9 Reasons Why DC Really Is Better Than Marvel

9. They Pioneered Legacy Characters

DC Comics

Full disclosure: Marvel's legacy characters are brilliant. Miles Morales, Kamala Kahn, Kate Bishop, Jane Foster's Thor - all of them have led Marvel's best comics since their introduction. The only reason why DC excel in respect to legacy, however, is that they've just been doing it longer; there's a real sense of history when it comes to mantles and the generational delineation between each successive change.

With Marvel, it took Peter Parker almost fifty years to have a true successor, and previous attempts to create legacies of their other characters resulted in embarrassing and poor imitations of the originals, exemplified in full by the nightmarish inflections of nineties Marvel and characters like Thunderstrike and Teen Tony Stark.

With DC, there's a massive in-house history to make their world feel just that little bit more unique. The Flash isn't just one hero, but a legacy of scarlet speedsters who've been a part of the DC Universe since the forties; the Green Lantern Corps have had no less than six different human representatives; and Dick Grayson - the first Robin - has grown before our very eyes, transforming from a sidekick into a fully fledged hero of his own in Nightwing over forty years after his original debut.

It's not that Marvel are bad at fashioning legacies of their own - quite the opposite - it's more that they're just monumentally late to a game DC perfected a long time ago.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.