WI: Marvel Bought/Licensed DC Comics in 1984?

I saw this interesting blog entry from former Marvel Editor-in-Chief, Jim Shooter, and wondered what would happen if the deal when through. According to the Shooter the first wave of the "Marvel-ized" DC characters would be...

Jim Shooter said:
SUPERMAN
BATMAN
WONDER WOMAN
GREEN LANTERN
TEEN TITANS
JUSTICE LEAGUE
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES

With FLASH and presumably other characters as part of the second wave. How do you think this would have changed comics? For all the flack Jim Shooter gets in the industry, he oversaw many famous runs like Claremon/Byrne's UNCANNY X-MEN, The "Demon in the Bottle" in IRON MAN among others. Presumably the universes would remain separate but they could eventually merge depending on the right conditions.

What do you guys think?
 
I saw this interesting blog entry from former Marvel Editor-in-Chief, Jim Shooter, and wondered what would happen if the deal when through. According to the Shooter the first wave of the "Marvel-ized" DC characters would be...



With FLASH and presumably other characters as part of the second wave. How do you think this would have changed comics? For all the flack Jim Shooter gets in the industry, he oversaw many famous runs like Claremon/Byrne's UNCANNY X-MEN, The "Demon in the Bottle" in IRON MAN among others. Presumably the universes would remain separate but they could eventually merge depending on the right conditions.

What do you guys think?

I stopped reading Marvel in 1986 when they went to bi-weeklies and the art went to crap. Many of the talented Marvel people went over to DC.

Marvel buying DC might have sunk both ships!
 
The blog brings up an interesting point. Assuming Marvel acquires/licences DC comics in the 1980's and avoids/wins the anti-trust lawsuit that scuttled the deal in OTL, wouldn't such a move merely delay another more successful anti-trust lawsuit?

Think about it! With these characters in addition to their own, Marvel would utterly dominate the comic book industry. Any anti-trust lawsuit launched after the acquisition/licencing of DC comics would certainly win IMO.

That being said, Marvel versions of the abovementioned characters would be awesome.
 
I assume it wouldn´t be much differnt from John Byrnes Post-Crisis-Superman. But propably Marvel would let Byrne get through with some of his weirder ideas. Like not Kal-El but a pregnant Lara landing on earth, giving birth to Kal-El and then dies.
 
I get the feeling they would have kept it originaly as a separate imprint (like New Universe) originaly but with the occasianal crossover.
 
Probably they'd keep the two universes separate at first, and throw in some major storylines to gradually merge the two together, probably concurrent with Crisis on Infinite Earths.

By 1990 Superman and the X-Men have gotten used to crossing over into eac other's universes frequently.

By 2000, with Ultimate Marvel, the two universes have always been the same, with Superman defending Metropolis right across the bay from Spider-Man's New York.
 
By 2000, with Ultimate Marvel, the two universes have always been the same, with Superman defending Metropolis right across the bay from Spider-Man's New York.

You know, that has always been one of the difference between the 2 companies, DC places its superheroes as defenders of fictionals cities (metropolis, gotham, central) with vaguely defined emplacement whereas the majority of Marvel's owns are in New York or some specific, real life places (except for Latveria & Genosha of course).
 
You know, that has always been one of the difference between the 2 companies, DC places its superheroes as defenders of fictionals cities (metropolis, gotham, central) with vaguely defined emplacement whereas the majority of Marvel's owns are in New York or some specific, real life places (except for Latveria & Genosha of course).

That and Marvel still don't need to reebot his universe for a too convulated continuity, except naturally for the 'brilliant' idea of Joe Quesada about Spider-man...(now with a eastern europe accent): curse you Joe Quesada.
Probably the interation between the two set of heroes will be like the JLA/Avengers miniseries two different universe with occasionally team-up for special occasion/event and maybe some exchange of charatecrs for publicity or shake up things
 
Marvel has destroyed just about any property that it has purchased over the years. Look at the Ultraverse characters. It's quite possible this could backfire on them, again.

Something else to consider: DC might not have the rights to sell those characters, especially Superman. Wonder Woman has a clause that says the character must have a book in print or the rights revert back to the creator's family. I think Batman and the rest are safer, but not 100%

Torqumada
 
Despite being a former comicbook geek, I'm unfamiliar with crisis on infinite earths. I think it combined all the separate dc universes into one. If that is the case, might we see a different version of it with both companies' characters experiencing it, & the result being a combined universe?
 
The reason for "Crisis" was partly to try and tidy up DC's cluttered Multiverse. Everytime they had acquire the characters from a different company, they had set them up on a different Earth and had done the same with their pre-silver age stories. Because all of them had interacted in some ways, it streamlined the whole thing.

A merger of DC and Marvel on the other hand would actualy complicate matters since apart from the odd one-shot crossover, they operate each with its own timeline.
 
The reason for "Crisis" was partly to try and tidy up DC's cluttered Multiverse. Everytime they had acquire the characters from a different company, they had set them up on a different Earth and had done the same with their pre-silver age stories. Because all of them had interacted in some ways, it streamlined the whole thing.

A merger of DC and Marvel on the other hand would actualy complicate matters since apart from the odd one-shot crossover, they operate each with its own timeline.

But an expanded "Crisis" could also be used to streamline the two universes together.
 
But an expanded "Crisis" could also be used to streamline the two universes together.

Don't know about that. In the case of DC, the picked and chose elements from the silver and golden age incarnations of some characters (Superman, batman, wonder woman, etc...) and reinforced the connections between some that were not previously related (the various Manhunters). A merger on the other hand would just have too much, in my mind, to make it anything but MORE cluttered.
 
Gerry Conway was at DC at the time working on Justice League of America (and a future Zatanna miniseries...). He had previously done Spiderman...could he become a bigger star?
 
Had it happened, I'm not entirely convinced the licensed characters would be segregated into their own individual universe. Yes, that was what Marvel did with its later acquisitions, but those were all in the future. Shooter's summary of the situation likens the proposed to deal to the same licensing arrangements Marvel had made in the past: notably properties like Transformers and Godzilla. The tendency was to integrate those characters in the proper Marvel universe, so much so that you still occasionally come across things like S.H.I.E.L.D.'s anti-Godzilla mobile artillery platforms in contemporary comics (with the only the minimum of changes made in order to get around the fact that Marvel no longer has the license).

At bare minimum, I expect that the appeal of crossover stories would have ensured that the licensed books weren't keep too isolated. The properties are too well known to avoid that, unlike, say, the Malibu acquisition a decade later.

Beyond that, though, it's hard to say how it would shake out. DC really created the idea of the line-wide crossover/event with "Crisis on Infinite Earths", which still hadn't happened yet. Without that, I'm not sure there's precedent for the sort of massive retcon that would properly integrate the two continuities. It could still happen, of course, but it's without any real precedent. It could just as well look like DC's acquisition of the old Fawcett Comics characters in the 1970s: broadly maintaining continuity with the past but allowing for crossover stories.

I'd be interested in how this affects comics going forward, though. In the late 1980s, DC famously sought out British writers based on the critical success of Alan Moore's work (particularly Swamp Thing and Watchmen). This brought creators like Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Peter Milligan (not to mention paving the way for later arrivals like Mark Millar) into American comics for the first time and formed the nucleus for DC's Vertigo imprint, which revolutionized a lot of things about the industry (increased reliance on trade paperbacks, licensing, etc.). Without Moore's work at DC in the early to mid 1980s, this is unlikely to have happened, since it was apparently a deliberate decision by DC to court these writers.

Regardless, the American comics industry still is liable to run into a prolonged slump towards the tail end of the 1990s, and Marvel's business problems that led to its bankruptcy during this period are unlikely to go away. If the DC properties were licensed, as opposed to purchased outright, it's possible that Time Warner buys out Marvel here, similar to the later Disney deal. Otherwise, I'd expect the licensing arrangement to end, with Warner licensing the properties to some other company or giving up on periodical publication altogether.
 
I would truly fear for Mary Marvel (Fawcett characters by then being in DC's empire). True, she would never be a major character but maybe some Marvel Comic Brainiac would get her relaunched in 2012 as a bulging-muscled, ethnic minority, tattoo bearing, lesbian super heroine.
 
I would truly fear for Mary Marvel (Fawcett characters by then being in DC's empire). True, she would never be a major character but maybe some Marvel Comic Brainiac would get her relaunched in 2012 as a bulging-muscled, ethnic minority, tattoo bearing, lesbian super heroine.

Actualy, that could work...
 
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