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Marvel vs. DC: Different Story Philosophies and Structural Differences in Storytelling as Made Evident by Superficial Character Similarities

@themysteriousinternetentity replied to your post “Cap’s allowed but he’s on thin ice.”

OP please the essay-

RE, my tags: “#my hypothetical essay on the philosophical differences between the otherwise strikingly similar originating tragedies of batman #and spiderman #would be honestly horrible to behold“

*cracks my knuckles* This is a load of bullshit but so are all comics and all fiction and storytelling under capitalism, and any expectation for cape comics to be comparable to each other or hold their own internal logic.

So with that out of the way. I’m gonna contrast Bruce vs. Peter, the Batman origin vs. the Spider-Man origin, and the broader foundational logic of DC and Marvel themselves.

Batman and Spider-Man are both famous fictional bastions of doing right by the world, but Bruce’s goodness is an innate trait and an inevitability and Peter’s is a result of free will and chaos theory.

They may both be innately great, but only Bruce is innately good. These properties exemplify how as I see it, a good DC story has players whose internal qualities point them to good or evil in a dramatic manner, and a good Marvel story has ones whose alignments are constructed by their circumstances and decisions.

We need stories about heroes of both types. The first is comfortable to settle into while feeling grand and epic. The second is easier to find yourself in without getting down on yourself for not being made of sunshine. They fill different needs for what we look for in media, and they can both inspire us to compare ourselves against them and be better people. Not everybody is going to agree with me dividing up which stories I want told which ways.

Okay, so, hear me out. The biggest moneymaker of my American superhero comic book company – not that it started as that, but that’s what it’s been known for for decades – is this dude! His theme is an animal traditionally considered creepy and disgusting, but he’s a hero. He scares people – criminals on purpose, because they get the full brunt of his deeply unsettling demeanor, but that poorly publicized spooky persona leaves average people unsure what to think about him, relying mostly on hearsay to build their impressions, so the public opinion is pretty uneven. But the READERS know he’s a good dude, because his origin story is centered around crime, specifically gun violence, and lets you know why he does what he does! A random criminal shoots this character’s guardian when he’s still a kid, and because of that he takes up the vocation of wandering around directing his abilities to 1. specifically stopping other violent crimes like the one that messed up his family and 2. generally improving the world however he is able, though of course things that reflect the tragedy he experienced resonate more personally. He feels obligated to do this because of the crime that affected his family.

Why that obligation? That’s where describing Bruce and Peter as one falls apart.

Bruce’s sense of obligation to fight crime is driven by empathy. Bruce’s reasoning is more optimistic. Yeah, I know, Batman is considered the more grimdark property between the two, but hear me out. Bruce was a baby who did nothing wrong. His parents are murdered, technically by a mugger, but figuratively by the very existence of crime. So he directs his actions toward this external problem, Crime with a capital C. He grows up in between his parents’ deaths and the beginning of his crimefighting career, and must be able to understand by then that the idea of trying to end crime is ridiculous and childish, but he acts on it anyway. It’s a beautiful act of defiant optimism, for all that it grew out of tragedy.

Bruce takes in a lot of children who have faced their own tragedies because he’s being there for them the way he knows he could have used someone to be there for him, and he works with these children similar to his past self on this child-level idea of denying incidents like the ones that struck them their right to exist. It’s thematic. These children grow, at a rate of about one year for every ten of ours, into adults who continue to commit the ultimate folly of refusing to succumb to pragmatism. Yes, again, I know, it’s the Batfam, the ultimate pragmatists, blah blah, but that’s a pretty late aesthetic addition to the mythos of these characters. It’s fun, and it balances out the wild optimism they run on for those who find it stretches their suspension of disbelief, but it’s not load-bearing. What is is that they’re fighting the very forces of entropy and human suffering. They make a difference one person at a time just in case they’re preventing tragedies like the ones that shaped them, with one eye on the impossible goal of there never being tragedies like that again. Until that happens they can’t stop.

Bruce, though, doesn’t need this tragedy to become a hero and a helper. In at least “To Kill a Legend” and Bombshells/Bombshells: United we see alternate versions of his tale where he becomes determined to become a hero without his parents dying just because he sees others proving the method and decides he wants in on that. In that first one the other hero in question is his own alternate universe self who did have that defining tragedy and is convinced that he’s creating a world with no Batman because he cannot stand by and let the tragedy that shaped him happen here because that’s the exact opposite of what he’s all about, who never realizes he’s actually inspired his alternate self to walk the same path he did.

He’s just a good dude! He might even be a better hero if he hadn’t been super traumatized at a formative age. When he does his best to do good he is arguably acting at least as much in spite of the Wayne murder as because of it.

Bruce is pretty much a very short Batman from the instant he gets a direction to work to, which is incidentally when his parents die in most lives. It’s easy to be like, “Well, his innocence is dramatically stripped away then, changing him foreverrrrr,” but he has to keep enough of that innocence to build the idea of Batman with. He has to keep enough of it to remember what he found inspiring in fiction about Zorro and the Gray Ghost and put it into action. Unsubtle nudge, this is what the reader is supposed to do about reading Batman, but with less literal cape wearing. Unless you’re a cosplayer who visits the ill, in which case wow, you are cool.

But yeah, Bruce’s core is set when he’s young, and all he has to do after picking a path to pursue is develop his methods, train his mind and body, and find like sixty or seventy people over the course of his life to become his found family. He’s angry at the world and needs an outlet to channel that, but when it comes down to it he rages at it for being unfair to people in general, not specifically to him, even though it would be more than justified. When contemplating his own hardships that rage rarely holds, leaving someone who’s just adrift, baffled at the senselessness of loss.

A lot of stories depict him as drawing clear lines between what he will and won’t do because he fears losing sight of things and becoming too much like what he fights, and some alternate timelines support that, and yet…I’m just not buying it, dude. I’m smacking my lips and it tastes like a contrived response to people who don’t understand genre conventions and demand an exact reason Bruce won’t kill killers besides “He just doesn’t roll like that and people don’t permanently die outside of backstories in this universe anyway.” When in doubt, he does shit because he’s a fundamentally good person. He sends his antagonists to an asylum where they will theoretically get better and lets elementary schoolers help punch mobsters and dresses up like a bat because his mythos is built on optimism. The gargoyles and blood red sky were a trick the whole time.

So why did I even clarify he did nothing wrong earlier? You can’t DESERVE to have your family murdered in front of you at a young age.

Haha. Unless you’re a Silver Age Marvel character instead of a Golden Age DC one.

Peter’s sense of obligation to fight crime is founded in guilt. He doesn’t cause a mugger to shoot his uncle, because karma isn’t real (even in Marvel almost all the time), and that’s completely ridiculous. But he 110% internalizes it as his fault. You definitely already know this story, but refresher, he thinks this because he saw the same criminal doing a crime earlier before it had anything to do with him or his family and he didn’t do anything about it just for the sake of being a good citizen. Just for fun, in around 2001 it comes up that his aunt, May, also sees Ben’s death as her fault because she let him leave the house after they had an argument instead of calling him back in to apologize, and that’s why he wasn’t safe at home that day. Parkers, man, they’re crazy.

Peter views his uncle’s death as a result of his inaction, and devotes the rest of his existence to making up for it, determined to never slip again. Not a naturally good person at all, he has to put in massive amounts of work to leaving the world better than he found it in every aspect of his life, and he often resents both the people he’s helping and the people he’s thwarting, sometimes in loud and creatively phrased ways. His character warps dramatically between age 15, when we meet him, up to age almost-30 where he’s been allowed to age to before being stalled out because older characters are perceived as selling more poorly. When the writing is strong you can see this as the direct result of him putting in constant work to be less of an asshole until finally, finally, it becomes more or less instinctive. And there are drawbacks – it’s pretty clear that his lifestyle of putting helping people and the greater good first compounded with his own pride and standards has prevented him from achieving conventional success in life – but he’s a happier person for it. He befriends old enemies he only disliked because he was quick to judge and write people off. He finds the worth in others and they respond by seeing the worth in him. The people he’s fiercely protective of can love him back because the work he’s put in has made it easy. When it’s down to the wire he finds he’s as satisfied with his mark on the world as he can get.

Where Bruce’s path is solidified in childhood but he waits to act on a child’s determination until he can blend it with the capabilities of an adult (the ultimate child’s fantasy, acted out to perfection), Peter’s story is initially a bildungsroman. His life is upended when he’s in high school, an uncomfortably liminal age, and he starts acting on his philosophical realizations about his duty to his community immediately. (Awareness of this is relevant to why this character is constantly rolled back to a more youthful age or demeanor, even though it defeats the purpose of a coming of age story to deny showing the results at the end.) Peter has no equivalent to taking in a round of Robins because as one who sees his tragic origin as his mistake, his way of improving the world is through improving himself, having embraced the idea that the self is a tool with which to improve the world. I. e. with great power there must also come great responsibility.

No equivalent from a story philosophy perspective, that is. From a ‘spinoffs sell’ perspective, uh. *closet door behind me that was groaning dangerously explodes outwards and it’s just full of spider-people, who I try to cram back inside ineffectually*

Peter also gets timelines where his originating tragedy doesn’t happen. In “Jumping the Tracks”, where Peter’s aunt dies of a random event that ISN’T perceivable as his fault, he becomes Spider-Man…the insanely successful media personality. He uses and then falls out of contact with his uncle and doesn’t help a single person in his entire life. “One More Day” describes two hypothetical/alternate timelines where nothing weird happens to him and we can assume that if he lost either of his guardians it couldn’t be perceived as something he could have changed. In one he just gets by, and in the other he becomes a successful industrialist a la Tony Stark. The biggest thing they have in common is that in both he’s an empty, hateful husk of a person. In Spider-Gwen where his family is fine because his friend gets superpowers instead of him he does mad science on himself because he’s developed an inferiority complex about that and becomes one of her villains very briefly and then her tragic origin story death very permanently. He’s shaping up to do basically the same thing in the new Spider-Verse title when it shows a world where it’s his aunt who has powers and nobody’s dead yet because she’s just that cool. That Peter was last seen with a vial of alien goo he snuck off a crime scene sitting on his desk and I am delighted/concerned. …I’m better at pulling specific Marvel references than DC references, sorry.

I say this lovingly: What a bitch.

He’s a naturally self-centered person, gifted with genius he’s only interested in using to benefit himself and the dangerously small handful of people he’s claimed as his own, and he’s not even very good at that second part. He’s angry at the world for being unfair to him. In his base state the dude needs workshopping. Extreme outside intervention.

Peter cannot stop helping for as long as he is able because that would be giving in to his flaws and repeating what he sees as his greatest mistake, and if the boy does anything it’s learn. He has choices about what kind of person to be he comes dangerously close to not recognizing for what they are. In on-track timelines shares Bruce’s backstory-related aversion to guns to a smaller extreme (it’s a teen’s calculated dislike instead of a child’s instinctive horror) but not those for murder in extreme circumstances or occasionally maiming unpleasant people out of spite. I’ve pulled at the DC hero operating on child logic and the Marvel hero operating on teen logic a few times already, and I do think that can broadly describe the two companies in some senses. But I’m just going to note here that that isn’t necessarily indicative of differing maturity in the telling of, reading of, or characters within these stories. Pulling on life stages to construct a story is pretty abstract, and also, in some ways teens are functionally dumber than small children. See: Peter’s pragmatic/realist philosophy means he doesn’t cotton on to what the narrative has known and enforced via deus ex machina the entire time, that he can’t kill in cold blood without losing himself, until he’s like 27.

You are.

The moral here is that you choose whether or not you’re going to try to have a net benefit on the world over the course of your life. You put in the work, and it’s hard, and it will hurt you sometimes, and it’s not a choice you ever get to relax and stop making. You never get to be sure and stop evaluating yourself. Sometimes to be good you have to cut away pieces of yourself and defer lives you could have lived that would have had things you want in them and just hope that you’ll still be happy more than you aren’t.

That kind of story is more like directions for bettering oneself, but not much of a balm for the soul tired by the harshness of humankind.

So I won’t buy into a story about dumb unthinking goodness from Peter, because I know he’s basically an averted supervillain. That’s why he interests me, so I am highly disinterested in letting go of it to sit back and enjoy a story that runs counter to the trait. Likewise I won’t enjoy a story about Bruce being a naturally bad person and either overcoming that or succumbing to it, even though I love stories about innately terrible people, unless you explain it with a SFF alignment swap, because the part of me crying out for stories with people displaying uncomplicated goodness has already latched onto him and it hurts like hell to talk it into letting go. They’re both driven geniuses drawing on a strong well of rage whose strengths are also their weaknesses and I just do not want to see the same kind of stories about them at all.

With Bruce, and Diana, and Clark, I want stories about people who just aren’t wired to let injustice stand when they can do something about it, no matter where you plunk them. They inspire. With Marvel’s (harder to list by highlights) mainliners, I want stories about people who have to work at being good in more ways than keeping their biceps toned so that they can be efficient at both punching and hugging. They teach.

Both flavors are fucking fun: That’s important.

DC has other Earths and elseworlds where the normally heroic characters are evil because alignment swaps are cool. It’s fun, rule of cool, and fueled by aesthetic. Even when they’re framed as “in spite of a nail” timeline changes the logic often fails to hold together (it’s easier in adaptations that can construct their world differently from the start!), because most of their flagship characters who it seems the most fun to write as villainous just. Wouldn’t go evil in the conditions displayed without acting wildly out of character. You can’t just change some events or actions. You have to rummage around inside of them and flip the ideas making them up on their heads.

Marvel is also full of alternate villain timelines, and with a lot of them you have to just go “yikes wow” because yeah your fave…would do that, whoops. Keeping them in character, no handwaving, and also evil, writes itself to the point of being faintly alarming.

Obviously both companies have an insane number of characters and creators and so have examples from the other character type. But it’s a rule of thumb.

I’ve been zoomed pretty far in because that’s more interesting to me and easier to construct a tight point with, but now I’m going to zoom way out with one last big company vs. company generalization. *knocks back a shot and then starts talking at the speed of drug commercial side effects* At day 1 Superman is the Ubermensch philosophy conceived as villainous and then redesigned to be heroic before it could hit publishing, Wonder Woman is about female supremacy, and Batman is just about how it is NOT cool to join organized crime, kids, stay in school. But Batman actually ends up being the one most embodying the Ubermensch philosophy. He’s an allegedly normal human who is just incidentally functioning beyond human peak, and that extends to his moral fiber. I’m once again not saying either way is better here when I note that DC actually runs on this kind of exaggerated concept of what a person is a lot. Because of this it fits the widely disseminated idea that superheroes are comparable to modern pantheons of gods much better than Marvel, which is more standard sci-fi “what if we added this impossible thing to the real world” storytelling.

They can’t be considered the exact same way. People not realizing that DC is a step further away from reality than they’re used to because they know so much about it from pop culture osmosis without ever needing to consider the source is why it’s more prone to amusing “logic failures” with its premises. Most fans, including me, have like five reasons in their back pocket to justify why Batman can have a child sidekick, can’t kill his villains, doesn’t get Superman to solve all his problems, whatever, but the actual reason is “BECAUSE. You need to relax.” Which people aren’t trained to do on that level the way they are not to get hung up asking exactly how Spider-Man’s webs work.

Features defying logic are baked into the DCU source material to support stories about characters who are structured to embody concepts more than to be easily mistaken for people you could run into on the street. It’s epic-level storytelling, where any child off the street is a god or a symbol. Versus how in Marvel even gods and symbols are fallible people if you dig in a little bit. This propagates on every level these companies operate on, like how DC made up a bunch of settings that are like ideas of cities where Marvel stuck everybody in New York City and informed their setting with the real world.

They’re both good. They’re wildly incompatible on a level that extends way beyond specific characters having easy to contrast traits.

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