#like partly that's just dc being in internal meltdown mode

[whetstonefires]

“The Justice League and the Avengers are very different teams”

In what respect? Like, how would you say both teams differ in terms of overall function, how they respond to threats, how they’re viewed by their respective publics, etc?

😂 who even are you?

anyway, these two teams have been reformed and rebooted so many times and are the flagships of the two juggernauts of their industry, so their natures have evolved and influenced one another heavily over the decades as you see armies tend to do in prolonged warfare, so there is probably not one single statement you could make about either one that's always true.

it would be crazy to try to explain the difference in diegetic terms, because those aren't goalposts they're hockey pucks. the difference in kind exists at a publishing level.

fundamentally, the Avengers was designed to rest, in narrative terms, on everyone's personal relationships and neuroses, and develop soap opera subplots and office drama around how these intersected with each other and various villains. because in the 60s Marvel was launching the Big New Thing which was heightened naturalism and relatability in comics.

(spiderman and the whole genre of underdog superhero who can't catch a break rather than slyly winking at the audience as the world looks down on his secret identity, not knowing how impressive he really is, dates to this pivot of Marvel's. both Superman and Captain America did the latter in their early days, which is highly dissonant from Cap and Bucky looking at them today, but Cap was retired from print for like 20 years and got heavily rebooted for the new age.)

they had an actual mansion they could all live in, and many of them did, for a solid chunk of time early on. there's a reason people swung so hard for the 'everyone lives in stark tower' scenario foreshadowed at the end of Avengers (2012)--that's how the Avengers are! you bang the action figures together and give them angst and bonding about it!

they fractured repeatedly under the weight of all that drama (because psychology and because stories that don't end are unable to make any narrative sense, and breaking up a team is honestly a half-decent substitute in the Eternal Now of big comics) and at this point the current avengers is much more impersonal and even pays salaries, like basically the commune-underwritten-by-rich-buddy has reincorporated as an NGO.

but it still runs on the same types of narrative tensions mostly--huge epic stuff will be happening, but the Avengers tension comes down to whether everyone really hates T'Challa this month for that thing he did. and what this is doing to group cohesion.

the Justice League on the other hand was not built for character-driven story.

they've done plenty of them, after it became the done thing, and even imitated the Avengers and did the diegetic collapsing and reforming arcs and so on. but it's not fundamental to how a Justice League runs; you could do a super long run where the interpersonal tensions never rose above B-plot status and it wouldn't be tonally dissonant.

it would be weird for many of the Justice League to live together--when a character is shown living in Justice League facilities it is usually to signify that they are isolated and don't have a life and this is Bad. the Martian Manhunter and Maxwell Lord dominated era was deliberately aping the Avengers imo and came out weird as a result, and Lord turning out to be a mind-controlling supervillain was not unrelated to how weird most people felt it was.

the Justice League is like. joining a club rather than a frat. like being on the board of an NGO, rather than taking a full-time job there.

you know? the type of commitment is different. the level of intimacy is different.

cap and iron man's relationship has generally played out primarily in the context of their positions within the Avengers, even though it spills into their own titles, while superman and batman have had entire joint books just for them, and their friendship has not usually been allowed to take up much page time in Justice League issues. because that would be indecorous.

commercially speaking, Justice League is first and foremost an easy-buy showcase for high-profile hero characters and anyone you want to burnish up by displaying adjacent to them.

They've totally gotten messy with it over the years but like. I think the seminal Justice League internal dramas were 1) that time Barry Allen killed the guy who'd killed his first wife and was about to kill his second one and they put him on trial 2) that time Wonder Woman killed a dude who told her under truth compulsion that the only way to stop him from mind-controlling Superman to murder people was to kill him and they put her on trial 3) blah blah Batman paranoia exploited by eeeeevil (barely counts imo) and 4) that extremely oogy time it turned out the Justice League had been using magic to forcible reform criminals and erased Batman's memories of this being a thing when he found out and objected because ethics wtf.

That last one was sufficiently story-breaking they started pretending it hadn't happened as quickly as possible. Which was amazingly quickly considering Identity Crisis was the basis for things like killing off the presiding Robin's remaining parent. They actually soft-reset the whole world fairly soon after by timeskipping over most of a year and being like ahem anyway the past is in the past. And then the universe just kept serially ending for over a decade, so it's been weird.

Justice League has reliably gotten a shiny coat of polish with every reboot tho lol.

(Still not over the way they were like, okay we're wiping Green Lantern back to Hal but now we don't have the token black guy everyone who saw the cartoon expects, let's promote Cyborg people know him because of that other cartoon, ah shit he doesn't work without a partner to do bits with. well we can't put garfield logan in the justice league it's too prestigious, he's from the doom patrol for a reason, yeah i know we've had folks like plastic man shut up this is a Cool Sexy new reboot where Superman and Wonder Woman are fucking, we're not using friggin beast boy. how about Captain Marvel? yeah ok shazam is An Silly Joker now and besties with this 20 year old who may or may not know about his elaborate cognitive situation. i don't actually think they put even this much effort into it but otoh maybe they debated really hard and this was the compromise.

........actually vic could probably work up a decent oppositional patter with eel o'brien ik they were never gonna use plastic man but i don't hate it.)

Right. There was a point.

Obviously I'm probably missing a few big dramas here, but the point is DC was trying to keep up with the fantastic dysfunction of the Avengers because if it bleeds it leads, but even in the Dark Age they could not dive in groin first without tarnishing valued brands. The Justice League is simply not built to tell the same types of stories that the Avengers are.

In Justice League stories the narrative will typically be split in focus to a varying degree between the problems created by the villain and the personal emotional situations--the problems--of the heroes. Usually the villain leads and provides the emotional stakes. Only occasionally, overall, do problems between the heroes rise to the same level. Even when they're having them canonically in some other book Justice League tends to be ruled not the right place for that.

Secret identities are traditionally kept to a minimum in the League and League stories, though what this means in practice has gone through some shifts.

This is not just the difference between DC and Marvel house styles, though of course that's part of it, nor is it the League being older, because it isn't by any significant amount. It replaced the Justice Society of America in 1960. Other teams, even the Titans to an extent which was just the junior wing of the League at first, were allowed to get more into the grit sooner, and have the experimental story of Speedy's career-ending heroin problem happen and intra-team dating drama take the foreground, and all that. Doom Patrol was all about the dysfunction, god.

But the Justice League is simply not designed to be that kind of a team book, and when it's occasionally written that way the seams usually creak.