Contemporary Authors

• Slugfest: Inside the Epic Fifty-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC Da Capo Press (New York, NY), 2017

1. Slugfest : inside the epic fifty-year battle between Marvel and DC LCCN 2017288883 Type of material Book Personal name Tucker, Reed, author. Main title Slugfest : inside the epic fifty-year battle between Marvel and DC / Reed Tucker. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : Da Capo Press, 2017. ©2017 Description xviii, 286 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780306825460 (hardcover) 0306825465 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Amazon -

  Reed Tucker is a journalist and author who writes mostly about pop culture and entertainment. His work has appeared in the New York Post, USA Today, Esquire and Fortune, among others. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina. He lives in Brooklyn. More at reedtucker.net

• Slugfest Website - http://www.slugfestbook.com/

  Reed Tucker is a freelance journalist and author who writes mostly about pop culture and entertainment. His work has appeared in the New York Post, Esquire, Fortune, and USA Today, among others. He is a graduate of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Brooklyn.

• From Publisher -

  Reed Tucker is entertainment reporter at the New York Post, covering movies and pop culture. His work has appeared in Esquire, USA Today and on the most popular sites covering the comic book industry.

• Newsweek - http://www.newsweek.com/dc-comics-marvel-comics-superheroes-slugfest-reed-tucker-680895

  MARVEL V. DC COMICS: THE 50-YEAR BATTLE BETWEEN THE CREATORS OF SUPERMAN AND SPIDER-MAN
  BY CRAIGH BARBOZA ON 10/10/17 AT 9:20 AM
  10_09_marvel_02
  'Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between DC and Marvel' lays out the rivalry between the comic book behemoths.
  TIM GAINEY/ALAMY
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  MARVEL
  DC COMICS

  It began as a playground argument for Reed Tucker, who can remember schoolyard battles over which was better, Marvel or DC Comics, or whether Hulk could whup Superman. But the idea for a book about the creators of his childhood heroes didn’t come until 2016, when Time Warner–owned DC Entertainment threatened to release its long-awaited superhero movie Batman v. Superman on the same day as the Disney-owned Marvel Studios blockbuster Captain America: Civil War. The internet exploded.
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  Tucker’s resulting Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between DC and Marvel (Da Capo Press, $27), lays out the rivalry between these behemoths, beginning with DC inventing the superhero in 1938, with Superman, followed quickly by Marvel’s debut of the Human Torch in 1939. Competition deepened in the ’60s, when Marvel’s Stan Lee introduced the superhero to the sort of real world anxieties college students could relate to. By the mid-’80s, with DC’s reboot of Batman and the limited release of Watchmen, those worlds—on page and behind the scenes—got very dark indeed.We spoke to Tucker about Slugfest a month before Marvel and DC face off in theaters again, this time with Thor: Ragnarok and Justice League.
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  Did your appreciation for comics grow as you worked on the book?
  Oh, for sure. It’s hard to convey how marginalized comic books have been for most of their existence. They were considered trash, disposable. In the ’50s, Congress held hearings about the detrimental effects of reading them. So it’s amazing to me to see that comics are now [entrenched] in mainstream culture. Superheroes dominate the box office and TV—which is even crazier when you consider many of the early characters were dashed off quickly by journeymen writers and artists who never imagined their work would survive beyond the month the issue was on newsstands. But they created something so cool, so appealing and compelling, that here we are decades later enjoying this stuff, albeit often in media outside of comic books.Even Martin Scorsese is making a Joker origin movie! What accounts for the profound obsession we have with superheroes and supervillains?
  Part of it is that superheroes are treated in a mature fashion on screen, whereas previously they were considered kiddie fare. The head of DC in the ’70s, Jenette Kahn, used to pitch to Hollywood, only to be told superhero movies wouldn’t appeal to anyone but children and mentally stunted adults. Studios laughed at a serious Batman film. Today’s studio executives grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, after comics had become smarter and more sophisticated. The bar was raised by Alan Moore’s Watchmen in 1986 and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns that same year [both are DC]. First-rate visual effects help.

  DC and Marvel are fiercely protective of their brands. What happened when you approached them about the book?
  Very politely, they were having no part of it. I guess I understand, though the subject’s not all that controversial.See All Of The Best Photos Of The Week In These SlideshowsYou still managed to interview 75 people, including Marvel’s Stan Lee and artist Neal Adams, who helped reimagine Batman as a violent, brooding vigilante. Is there anyone you would have liked to speak to that you didn’t?
  Bill Jemas. He was Marvel’s president in the early 2000s. He came from a job with the NBA and loved rivalries, and he was determined to ramp up the feud. It resulted in the ugliest period in Marvel vs. DC’s history. Jemas even wrote a 2002 comics series, Marville. Ostensibly, it was a parody of Superman, but the sole reason was to bash the competition. The opening page in issue No. 1 reads, in part, “Marvel’s Distinguished Competition (DC Comics) is run by a man named Paul Levitz who fights a never-ending battle to keep his business obscure.” It’s hard to believe Marvel published that.
  10_09_marvel_01
  Reed Tucker’s "Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between DC and Marvel" is available from Da Capo Press.
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  What else surprised you? There were several instances of spying over the years. The best was probably in 1971, when DC suspected one of its employees was leaking secrets to fanzines and Marvel. The head of DC launched an honest-to-God counter-espionage operation, code-named Blockbuster, in which he created a fake memo about the company’s plans to publish gigantic 500-page comics. He then left it in his outbox. Sure enough, the spy took the bait, and soon there was talk over at Marvel of doing 500-page comics.Marvel and DC had creative ways of undermining each other. For example, Marvel introduced a character in 1964 called Wonder Man that ticked off DC, who thought it sounded too close to Wonder Woman. So Marvel agreed to kill off Wonder Man. Then DC unveiled a hero called Power Girl just a few years after Marvel introduced Power Man, so Stan Lee exacted payback by reviving Wonder Man. One of the few times the companies collaborated, weirdly enough, is on the trademark for the word superhero. DC and Marvel filed jointly for ownership and still sue people who try and use it.There were also “talent wars,” vying for stars like Wolverine co-creator Len Wein, who died last month. Yes. During the boom years—the late ’80s and early ’90s—some top writers and artists were raking in millions. X-Men writer Chris Claremont literally bought a plane!

  Before they were acquired by conglomerates, the houses had very distinct cultures. Where would you have wanted to work? No contest: Marvel. They’ve always had a more laid-back culture, with wrestling matches and silly string fights in the hallways. DC was button-down. Somebody described the offices as out of Mad Men.

• Reed Tucker Website - http://www.reedtucker.net/

  I’ve been a journalist working in New York since 1999, most recently as a staff features writer at the New York Post. I’ve written hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles for everyone from Esquire to USA Today to Oprah. I’m still not sure how that last one happened. Read and download my resume here.

  CV: http://www.reedtucker.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ResumeMay2016.pdf

• Cartoonician - http://cartoonician.com/clash-of-the-titans-an-interview-with-the-author-of-slugfest/

  Clash of the Titans: An Interview with the Author of “Slugfest”
  Dec 18,2017 - by Tom Heintjes
  0
  In an era when our society is riven by acrimonious and seemingly intractable divisions, we’ve become nostalgic for a more carefree societal division: whether you were a Marvel or DC fan as a child. The feelings surrounding one’s corporate allegiance ran high, to be sure, and the passions behind them ultimately played a big part in fueling globally iconic brands and billion-dollar box offices. Author Reed Tucker has tapped into the intensity of this rivalry and its history in his recently published book Slugfest, and Hogan’s Alley editor Tom Heintjes discussed the making of the book with Tucker.

  Tom Heintjes: Did you grow up a lifelong comics fan?

  Reed Tucker: Hell, yeah. I was trying to think the other day what was the first comic I ever owned, and I can remember being a small child in the late 1970s and getting a free comic out of a cereal box. Anything that came inside a cereal box was cool at that age, but that thing was like treasure to me. I recently went on eBay to look for those comics, and I discovered the one I remember probably came from a promotion Post had with DC in 1979. They gave away these mini-comics with Batman and Wonder Woman and the others. I still can remember what that comic felt like coming out the cereal box, wrapped in plastic and covered in Honeycomb dust.

  I read comics all through childhood, in part because they were much more available back then. They’d be there on a spinner rack at the 7-11 or the B. Dalton’s bookstore. You didn’t have to go hunting for them. I’d buy two or three to read on a car trip.

  When I was about 12 or so, a friend took me to a comic specialty store in Richmond, Virginia, where I grew up, and it blew my mind. It was my first glimpse of true comic book culture. Comic books were so underground and marginalized back then that I had no idea that there was this whole world of serious hobbyists out there who collected and revered them. The one thing I really remember about that store is that they were dead serious about protecting their back issues. The store was packed with dozens of long boxes full of comics, and the customers weren’t allowed to touch them. You had to ask the cashier to get you whatever book you wanted. It was more like an unfriendly museum than a fun pop culture store.

  Tom Heintjes: What were some of your favorite titles or characters?

  My favorite character growing up was Batman. I just liked his overall dark vibe, and I’ve always liked mystery stories, so I dug the whole detective thing. I realize now only in retrospect that I probably also liked Batman because he was a bit closer to a Marvel character than the others at DC. He had no superpowers and was full of angst. DC’s other heroes never did that much for me. I always found them a bit boring. I think one of the hardest jobs on earth has to be writing Superman. After 80 years or whatever worth of stories, how do you come up with something new and interesting to say about a nearly omnipotent character? I would just be like, “Um, how about Kryptonite again?”

  My favorite DC superhero title was Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire’s Justice League, maybe because it was very un-DC. I really enjoyed the comedic spin on the cast of usually stodgy heroes.

  I tended to prefer the Marvel characters in general. I loved Wolverine when he was hot in the 1980s. Loved Spider-Man. Loved Daredevil, mostly due to Frank Miller. Loved Elektra: Assassin and anything by Bill Sienkiewicz.

  Heintjes: What inspired you to pursue the idea of the rivalry between Marvel and DC?

  “Slugfest” author Reed Tucker

  Tucker: I like rivalries because they have the most important element of storytelling built right in: conflict. It’s a pretty easy starting point for a book right there. You don’t have to gin up anything or try to fake the drama. It’s baked in.

  I’m a Tar Heel, as I know you are, and UNC has this long-burning feud with Duke, so I think going to school in that atmosphere made me more cognizant of rivalries.

  As a child, I can remember kids on the playground arguing about whether Marvel or DC was better or whether the Hulk could beat up Superman and all that dumb stuff. So I was always aware of this divide. The thing that really cemented the idea for the book though was a few years ago when DC threatened to release Batman v Superman on the same day as Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War. People online kind of exploded. Lines were drawn all over again. I was surprised not only that this tribalism I remembered as a kid still existed, but that it was, if anything, even more passionate than back then. The superhero movies gave the fans something new over which to divide themselves all over again, or at least a new opportunity to express their love of Marvel and their hatred of DC, or vice versa.

  Once I started looking into the rivalry even more, I realized there was so much fun stuff and so many interesting anecdotes and that the rivalry speaks to a lot of what’s going on today with DC and Marvel in mainstream pop culture.

  Heintjes: When you approached creators and company executives to talk about the rivalry, what kinds of reactions did you receive?

  Tucker: It was mixed, honestly, as you might expect. When I started the project, I compiled a huge list of people I might want to talk to. It skewed more towards editors, company executives and writers, because I thought those people probably had a better grasp of what was going on inside the companies than, say, a freelance artist might. So I just started reaching out, emailing them or writing them actual paper letters. I also went to a couple comic cons and tried to meet some creators in person. Generally, people were pretty receptive. A couple people declined nicely. One or two were kind of nasty. More than a few just ignored me. Fair enough. I can understand that the topic might be somewhat touchy, but I thought and still think that you have to have your head buried in the sand to dismiss the rivalry or its effect on superheroes and contemporary pop culture. I think it’s a worthy topic for discussion, not something that’s simply petty or gossipy.

  That said, the people who did agree to talk to me—and there were a lot of them—were incredibly generous. Obviously, the book would not exist without them. They were really patient about talking to me in person or on the phone and answering a bunch of follow up questions. It goes along with one of the reasons I like comic book culture and conventions. There’s a friendly vibe and a sense of community, maybe because there’s a feeling that we’re all nerds in this together.

  DC and Marvel didn’t cooperate at all. I reached out to them and got the runaround for a few months. I never expected them to help, but I did want to give them the chance, of course.

  Heintjes: It was so interesting to me how incapable the DC executives were of seeing what factors were behind Marvel’s rise. Do you think this was because they weren’t truly fans of what they were producing? It came across to me as if they were slightly contemptuous of their own product.

  Tucker: That’s probably part of it. The only comic Irwin Donenfeld, who ran DC until Kinney bought it in 1968, read was supposedly Sugar and Spike, a humorous book about two toddlers. He was also reasonably dismissive of a comic book’s content. He was obsessed with covers and thought they were the only thing that mattered in the comic book market. So when Marvel came along with a new way to tell superhero stories, I think it escaped some at DC because they weren’t particularly focused on the story possibilities, especially when it came to appealing to older readers.

  There was also a sense of superiority among some at DC. They had launched the American superhero with Superman and they had been the class of the industry for years. There was a feeling that no one could touch them, and that arrogance helped keep the blinders on.

  Heintjes: I’ve always heard a story about, when Marvel finally overtook DC in sales, Stan Lee gathered the staff and essentially said, “We’ve always had change in our universe. Now I want the illusion of change.” But that anecdote isn’t in your book, which leads me to think it’s apocryphal. Have you ever heard that?

  Tucker: I’ve heard the same, and I think some version of it is probably true. Roy Thomas has said that Stan told him and writer Gary Friedrich something similar in the late 1960s. This was before Marvel overtook DC but after Marvel had broken out. I think I understand Stan’s position. His line of books had become unexpectedly successful, and these characters had become incredibly valuable. I can see that some fans saw this edict as a betrayal of Marvel’s early innovative spirit, but what was Stan meant to do? Kill off Spider-Man? In a way, Marvel became trapped by its own success. The more well-known these characters became, the less leeway the company had to mess with them. In part, that’s one of the reasons the death of Gwen Stacy was so shocking. A prominent character actually got killed off. Stan has claimed in recent years that the story was written without his knowledge while he was away in Europe, but the writer, Gerry Conway, has said that he ran the plot point by Stan. I believe Conway on that one, which suggests Stan might not have been so wedded to the whole “illusion of change” thing.

  Anyway, I didn’t include all that in the book because, like so much, I just didn’t have the room and had to make a million hard choices.

  Heintjes: In the mid-80s, DC really shook thing up with Watchmen, Dark Knight, and Swamp Thing. And it was Marvel that appeared creatively sclerotic, even if their sales were higher…very much an inversion of the situation a couple of decades earlier. Why was Marvel not able to see the role reversal under way?

  Tucker: I don’t think Marvel cared. DC was branching out in different directions, in part, because they had no other choice. They’d stumbled at the superhero game and had nearly gone out of business in the 1970s. Marvel was cleaning their clock month after month. DC had to get more daring and creative. They had to try new things. And that’s when they took a shot on a radical reinvention with The Dark Knight Returns and when they let a mostly unknown British writer take a stab at mature horror in Swamp Thing. The broadening of the kinds of books DC published worked out in their favor, but I don’t think anyone was certain at the time that it would. Frank Miller likes to talk about how DC execs hated what he was doing with the Dark Knight and was afraid to publish it. Steve Bissette, one of the artists on that great Swamp Thing run, told me that when he and Alan Moore took over, sales of the title were around 16,000. It was basically dead, so DC had nothing to lose by shaking it up.

  Meanwhile, Marvel has always been and remains much more of a traditional superhero company. They’ve never really expanded beyond those narrow parameters, but the niche focus didn’t really hurt their sales, as you mentioned. They were the market leader back then and they remain now. They’re in the business of making money obviously, so they don’t have much incentive to change.

  I do find it disappointing that Marvel doesn’t publish more non-traditional titles or have an imprint similar to DC’s Vertigo. I’d like to see the kinds of books that would come out of there. They did have the Max imprint a few years ago, but that seemed like little more than excuse to let existing characters say the F-word.

  Heintjes: Can you discuss sourcing? How cooperative were people in talking about events, personalities and other potentially ticklish topics? Were there people you really wanted to talk to who just refused to discuss those events?

  Tucker: It was mixed, as I mentioned before.

  There were definitely a few people I would have liked to talk to that escaped me for various reasons. Would have loved to have had Joe Quesada, not just because he’s been high up at Marvel for so many years, but also because of what he did revitalizing the company with Marvel Knights.

  The one person I was most sorry not to get was Bill Jemas, who ran Marvel during the early 2000s and was determined to poke DC in the eye as much as possible. I tried to get an interview. I called him, sent him letters but never got a response. I think he knows he made quite a few enemies in the industry and he probably wants to put his tenure at Marvel behind him, which is fair enough, I guess.

  Heintjes: Related to that, many of the principals from the early days of the DC-Marvel rivalry are dead. Who would you have liked to talk to but couldn’t?

  Tucker: Oh, God. So, so many. It killed me that all these influential people are no longer with us. Some of them left behind loads of interviews, but there were still a million questions I’d have liked to ask. I’d be reading these old interviews, and some tantalizing point would come up with regards to the rivalry, but then it would drop. I’d be almost yelling at the computer or magazine, “Ask the follow-up question!”

  I would have absolutely loved to have spoken to Irwin Donenfeld. His personality and motivations remain a bit of a mystery to me. Another is Carmine Infantino. He presided over DC at such a critical juncture, in the late 60s and early 70s, when DC was losing its grip on the market and desperately trying to meet the challenge from its rival.

  But the one person I didn’t really know much about that I became most interested in having written this book is Arnold Drake. He’s a person that I think doesn’t really get his due when it comes to the important figures in comics history. Not only did he write some great stories and come up with some great characters, but he was one of the earliest at DC to recognize the challenge from Marvel and he tried to push the company in new directions. He was also really outspoken, which is always great from a journalistic perspective.

  Note: You can order a copy of Slugfest by clicking here.

Tucker, Reed: SLUGFEST
Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Tucker, Reed SLUGFEST Da Capo (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 10, 3 ISBN: 978-0-306-82546-0

A smart, blow-by-blow narrative of the sometimes-friendly, often bitter rivalry between corporate comic-book behemoths.When Superman debuted in 1938, no one could have predicted that he and his underwear-on-the-outside brethren would eventually come to dominate the entertainment landscape. Journalist Tucker (co-author: Duke Sucks: A Completely Evenhanded, Unbiased Investigation into the Most Evil Team on Planet Earth, 2012) makes a compelling case that the rise of the superhero in popular culture is perhaps best understood by exploring the evolution of the two companies that created and proliferated those heroes: DC Comics, the upright and staid publishers of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and Marvel Comics, the hipper, edgier purveyors of Spider-Man, the Avengers, and the X-Men. The author provides an essential primer on how these companies' comics evolved from four-color funny books for kids to complicated, carefully curated content aimed at an aging comics cognoscenti to intellectual property laboratories for multinational entertainment conglomerates. Comic-book fans will revel in the minutiae of Tucker's account, from stories of artists using pen names in the early days of the rivalry to collect a paycheck from both sides without incurring the wrath of their primary employer to alleged acts of spying in the wake of both companies simultaneously publishing stories of startling similarity (on multiple occasions, no less). Comics neophytes will undoubtedly get lost in the voluminous list of creators cited throughout the book and be astonished by the lack of business acumen displayed by various editorial regimes. However, even they will be able to appreciate the salacious significance of DC's secret overtures to Stan Lee at the height of his Marvel fame and the way in which each company's corporate culture, not to mention the machinations of their parent companies and investors, contributed to the current state of superhero ubiquity--even as the comic publishing industry itself dwindles. A wild haymaker for the masses, perhaps, but a knockout read for capes-and-cowls aficionados.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tucker, Reed: SLUGFEST." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572681/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23cf4d87. Accessed 12 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572681

"Tucker, Reed: SLUGFEST." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572681/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23cf4d87. Accessed 12 Apr. 2018.

• National Review
  https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/12/18/reed-tucker-slugfest-review/
  Word count: 1077

  Clashing Universes
  By BRADLEY J. BIRZER
  December 18, 2017 12:50 AM

  Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle between Marvel and DC, by Reed Tucker (Da Capo, 304 pp., $27)
  No matter how cynical any civilization becomes, its people will always need heroes. If the gods and demigods of the ancient world gave way to the saints and martyrs of the medieval world, the saints and martyrs of the medieval world gave way to the comic-book masked vigilantes, aliens, and mutants of the modern world. What will the postmoderns do? (Try to deconstruct the moderns, of course, and leave us with only our hopelessness.)

  Like it or not, over the past 40 years comic-book characters have come to dominate the popular culture of America. Once thriving only on drugstore magazine racks and in the newspaper strips, superheroes, especially, have found profitable homes on television, at the movies, in video games, and in the young-adult fiction section of your local Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million. What was once the province of gifted but socially awkward kids and older socially awkward nerds has become mainstream. Not only a massive amount of money but the very soul of our society is at stake, depending on how we choose to interpret Wonder Woman, Batman, and Wolverine. Do we laugh at them or with them? Do we see them as heroes or antiheroes? Do they work for or against the government? Do they represent law and order? And so forth.

  In his captivating new book, pop-culture journalist Reed Tucker explores the surprisingly bitter and diverse world of comic-book artists, writers, and companies. While a number of books — both academic and popular — have examined one superhero, one company, one artist, one writer, or one universe, Tucker’s is the first to offer a sweeping overview of how economics and cultural values have intertwined, collided, and struggled in the creation of the two empires — DC and Marvel — that dominate comics today. While many grown-up conservatives might still turn away comic books as a trashy genre, Tucker makes a convincing case that Marvel and DC matter greatly to the order and stability of our society, whatever the faults and egos of those involved directly in generating these publications.

  A comic-book fan will learn a great deal from this book, as will those interested primarily in the workings of economics. Tucker has done such a fine job of explaining how DC and Marvel have competed with each other that there were times he could easily have traded out DC and Marvel, respectively, for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. “If DC represented Eisenhower’s America, Marvel was like John F. Kennedy’s. The publisher was younger, cooler, and possibly sleeping with your girlfriend,” Tucker explains. The companies imitated, plagiarized, outproduced, undersold, outgimmicked, and spied on each other. Since 1972, DC has been second best, never quite catching up to Marvel in sales. DC explains calmly that it has always favored quality over quantity. As Tucker notes, financial success in comics is measured by having a high “sell-through percentage” — meaning having a low number of copies returned, unsold, from stores to the publisher.

  Don’t be afraid, however, that statistics might dominate this book. (From time to time, the reader could even use a few more than Tucker provides.) The author focuses chiefly on the many fascinating personalities in the industry — such figures as Julius Schwartz, Frank Miller, Jack Kirby, and Todd McFarlane. This was — at least before the success of 2017’s film version of Wonder Woman — a nearly all-male world; the one important exception was Jenette Kahn, long-time president of DC.

  No one figure appears more often than Stanley Martin Lieber (b. 1922), known now to legions of adoring fans as Stan “The Man” Lee. Tucker offers us a very different Lee from the one who appears in cameos in Marvel movies. The early Lee wanted nothing to do with comics, other than to make enough money to establish himself in respectable publishing. From 1941 to 1961, he thanklessly wrote, pulp-style, hundreds of comic tales — but when Marvel collapsed in the late 1950s and the publisher decided to reboot his approach to the business, it was Lee who was central to the project: He created (with help from Kirby and Steve Ditko) the comic-book antihero, a much more human and conflicted superhero than the do-gooding gods of DC. Ever since, Lee has been loved and hated by fans and industry people alike, and has been the most successful comics entrepreneur of the past half century.

  As Tucker notes, Lee’s re-creation of Marvel was in keeping with the budding cultural nonconformism of the 1950s and built up to the seemingly unstoppable countercultural movements of the late 1960s. Far more than DC, Marvel captured the attention of the dissatisfied youth of America. Ever since, comic readers have tended to self-identify as either Marvel or DC fans.

  The only problem with Tucker’s duopoly approach, as successful as it is as a narrative, is that it ignores a variety of other players in the field, especially a number of prominent comic-book companies from Europe and Japan, and even some North American companies such as Dark Horse and IDW. Overall, though, the book is a gem: I became so taken with it that I read the entire book in two sittings. Not only did I find the stories Tucker highlighted thoroughly fascinating, but I also quickly became infatuated with his writing style, something of a 2010s version of Tom Wolfe–meets–P. J. O’Rourke.

  COMMENTS
  Though Tucker claims not to be a fan of either DC or Marvel, he certainly knows the ins and outs of each company well enough to make me skeptical about his claims to distance: It is his love of the topic that makes the book so fundamentally enjoyable. In his epilogue, he makes a plea for partisans of DC or Marvel to put their differences aside and instead recognize how incredible it is that kids who were beaten up in junior high for letting an issue of Batman slip out of their Trapper Keepers now dominate the film, television, and video-game industries. In sum, whatever the struggles of Marvel and DC, the nerds won.

  – Mr. Birzer is a professor of history at Hillsdale College, where he holds the Russell Amos Kirk chair in American studies.

  BRADLEY J. BIRZER

• Bloomberg
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/slugfest-book-review-marvel-vs-dc-is-the-epic-conflict-of-our-time
  Word count: 913

  Marvel vs. DC Is the Epic Superhero Conflict of Our Time
  Slugfest traces the vitriol, and occasional villainy, behind the competition for spandex supremacy.
  By
  September 28, 2017, 6:37 PM GMT+8
  From Subscribe Reprints

  Illustration: Matija Medved
  I can still remember what it felt like to pick up my first Marvel comic book, The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2, in 1965 at a store near my home in the Philadelphia suburbs. I was already a comic fan, devouring issues of Superman and Batman.

  This was something different. Inside, writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko wove a tale that put the arachnidan hero in the surrealistic realm of Doctor Strange, a master of the mystic arts. It was thrilling, even a little scary—an intoxicating mix. I have friends who identify as DC kids. They have a weakness for Superman, Batman, and the other less morally complicated American heroes. But on that day, I became a Marvel lifer.

  Reed Tucker doesn’t take sides in his book Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC (Da Capo Press Inc., $27). Instead, the former feature writer for the New York Post chronicles the companies’ longtime feud, which has grown more vitriolic in an age of multibillion-­dollar movie franchises.

  In 2002 a Marvel executive compared DC to a porn star who was unable to activate his most crucial organ. At last year’s premiere of Suicide Squad, a film about villainous DC characters forced to do good, the director David Ayer snarled, “F--- Marvel!” to cheers. Along the way, the companies have accused each other of antics worthy of the villains they invented, trading charges of plagiarism and engaging in CIA-level paranoia.

  The competition actually started in the 1960s. DC, formerly known as National Periodical Publications Inc., had invented the modern superhero genre in 1938 when it published Action Comics #1 featuring Superman, a red-caped visitor from the planet Krypton who possessed godlike strength. Before long, Tucker notes, DC was selling 1.3 million copies of Action Comics a year. In 1939, Batman materialized, in the company’s Detective Comics #27. With the public embracing these gaudy icons, they became the subjects of movie serials in the 1940s.

  What happened two decades later is a familiar disruption trope. DC was the successful company reluctant to risk jeopardizing its brands. Marvel, its smaller rival, desperately needed to innovate, or it would go out of business. Marvel editor Lee, a frustrated novelist, started publishing comics with costumed heroes wracked with Dostoyevskian self-doubt (the Fantastic Four and X-Men among them). They were characters more in step with the rebellious times than DC’s emotionally detached leading men.

  Lee also hired artists such as Ditko and the extraordinary Jack Kirby and promoted them with the same verve that he did with his fictitious stars. He was a master of creating community among his readers, too, encouraging them to join the whimsically titled fan club the Merry Marvel Marching Society while taking shots at DC, which he called “Brand-Echh,” on the editorial pages of his books.

  Each successive decade changed the storyline. During the ’60s, Tucker reports, DC made $100 million a year; Marvel managed only about $35 million. By the early ’70s, Marvel had eclipsed its rival in comic sales, and it has stayed in first place since. In the ’80s, DC created the ­graphic-novel business in the U.S. with titles such as Watchmen, a series with literary ambitions.

  Then came the movies. Frank Miller’s reinvention of Batman as a grizzled vigilante in the 1986 comic-book miniseries The Dark Knight Returns inspired director Tim Burton’s film version, which grossed more than $100 million in 1989. But such theatrical dominance was transient. Marvel, which declared bankruptcy in 1996 and had already sold the X-Men film rights to Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. for a mere $1.5 million, eventually created its own Hollywood studio and began pumping out remarkably lucrative films, starting with Iron Man in 2008. (Walt Disney Co. would go on to buy Marvel for $4 billion in 2009.) Tucker estimates that Marvel’s movies have made $8.9 billion and DC’s have made $4 billion.

  Tucker is no poet of the superhero world. In Slugfest, minds are “blown,” gigs are “cushy,” thunder is “stolen,” and the rich are “filthy.” There’s also lots of numbing fanboy trivia: Did Marvel steal the idea for the X-Men from DC’s forgotten Doom Patrol, or was DC imitating Marvel? Does anyone but me care?

  What’s really missing, though, is a passion for comics and a sense of the wonder they can evoke at their best. Tucker says he doesn’t bother with comics from either DC or Marvel these days. He’d rather read non-superhero titles like The Walking Dead, an independent publication. More thoughtful analysis about why these companies still resonate would have helped.

  I came across Ditko’s Spider-Man again in 2007, on the wall of the Jewish Museum in New York as part of a show called Masters of American Comics. It was the cover of one of the last Spider-Man issues he’d drawn, No. 33, from 1966. The cover line was “The Final Chapter!” and Spider-Man is trapped under machinery in an abandoned factory. He escapes, of course, but only after overcoming his self-doubt. The image moved me like it did when I first saw it. It also reminded me why I had to take a side.

• Washington Times
  https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/22/book-review-slugfest-by-reed-tucker/
  Word count: 1328

  The battle of the superheroes
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  By Michael Taube - - Thursday, February 22, 2018
  ANALYSIS/OPINION:

  SLUGFEST: INSIDE THE EPIC 50-YEAR BATTLE BETWEEN MARVEL AND DC

  By Reed Tucker

  Da Capo Press, $27, 304 pages

  One of my favorite childhood memories was going to Comics Unlimited, a now-defunct comic book store close to my high school. My friends and I would enthusiastically snatch up just about every new title before it was placed on the racks.

  As we trudged back to our classes with bags of comic book booty, the conversation would often shift to who published the best titles. Some preferred Marvel (Spider-Man, Captain America, Avengers), while others supported DC (Superman, Batman, Justice League). Like most comic book aficionados, we playfully argued, debated and bickered — but never reached a consensus.

  These discussions came flooding back as I poured through Reed Tucker’s “Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC.” The freelance pop culture journalist/author has written an intriguing examination of the intense Marvel-DC rivalry that has helped shape, well, comicbookdom.

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  DC was founded by former U.S. Cavalry officer/pulp writer Maj. Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson as National Allied Publications, and it released its inaugural comic book, New Fun Comics #1, in 1935. After an additional five issues, Wheeler-Nicholson “ran out of money” and teamed up with Independent News.

  The latter company, started by Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz, had made its money “by backing a series of racy pulps” but also received public scorn. Wanting to “diversify away from its girlie-heavy portfolio and expand into more innocent publishing arenas,” Independent consolidated efforts with National Allied and became Detective Comics, Inc. in 1937.

  Marvel was formed in 1939 as Timely Comics. Its founder, Martin Goodman, “got his start producing low-rent magazines, just like the men who founded DC.” Marvel Comics #1 was released, and the company jumped “from fad to fad, with little originality or leadership in evidence.” Everything from superheroes to funny animal stories was fair game. In 1951, Mr. Goodman left his distributor and renamed his company Atlas Comics. He struggled financially, gave Atlas a fresh coat of paint, and launched Marvel Comics in 1957.

  Marvel was originally seen as a “copycat” of DC and, as Mr. Tucker amusingly depicts, “the equivalent of a bad bar cover band.” Yet, there were some weird, early connections that tied them together.

  DC, sensing Atlas was “fatally wounded” in 1957, offered $15,000 for three significant characters: Captain America, Sub-Mariner and Human Torch. Mr. Goodman considered this offer, which “looks insanely lowball by today’s hyperinflated superhero market,” but the millionaire businessman passed on it. Meanwhile, Mr. Goodman used Independent News as a distributor starting in the 1950s. This decision had “little to do with altruism,” but to help DC dispel concerns “about appearing to be a monopoly.” If this arrangement hadn’t occurred, Marvel could have potentially closed its doors for good.

  Marvel and DC have remarkably different operating philosophies.

  “If Marvel’s art was a double espresso,” Mr. Tucker notes, “DC’s was like a pleasant green tea.” Marvel was more interested in being “more experimental, more edgy,” or, as former editor in chief and publisher Stan Lee said, “a cornucopia of fantasy.” DC liked a “cleaner, more technically correct style” in its artwork, leading editor Julie Schwartz to remark, “If it’s not clean, it’s worthless.” Readers originally favored DC’s approach, but as its sell-through rate became noticeably “shakier compared to Marvel‘s,” the upstart competitor took control in the 1960s.

  Both companies try to one-up each other, including multiverse stories like Marvel’s “Secret Wars” and DC’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” Unusual superhero similarities, such as DC’s Doom Patrol and Marvel’s X-Men (both feature a “team leader in a wheelchair”), have raised eyebrows.

  There was a successful Marvel-DC team-up in 1976 with Superman and Spider-Man, but a Justice League-Avengers follow-up was “so fraught with difficulties and rancor that it killed cooperation between the companies for more than a decade.” Talented artists like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby worked for both companies, which led to personal distrust and many expletives.

  Superhero movies have also created a new dimension to this rivalry. DC is owned by Warner Bros. Entertainment, while Marvel is part of Walt Disney. “DC’s brand is not as strong or cohesive as Marvel,” in Mr. Tucker’s view, and “Marvel has also been much more disciplined with its planning than DC.” While there may be room for both companies to succeed in Hollywood, “Marvel marches on, continuing its historic run.”

  Who will win this titanic battle of the superheroes? That remains to be seen, but let’s hope people keep reading their favorite comic books for years to come.

  • Michael Taube is a frequent contributor to The Washington Times.

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