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Recycling the Competition

If one competes, he can see the pleasure in the occasional jab of humor directed at his rival. DC and Marvel, back in the Silver Age, competed viciously for a modestly lucrative market that only one, so it seemed, could dominate. One type of recurring jab that appeared within comics themselves involved the caricature of the rival's product. By 1971, both DC and Marvel had presented derisive versions of the other's goods. These parodies became more and more popular over time, offering an appeal to loyal readers (who disdained the substandard fare foisted upon gullible readers by the competition) and promiscuous readers (who enjoyed the joke on recognizable versions of characters they new well).

After a while, though, something peculiar happened. The parodies took on lives of their own, and gradually entered the shared universe of the companies that distilled them from the originals of the competition. Some, like the Squadron Supreme, would infuse themselves into continuity until they possessed more printed pages overall than certain homegrown characters.

Sometimes these duplicate characters might become as popular as, or more popular than, the originals; and sometimes they would allow comics creators to do things that no editor would ever allow them to do with the originals.

By 1986, the ripoff character had come into his own.

Marvel Does DC

One can see the first stages in this process in the pages of Marvel comics of the Silver Age. Marvel's situation made some type of parody or tribute almost inevitable; DC, after all, stood as the Grand Old Company of comic books during Marvel's early, post-Atlas, days. DC's characters had appeared in print so long as to represent cultural icons; their characters had appeared as comics, as cartoons, as movie serials, as television shows, and as movies. People recognized their characters in direct proportion to the age of these creations.

On top of this, Marvel held the position of unruly upstart. Marvel had achieved a notable success starting from scratch in a standardized market into which no one would have predicted their ability to enter. Marvel had created new comics concepts and rubbed the point in with an entirely new slant on superhero comics relying less on the role-model/iconic nature of their heroes and more upon the human faces of their superhero stable. DC, in the meantime, initially failed to adapt, and seemed like a company filled with stuttering, stuffy old men offended by wild young men in fast cars blasting by them while they stalled in traffic.

Marvel had to gloat some back in those days. Youth has to poke at maturity occasionally.

The Squadron Sinister

Marvel therefore infused an inside joke about DC's characters into an Avengers story. One of Marvel's innumerable cosmic beings, possibly the Grandmaster, had decided to impose a contest upon the Avengers; therefore, he confronted them with a created supervillain team of Hyperion (Superman), the Whizzer (Flash), Nighthawk (Batman) and Dr. Spectrum (Green Lantern). This story gave Marvel's creative people the satisfying opportunity to create comics stories in which Marvel characters might pummel the living snot out of (imitation) DC characters.

In some ways, thanks to the stylish pencil of a Buscema, this take on the Justice League had more appeal than the originals had enjoyed during portions of their history. Whizzer and Nighthawk, for instance, enjoyed a better treatment than their originals sometimes received except at the hands of exceptional talent (such as Batman's fortunate handling under artists like Jim Aparo and Neal Adams). Readers, therefore, could enjoy these characters for the appeal they held without reference to their (illicit) origins; and the caricaturish aspect of their role as an imitation Justice League offered readers a mildly naughty joke at DC's expense.

The Squadron Supreme

Something about the Squadron Sinister caught on, and the villain team would reappear into the 1970s. However, for unclear reasons (perhaps including the desire to create an ersatz Justice League even more similar to the original), Roy Thomas wrote a pair of stories in which several Avengers vanished into, and saved, a parallel earth. Said earth contained a group of superheroes living in a building where the Avengers Mansion should have appeared; and said superheroes bore remarkable resemblances to the aforementioned Squadron Sinister.

Thus appeared, for the first time, the Squadron Supreme, whose more complete membership included Nighthawk (a version of Batman), Lady Lark (a version of Black Canary), Hawkeye (a version of Green Arrow who would later wear the names Golden Archer and Black Archer), American Eagle (a McCarthyite version of Hawkman), and Tom Thumb (an unlikely parody of the Atom).

Readers received the Squadron Supreme positively, and Marvel reused the team over the years. By 1976, Marvel added Power Princess (a bogus Wonder Woman) and Amphibian (an imitation Aquaman) and, at the beginning of the Squadron Supreme miniseries, attempted to complete its catalogue of recent Justice Leaguers by adding Arcanna/Moonglow (Zatanna), the Skrullian Skymaster (whose resemblance to the Martian Manhunter seemed legally actionable and resulted in his removal from stories about the Squadron) and Nuke (Firestorm).

Marvel had truly begun a roll with these characters. From their origins (and long careers) as gullible political stooges and victims of mind control, the Squadron had gone on to star in a 12-issue series that could have borne the title "The Death of the Justice League" had the characters worn the names of the characters who provided their inspiration. By the early issues of this series, the characters had taken lives of their own, beginning to deviate seriously from their original conceptions. The mix of a Draconian plan to bring about Utopia with an internal crisis of confidence about using mind control as a means of social reform resulted in a long and grotesque free-for-all that killed off Nighthawk (Batman), Black Archer (Green Arrow), Blue Eagle (Hawkman), and a number of original characters not derived from DC characters at all.

Marvel had stumbled onto something here with its imitation characters. In a sense, such characters could play a more meaningful role in stories than their originals, because Marvel, not truly owning these characters (in the sense of their derivative nature and their lack of autonomous comics titles) could do whatever to or with them that they wanted. Marvel could have a Batman and kill him; Marvel could have a Superman, but do terrible things to him. DC had no such freedom with its characters, who had not only to adhere to a canon of continuity, but also to continue to sell ongoing comics.

Marvel had discovered how to have the competition's cake and eat it, too.

The Shi'ar Imperial Guard (or Something)

Marvel owes another significant element in its duplicated DC creations to the efforts of Dave Cockrum, who, during his tenure at Marvel, recreated the comics concept that had brought him to fame; he made Marvel its own version of the Legion of Superheroes. At first, the resemblance does not appear clear, since, as in the case of the Squadron Supreme, Cockrum did not render these duplicate characters similar in appearance to their prototypes. Yet one can find a correspondence in the original Shi'ar Imperial Guard that bespeaks a one-to-one function of duplication. For example, Gladiator represents either Superboy or Mon-El; Titan represents Colossal Boy; and so on.

Circumstances suggest that Cockrum's intent included mainly either irony or tribute to the concepts he had stimulated to create his first notable success in comics. Nonetheless, this duplicate Legion survives in Marvel canon into the present, and also serves to inflate the number of superheroes Cockrum can claim to have invented. Like the Squadron Supreme, this superhero team allows Marvel to work with non-commercial material derived from the competition in ways its original custodians did not originally dare. Thus, this quondam LSH served as heavies in the "Operation Galactic Storm" stories of the early 1990s.

DC Does Marvel

DC titles, back before 1972, enjoyed a number of absurd and bizarre tales that seemingly began somewhere in an inadvertently surreal corner an author's mind and would erupt from the pages, careening improbably from coincidence to non sequitur, and finally ending in some place best left unseen. In one such story, promising a Batman-gone-evil who would slay his Justice League teammates with a robot so that he could wear a stupid crown and laugh at their bodies, DC introduced a version of the Avengers.

In JLA #87, Mike Friedrich Dick Dillin depicted a team of superbeings from some alternate world ravaged by nuclear war, and used these characters to explain why Batman might want to wear a crown and laugh at the bodies of his peers who, disappointingly, failed to appear for any scheduled appointment with death within the pages of that issue.

With a lack of style commensurate with its lack of subtlety, this team offered unappealing warmed-over versions of Thor (Wandjina), the Scarlet Witch (Silver Sorceress), Quicksilver (Jack B. Quick) and Yellowjacket (Blue Jay). In spite of the poor conception and dreadful execution, DC had some remnant of this team appear in Justice League titles of the eighties, back during that team's fracture into several irrelevant superhero teams. Blue Jay may have joined some version of the Justice League, suggesting that some writer somewhere found him interesting in a way that a reader might never understand. Eventually, some daring soul attempted to put in his two bits for Peace, Progress, and Prosperity, by declaring Blue Jay a homosexual, an event which must have evoked rousing protests of "Who's that?"

Image Does DC and Marvel

Thanks in great portion to Rob Liefeld, some of the early Image Comics characters - now in the Awesome Comics stable - bore likenesses to earlier, generally iconic superheroes. In some cases, these characters mainly borrowed traits; in other cases, these characters seemed lifted entire from titles published by the Big Two. That such derivative characters owed to such recognizable prototypes makes them particularly worthy of attention here.

Supreme and Youngblood

Image Comics, before its schism and demise, had some considerable success with a number of characters that definitely had a familiar cast to them. These characters bore strong resemblances not only to DC properties but to the central, big-money DC properties. For instance, Supreme, a Rob Liefeld creation, bore and bears a convincing resemblance to Superman, a Siegel and Shuster creation. Nor do the talents that worked on Supreme's books deny that they intended to create a "Superman done right;" Supreme's stories, under the pen of Alan Moore, overtly celebrated the lost elements of Superman's 1960s mythos that DC abandoned after John Byrne reworked the character in 1986. Supreme's canon includes versions of the Phantom Zone, of Krypto the super-dog, of Supergirl (the original), of the bottle city Kandor, and of the Justice League.

Granted, the character Supreme sometimes put a new twist on this derivative material; or, during particularly grotesque phases of the "new comics" fad, ignored his roots altogether and behaved as a super-powered serial killer. Short-term Image readers might have missed the resemblance altogether in stories that paid no homage and offered little more than gory rampages where Supreme casually disembowled rival heroes with his fists. Nonetheless, under better hands (specifically, Alan Moore) so much of the Silver Age Superman canon appeared within Supreme stories that one must wonder if DC even cares enough to sue.

Youngblood, in its first form, may also have represented DC concepts. Liefeld's eternal critics claim that everything Liefeld ever did came off someone else's drawing board or out of someone else's script. Ignoring, for the time being, such claims, we can nonetheless note that Liefeld may have pitched to DC an idea (which it rejected) for a "Justice League West" or similar supergroup composed of some established DC characters and some new characters. For instance, Shaft, the red-headed young archer, might have begun conceptually as Speedy/Arsenal, Green Arrow's onetime partner.

Image (and the junior Image splinter companies such as Awesome Comics, which handles Supreme and Youngblood these days) sometimes did well with such preowned concepts as Supreme, but tended to succeed with these in direct proportion to the quality of the talent handling them. No one need show surprise or dismay that JLA outsells its imitations these days.

1963

More akin to a tribute than a "borrowing," Image's 1963 books tried very hard to replicate the strong points of the first wave of Marvel's Silver Age success. Like Supreme, the characters in this line had clearly identifiable antecedents (the Avengers; Daredevil; Spider-Man; the Fantastic Four). However, the structure of the stories limited their scope to the 1963 event, which involved a kidnapped member of an FF-like group into the bowels of the Multiverse.

The story ran through six titles and seemed to lead to a conclusion, but, sadly, Jim Lee demanded to handle the wrap-up story that explained how and why the pseudo-Marvel characters had arrived in the Image comics universe, and, instead of doing the story, sat on it and blew it off until it became to late to release the story. No one can confirm if he ever actually began the story, but by that time, mid-1994, the shine had begun to wear off "new comics" and Image began to have the problems that resulted in its ultimate fracture into smaller companies that mostly failed or sold themselves to larger companies (for instance, Wildstorm, which DC recently acquired).

For all the unhappy ends that the 1963 project suffered, it nonetheless worked on the model that made Squadron Supreme succeed: it duplicated existing characters, allowed talent with respect for the concepts they handled to manipulate these characters in a manner that the freedom of disposable characters allows. Unlike Squadron, however, the 1963 books did not try to resolve the histories of its characters in a permanent fashion. Perhaps the 1963 1 /2 Image annual would have killed half of them off, driven another quarter mad, and left the remainder to recite sad homilies about what goeth before a fall. Yet the six existing 1963 stories do not obviously point to any such resolution, and internal advertising suggests that the original plan involved a follow-up - 1963 1/2 - that implies that Image might have intended to continue this tribute.

In spite of the quality of the 1963 books, one may notice the contradictions inherent in them. One of Image's best known efforts involved not a redefinition of the medium (such as the term "new comics" suggests) but a reactionary withdrawal to an idealized earlier age when things seemed saner and better.