DC & Marvel: Headed In Opposite Directions?

Both of the major comic publishers, Marvel Comics and DC Comics, are in the midst of fairly large-scale redefinitions of their respective universes. For whatever reason, it recently occured to me to think of how those developments relate to each other, if at all.

At first, it seemed to me that they were going down diametrically-opposed paths. Marvel's using Civil War as a springboard to tell tales that are parables for what's going on right now in the real world. The Superhuman Registration Act, for example, reminds us of the Patriot Act, as both involve the casting aside of civil liberties in the face of fear. We've watched an increasingly paranoid U. S. of A. going crazy by degrees on our TV screens and in airports and at borders, while in the Marvel Universe the same sort of thing has happened where superpowered individuals are concerned.

By contrast, DC initially seemed to be on a road toward a brighter, more upbeat tone than anything we'd been subjected to since Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns changed the landscape in the mid-80s. And, in fact, we've seen some of that in the pages of Batman and Detective Comics, where the Caped Crusader was pulled back from the edge of madness - where he'd been teetering for a couple of decades - to a more well-balanced blend of intensity and mellowness. In fact, that's the sort of thing many of us expected post-Infinite Crisis, but it hasn't really been that evident elsewhere. Had it, that would've been a stark contrast between the two companies: one going darker, the other going lighter.

Instead, though, what we have upcoming in the DC Universe, we're lead to believe, is the return of the multiverse. The concept of parallel universes, a mainstay of DC between 1960 and 1986, allowed the superheroes from the 1940s to exist on Earth-2, the Marvel Family (Captain Marvel, Mary Marvel, Captain Marvel, Jr, etc) to operate on Earth-S, a villainous JLA called the Crime Syndicate to wreak havoc on the reversed-history cities of Earth-3, and so on... all while our current heroes delivered thrills and chills every month from the familiar confines of Earth-1. Crisis on Infinite Earths, in 1986, eliminated DC's multiverse - forever, we were told at the time - because it was allegedly too confusing for new readers. And yet every indication right now is that DC's bringing it back, as they teased us with in last year's Infinite Crisis mini-series. Think of it as the ultimate nostalgia trip for older fans, were the multiverse to really return in all its former glory.

Which would, in fact, make the directions being travelled by Marvel and DC more alike than different. Marvel's Civil War was intended to make the Marvel Universe a less comfortable place than it's been of late, returning it to the edginess that it had when its characters were new and Stan Lee was writing all of the stories. So with Marvel doing that, and DC potentially bringing back the Silver Age's parallel Earths notion, they might both be characterized as working toward a position of "everything old is new again."

It all boils down to how you look at it, I guess...