One Perfect Moment: The Riddler

[goggle_kid]

One page from 1989's Secret Origins special.

Comments

[jlroberson]

I would agree regarding the Golden Age, if you leave out Quality, EC, Eisner, whomever Matt Baker(Fox?) worked for, and a number of others, basically everyone but DC. Except? Jerry Robinson on Batman.

I'm not even speaking of the quality of the stories, just saying that the Joker being a killer, and darkness in Batman, was its character for at least the first 5 years of existence. It was really post-war that it started slowly changing into an odd imitation of Superman.

I don't care for Infantino myself--not saying he's crap, but he's not my taste--but I see your point. I would, myself, go with Kirby and Ditko. DC was, apart from the occasional great thing like DOOM PATROL, a pretty stiff and moribund thing in the 60s compared to Marvel, and positively undead compared to the underground. It was not a place of artistic innovation at the time, though you had a lot of professional craftsmanship.(Nick Cardy for instance)

Partly because DC for a long time, notoriously, did not put its best artists on its best sellers.

[filkertom]

I think a lot of that was due to the perception of where the market was. Stan Lee was very well aware that the young adult market was untapped, and he wrote to get their attention. Mort Weisinger, on the other hand, considered his primary customers to be the kids that had always been the base, which is why we had so many giant apes, dress-up Jimmy Olsen shticks, and a gurrrrl who kept trying to figure out Superman's big secret. It wasn't until Denny O'Neill and Neal Adams broke through with Green Lantern/Green Arrow that DC started to figure out what Lee had known for years.

[jlroberson]

And for a while DC controlled most distribution and limited Marvel's titles(which was why Marvel characters had to bunk up in the same books like STRANGE TALES).