Why has DC been traditionally successful at creating legacy characters, while Marvel fucking stinks at it?
I say this as a Marvel fan, I notice all the legacy characters in DC, none seem forced or out of place and all seem to have their fanbases..
Meanwhile, I only want Marvel to fucking stop it, and so do most other people I know
DC treats their heroes as gods among men.
Marvel treats their heroes like flawed people doing what they can to help others.
Normal people don't pass the torch, they take up the cause, but with their own identity. Lebron James became Lebron James, not Micheal Jordan II. Spider-Man in the MCU is actually a good example of how a legacy character would work because he's his own character, but wears colors similar to the heroes who inspired hims (Blue for Captain America and Red for Iron Man). We all know that's not why his outfit has those colors, but it seems natural enough not to notice.
Because most of DC's legacy characters have been around for decades now. The initial fan outrage over them has died down, and now heroes like Kyle Rayner and Wally West are old enough to have nostalgic fans of their own.
Trust me, a lot of people fucking HATED DC's legacy heroes when they were first around.
Because DC invented legacy heroes. They were doing them before Marvel even published Fantastic Four #1. It's an essential part of the company's mythology.
That's not to say that Marvel can't do them too, but it feels less natural to their setting. There are some excellent legacy characters at Marvel right now (Kamala Khan and Jane Foster are probably the two best written ones) but there are also ones who just feel like they're jumping on a bandwagon and have nothing to offer (looking at you, Riri.)
>DC treats their heroes as gods among men.
>Marvel treats their heroes like flawed people doing what they can to help others.
>2017
>Believing in a 70's meme
This is a miss concept that dies as soon as you actually read a comic.
Batman
Bucky worked as a legacy to Rogers.
Rhodes worked as a legacy to Stark.
Otherwise, nothing worked because it became political pandering.
Was that supposed to be a rebuttal? A good one, even?
Only casuals fall for the Batgod meme, user.
>Batman
>mentally ill rich guy who is a douchebag to everyone around him, is paranoid, and is constantly being pulled back from the edge by his emotionally exhausted family members
>not flawed
That's a good one.
>Spider-Man in the MCU is actually a good example of how a legacy character would work because he's his own character, but wears colors similar to the heroes who inspired hims
>Red for Iron Man
>IRON MAN INSPIRING SPIDERMAN
Don't you know? Tony Stark invented red.
Lots of other stuff too, like pineapples, and cats.
they are old enough to have their own legacy characters if DC allowed it
Wally>Bart, Jai and Iris
Dick>Damian
Donna>Cassie
Roy>Mia or Lian
DC only uses "legacy heroes" when it fits the character. Like it makes sense with Green Lantern because of their being thousands of them to begin with so they don't always have to focus on the same one.
>Jane Foster are probably the two best written ones
No she is not.
Why is when the discussion of Marvel Legacy characters come up people forget this guy?
You know Scott Lang the second Ant-Man?
it's only recently the passed 13 years? that DC has been trying to make them more flawed and human. Thing is it's kind of wierd.
Marvel does it better but since they are flawed it's also easier for you to hate them. Then Marvel just recently has been making characters god like through diversity and make the legacy look like scum by comparison. Marvel can't make relatable minorities in fear of reprisal.
Spidey 2099 and Mayday were pretty successful legacy characters
No, I don't. Maybe because no one has ever given a shit about Ant-Man outside of wifebeater memes and that brief SCIENTIST SUPREME bullshit.
b-buh muh mcu muh ANTS
>Jane Foster
Compared to Dick Grayson, Wally West, Roy Harper, Tim Drake, Donna Troy, and Bart Allen, I'd say they pale in comparison.
They should have kept Bucky.
>Iron Man begins merging with his tech
>Captain America kept alive by the SS serum
>Wolverine's healing factor
>Hulk being Hulk
>Thor being Asgardian
Most of Marvel's big characters don't really need to age, so they can basically keep them around forever with it making sense in-universe. Spider-Man would eventually make a cool legacy character if they'd allow him to actually be an adult and raise a child. Easiest, most acceptible future replacement in the world.
What they should do is retain their old standbys while creating NEW characters. A few are sure to stick. Instead they want to trample the legacy of their established characters by replacing them with SJW stand-ins.
DC's legacy characters are long-standing characters, usually sidekicks. Marvel just makes up some Pakistani girl or some Latina lesbian.
>kamala Kahn
I bet you love those quranic verses in the comics
Yuck
This, creating a new Flash and new Green Lantern kicked off the whole superhero revival that led to Fantastic Four in the first place.
The original Flash and Green Lantern were seen as old-fashioned and there needed to be new ones for a new era. That made it easier to replace the Silver Age ones too (even if they came back eventually).
Most of Marvel's characters never stopped being popular quite to the point that they needed permanent replacement.
Because the real idendities of Marvel characters are intrinsic to their alter ego.
DCs heroes ARE the idendities so it doesn't matter who is wearing what cape
Legacy héroes aren't a thing anymore because the industry is run on nostalgia. DC was great at making legacy heroes to the point of making them even better than their predecessors but the company is controlled by Silver Age fanboys like Didio and Johns so they're pushing the idea of Hal Jordan as the only Green Lantern and Barry Allen as the only Flash, ignoring they aren't the originals but they're the heroes from their childhoods so that make them legitimate and the others are phonies. Remember how Barry Allen is the key of the entire Flash legacy and he made Jay Garrick into The Flash?
Marvel should just do more original characters, not legacy ones
This, pretty much. When Superheroes went out of style in the 50s, they stopped getting published except for a handful like Superman and Batman. So there was a clear separation from the Golden Age to the Silver Age, which is where you get most of the legacies.
From the silver age on are the characters most people remember. Even DC has had trouble moving away from them to new legacies, as new characters like Kyle and Wally were eventually replaced by their Silver Age counterparts (though Wally is definitely the most successful of those post Silver Age legacies). Marvel never had that separation so most of their legacies eventually get replaced too with the more familiar versions.
This does not even sort of apply to post crisis DC
Maybe Morrison's JLA, but even then it's Morrison so the characters are decently dynamic.
Hell people even love O'Grady
>it's only the past 13 years
>what is Saga of the Swamp Thing
>What is O'Neil Batman and Questiom
>What is Morrison Animal Man
>What is Hitman
>What us JLI
You are drowning this far out of your depth you casual
Yeah I remember people hated Kyle with a passion for a long time
HAL'S
EMERALD
ATTACK
TEAM
It's because they actually did play him in a similar way to Marvel's current legacies. Maybe him super awesome at everything and disrespected the others. Even fucking Alan Scott had to change his codename because of Kyle "literally who" Rayner.
>that pose
the absolute flashman
Not really, he definitely got a big push but he was frequently at odds with Hal's friends and did fuck up (even got his GF killed)
Dick Grayson isn't a legacy character except when he's being Batman.
He wasn't the first Nightwing.
Because a lot of stuff at DC was set up either intentionally or unintentionally.
Like for instance most superheroes went away by 1951. By then DC only published Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman stories. There was no internet and fandom wasn't heavily organized yet.
When they finally brought back the missing Golden Age heroes they established them on Earth-2 and allowed them to change (mostly) in real time. Bruce Wayne retired, married Selina Kyle and they had a daughter, Huntress. Members of the JSA have children that formed their own team, Infinity Inc. Readers of those comics got used to legacies that way.
And then there were concepts that also allowed for other people to take on the identity. Like Silver Age Green Lantern for instance, it already set up the idea of the Green Lantern Corps right from the start so introducing various Green Lanterns was natural to its concept. Guy Gardner was introduced in the late 60s and John Stewart was introduced in the early 70's and became Green Lanterns (and since they were outright stated to be reserves, readers got used to that idea as well) so when they became regular GLs in the 80's there wasn't as much fuss.
Marvel didn't really have many replacement characters until maybe the 80's. But each then had distinguishable things enough to be their own character. James Rhodes is Tony's pilot and friend who became Iron Man in a last-minute situation (when Tony was too drunk to fight a villain) and has to struggle with the armor at first since Tony's too boozed up to help. John Walker is a Captain America whom Gruenwald deliberately created to be contrasted against Steve Rogers politically and personality-wise.
You know the dumb thing casuals say about how DC characters are gods and Marvel characters are human? There's a truth to this but it's not in the way people think.
DC treats their universe like mythology, while Marvel treats their universe like a novel, a really long convoluted and sprawling novel, but a novel all the same (or did).
The death of Herakles; with his accidental betrayal by his wife, building his own funeral pyre, and apotheosis was well known to the Greeks and the final Herakles story, but it did not stop them telling other stories about Herakles. DC has printed this Deaths of both Superman and Batman (sometimes in multiple forms) with books like The Dark Knight Returns and All Star Superman. And yes you could say that these stories don't count but both All Star Superman and The Dark Knight Returns continue to influence writers of Superman and Batman and metatextual references to them are made. Time is very fluid and mythology and DC is happy with embracing that with events like Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Marvel used to treat their universe in a novelestic fashion with A leading to B leading to B. There was a linear progression. And then in 1989 most people will argue their stopped. The progression of Marvel comics ceased to be in any real sense of the word. Marvel was affected by DC-itus, but not in the way people think as Marvel wanted to keep their novelistic approach while NOT progressing and moving characters forward. Marvel wanted to have their cake and eat it to.
As Marvel has given up on the novelistic approach in any real sense of the word they should just go the mythological route like DC did, or do some really serious retconning to get things back on track like they were circa 1989. But it is sadly unlikely that they will do either.
What legacy character has DC successfully created?
Oh wait, I just remembered that Scott Lang was Ant-Man in 1979. But he's also another example of a character who's different enough from the original (Hank is a scientist, Scott is an ex-convict/electronics expert) and readers got used to Hank having different identities (Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Yellowjacket) so he was accepted. There might be a few others (like the guy who replaced Captain America while Steve was Nomad) but it was rare until the 80's.
>Meanwhile, I only want Marvel to fucking stop it, and so do most other people I know
You and most other people you know only hate because
1. Marvel wants to replace so many characters in a short timeframe, likely for attention (it was similarly done in the past for attention in some cases too, but this time around it's mainly for attention on Disney-affiliated news shows).
and
2. The quality/craft is honestly not all there. Some characters do have it, but it's pretty clear there's a downgrade in character-building in the last five or more years.
Probably Hal Jordan and Barry Allen if you take the idea that they're legacy characters to Alan Scott and Jay Garrick.
Hell even Sam was an alright legacy for Cap considering their history it made a sort of since to use him if you couldn't use Bucky
And X-23 makes since for Wolverine even if I don't like the series
The rest of the new legacy characters are all shit diversity hires or are characters that would be better served being their own thing like Amadeus Cho and Kamala Khan
>Otherwise, nothing worked because it became political pandering.
You can't claim Rhodey works for Iron Man but Sam doesn't work for Cap.
I would say 1989 they kind of stopped. but even after 1989 they put effort into being consistent (even though they were doing the sliding timeline then). It's after Quesada took over that they barely tried to be consistent (though they did try; look at Millar's Civil War pitch with all the corrections that had to be made) in favor of the story, and I think from OMD onwards is where they gradually gave less of a fuck and the books started to suffer to the point where it is now.
The idea that story trumps continuity only works when the story is actually good. A lot of Marvel stories from the last seven years are really fucking awful and don't justify the excuse.
>Otherwise, nothing worked because it became political pandering.
That has more to do with the quality of writing than a character being a legacy character. Sam as Cap could work. I don't think it was well executed.
Pic related before Bart and Barry ruined it
>What they should do is retain their old standbys while creating NEW characters
yes
>Spider-Man would eventually make a cool legacy character if they'd allow him to actually be an adult and raise a child. Easiest, most acceptible future replacement in the world.
I really do wish they would allow Peter to stop being the down on his luck kid and be a grown ass man just once, Peter as the down on his luck family man trying to support his wife and child would work just as well.
And speaking of Legacy characters if Marvel gave a shit about the Fantastic Four Franklin and Valeria are already one half of the next generation of that team, and Ben was shown to age super slow in an issue of Hickman's run so you could have him stick around with Franklin since he is also immortal, as for the fourth member of the next Fantastic Four you could use any of the Future Foundation kids , Bentley-23 for the connection to the Wizard
or go for broke with the big G
Marvel used to be pretty good with Legacy characters
the AntMen
Ghost Rider
Captain Marvel
Bucky Cap
Rody taking over as Iron Man for awhile
hell even Ben Reilly's time as Spider-man was a fun ride until Marvel editorial fucked him over
>hell even Ben Reilly's time as Spider-man was a fun ride until Marvel editorial fucked him over
If they hadn't made the retarded move with "Peter was the clone all along!!" I think the story would've been less hated than it did. I would also say Ben Reilly had more character development during the 90's than some new Marvel characters in the 10's.
>and Ben was shown to age super slow in an issue of Hickman's run
IIRC there was even an annual by Karl Kesel where Ben traveled to an alternate universe that ran in real-time to Marvel's publication date and it implied Ben either doesn't age or ages slowly since his real-time counterpart is said to usually meet with Thor, Wolverine, and Doctor Strange for poker.
>>Peter as down on his luck family man trying to support wife and children
I didn't know I wanted Mayday in the Middle so bad until just now.
>I say this as a Marvel fan
What a load of horseshit.
If you DCfags ever gained the ability to legitimately make believable posts, at least you would be entertaining.
He has a different opinion, he must be a shill
All the "iconic" heroes DC pushes are legacy characters. Barry, Hal, and Barbara. Of course, this is also DC's Silver Age fetish given that they push them the most because there's a possible chance they're more recognizable given that they've been in various media outside comics.
It's alright user, Thor Ragnarök looks great and will be a good film.