ‘The Mutants’, a term as synonymous with Marvel as ‘Stan Lee’ and ‘unethical work-for-hire contracts’. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986 ½) took this critique even further. Its mature deconstruction of superhero comics not only exposed some of the genre’s more problematic tropes but made people think twice about getting into scraps while dressed as Doctor Octopus.

Peacemakers

Both Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns topped The New York Times Bestseller list, so journalists on the newspaper were forced to read them. For many, it was their first exposure to ‘The Fandom Problem’ and led to a six-month Times investigation into the American comics industry entitled ‘Biff! Pow! Comics are just for thugs these days’. This sent shockwaves through Marvel and DC offices, with senior management afraid of being hit with congressional hearings and big warning stickers.

The subsequent 1988 Marvel/DC Crossover Treaty was a watershed moment for the industry, and the sight of former enemies putting aside their differences and reading each other’s comics inspired the world. In the years that followed the Berlin Wall came down, South Africa’s apartheid system was abolished and the members of Fleetwood Mac finally attended counselling.

The 1990s: Nerdecadence

The 90s were a period of excess for Marvel and DC. With a speculator boom driving up revenues and sectarian tensions no longer in the air, comic conventions had turned into champagne-guzzling feasts of unbridled hedonism. They were the sort of places where a Rob Liefield autograph could get you anything you desired. Traditional boundaries between Marvel and DC were breaking down and there was a permissive, anything goes approach to intercompany crossovers.

While the liberal comic elites partied, dissident groups of ‘fandomentalists’ could be found lurking in the dark corners of what was still called ‘The Inter-Net’ until DC extremists made them drop the hyphen (in fact, many still refuse to call it ‘the web’). These groups communicated with each other on Bullpen Bulletin Boards made from cork panels attached to 56K dial-up modems. Some even set up profiles on websites like Ask Jarvis and Super Friends Reunited.

During this era, modern toxic online behavior patterns were being secretly beta tested by petty, squabbling dorks. For instance, angry fans of The Human Torch invented the term ‘flame war’ while the first recorded act of trolling took place an AbUsenet group dedicated to Pip the Troll. They thought they were better than everyone else and saw themselves as pioneers of pedantry, trailblazers of trash-talking and the avant-garde of aggression.

To put it another way, they were destined to become massively influential.

21st Century Fanboys

These feuding fans broke cover in 2001 when fights broke out in comic stores because weekly standing orders had been delayed due to the 9/11 attacks. In time, the situation only got worse. There were widespread reports of Marvel and DC gangs hitting each other across the face and neck with rolled up Previews catalogues. Renewed hostilities were undeniably fuelled by a new wave of big budget superhero movies. Comic gangs saw noughties hits like Spider-Man, X-Men and Batman Begins as Hollywood-subsidised recruitment videos. They welcomed the opportunity to expand their ranks and ramp up hostilities, but things didn’t go quite as planned.

Superhero blockbusters created new Marvel and DC audiences, but they weren’t the sort of people traditional comics gangs liked. They referred to these newbies as ‘the wrong sort of fan’, a phrase that was always accompanied with extravagant and theatrical air quote gestures. They also called them ‘nouveau douche’. By the same token, the new fans despised their older counterparts. They mocked these ‘Devil Dinosaurs’, shutting down their criticisms with the phrase ‘OK speculator boomer’. This would be delivered in a specific type of flat, bored, monotone voice that required many weeks of practice.

What caused this hostility? For one thing, while this new generation embraced the online toxicity pioneered by traditional comic gangs, they ignored the time-honoured publishing boundaries. Instead, they were more interested in forming politicised ‘affinity gangs’ like the Social Justice League, the San Diego Comic Conservatives, the Easily Offended Guardian Readers of the Galaxy and the Anti-Vaccine Titans. Though their ideologies differed, these groups all contained a mix of Marvel and DC fans united by a common desire to angrily scream at people with different opinions.

Make Captain America Great Again

Veteran comics gang members became so disillusioned by all this antisocial change that many tried to turn back the clock and become All-New Neo-Nostalgists. Others went underground and joined far-right Guns, Jesus and Graphic Novel militias. Traditional comics sectarianism continued to exist, of course – and headlines about up-and-coming review-bombers like Dicksplash P. Bubblecroft must have given these old thugs some hope – but this was a bygone battle with a foregone conclusion. Nowadays, comics fans were more likely to be attacking their own kind. Take, for instance, the deranged loner who kidnapped his favourite cartoonists, or the recent DC movie shoot disrupted by 300 semi-naked Zack Snyder fundamentalists all protesting in slow motion.

For the likes of Martin Scorsese who yearn for an end to violence amongst comics fans there’s even less hope. Peace treaties can’t fix a situation like this. It’s a war fought on multiple fronts by swivel-eyed, self-righteous nerds who most people find really annoying.

It’ll take more than a popcorn protest to stop that.