Marvel & DC Pride

[shakalooloo]

Each of the big two published a Pride special anthology this month, for the same price. How do they compare?

First thing one will notice - beyond the covers themselves - is that Marvel's offering is of the same material as their regular comicbook output, and even retains the same stapling to keep the pages together, while DC has the slightly sturdier outer shell and spine that their 100-page giants tend to sport.




Inside, I won't go over again how ridicuolous the Marvel Voices contents page layout is, but I will re-iterate that Marvel has once again chosen to isolate the creator credits there, whereas DC prints them both on the inside cover (which Marvel instead gives out to ad space) AND with the individual stories.

On ads, while both volumes feature 'non-content' pages, DC's are more curated, advertising Pride-related services and charities, while Marvel shoves in the same ones in every other book it publishes this month, including pushing the latest event title. Other big difference - DC ads only interspcae the stories, while Marvel is happy to interrupt a comic's flow to show an ad in the middle of it.



Content-wise, barring a foreword, DC is all comic strip. Marvel instead has mainly stories with a four page history article and some Marvel Handbook entries in the back. Leaving aside that the latter are essentially glorified wikipedia entries (and Marvel's insane numbering system meaning that two characters debuting a year apart both cite Marvel's Voices: Pride #1 as their debut!), the editing on the history article is not the best, omiting and confusing dates in places and having FOUR of the six total times Brian Falsworth is mentioned calling him 'Brain'.

The most important part of the anthology, obviously, is the comics themselves, and the quality therein is obviously subjective. The only real objective distinction one can draw between the two is hinted at on the cover, where DC boasts 'fan-favorite characters'.

DC has a majority of its time spent with big-name characters with their own books, like Jon Kent, Tim Drake and Harley & Ivy. Marvel has instead gone for introducing a bunch of new characters, to such an extent that none of the stars even have an ongoing book currently - not even the Young Avengers or the Guardians of the Galaxy! So the DC title feeds more into its current events while Marvel's is more self-contained.

The Marvel book does not contain anything close to DC's 'Finding Batman', but one story does pick at an old, favourite discussion topic of Scans Daily, so why not leave this with a page discussing Krakoa?



Charlie Jane Anders, story; Ro Stein & Ted Brandt, line art; Tamra Bonvillain, colors; Naseem Jamnia, consulting

Comments

[alliterator]

"Having the extra page count definitely helped establish the characters better than the couple of panels D-Man's friends got."

And the fact that Charlie Jane Anders is coming back to write Escapade (and Morgan and Hilbert) in a New Mutants arc later this year, too. So the character isn't just being introduced and discarded.

As for D-Man's supertrans support group -- I thought that was just funny. Plus, it introduces a bunch of new trans characters who other writers can now use and give more depth to.