Reed Tucker - Slugfest: Inside the Epic, 50-year Battle between Marvel and DC

M y first glimpse of true comic book culture came when a friend took me to a shop called Daves Comics in Richmond, Virginia, in the mid eighties.

Daves was located in a strip mall down the street from a university. For millennials and others of a certain age who have lived nearly their entire lives when superheroes have existed inside the mainstream, for whom visiting a funny bookstore means turning up to a clean, well-lit pseudo-macchiato bar run by hipsters, its difficult to convey how underground and marginalized comic books used to be.

Daves Comics sat literally at the end of an alley bookended by a chemical-smelling hair salon on one side and dumpsters on the other. The store was tinytwo hundred square feet, maybe. The space looked like it had once been a storage closet for the malls maintenance equipment before the owner one day had a brainstorm that he could hose it down and rent it out for a few bucks.

The new comics were displayed in two modest, shoulder-high wooden racks, and in those days the entire weekly output from DC and Marvel could fit into a couple of dozen slots. These days youd probably need the whole mall.

The rest of the store was filledburied, reallywith back stock stored in long white cardboard boxes piled on top of each other and containing God knows how many wonders.

If all this sounds like a fun place for a kid to spend a day, it wasnt. Daves had a strict no-browsing rule in order to safeguard the condition of the wares, and the owner and his staff were militant about it. Like Michigan-militia militant. Start flipping through a random box, and youd get yelled at with a quickness. If you wanted a particular back issue, you had to timidly ask for it, forcing the clerk to sigh loudly, get up from behind the cash register, and start yanking unmarked boxes from the stacks, straining to remove and return at least three before he found the correct one.

Daves Comics eventually moved to another location in the mall that offered pristine amenities the original didntsuch as ventilation. The shop, before closing in 2015 after the unexpected death of its owner, appears to have done well for itself over the years. And like a lot of comic stores, its growth was probably driven in part by an expanded customer base, as more and more readers realized, in the words of a jillion clichd newspaper headlines, comics arent just for kids anymore.

I came to that same conclusion while still a kid. I can remember being at a bookstore in 1986 and spotting a display beside the cash register sporting the most bad-ass image of Batman Id ever seen.

The cashier saw me staring and, completely unsolicited, said, You should buy that. Itll change your life.

I did buy it, and that book was Frank Millers The Dark Knight Returns, aka the single-coolest thing Western civilization has ever produced. (Your mileage may vary.)

I knew immediately this was a different kind of comicand not just because it cost an allowance-draining $12.95. For one, it looked like a proper book and was printed on sturdy paper that didnt seem to dissolve as you turned the pages. The art was graphic and kinetic, and the hero presented within those pages was dark and violent, a frightening shadowy figure who dangled criminals from rooftops and snapped legs with powerful roundhouses. This Batman bore little resemblance to the one whose adventures Id seen on Saturday morning cartoons. This felt dangerous and adult. Even the costume was darker and lacked the goofy yellow oval on his chest emblem.

It was lost on me at the time, but The Dark Knight Returns was a true milestone in comic book history. It was one of the most influential and important advances in the revolution that was then sweeping through the medium, putting a more sophisticated spin on superheroes. And I happened to have the good fortune to be at the perfect age to benefit from that revolution.

In the America I was born into, comic books were considered almost exclusively kiddie fare. They were something to be read for a few years before you inevitably outgrew them, somewhere around age eleven. Then you would move on to other hobbies, like trying to convince someone in the grocery store parking lot to buy you beer, a younger reader would replace you, and the cycle would continue.

It took until basically my lifetime for this pattern to be broken. Just as I was on the way toward becoming an adult and leaving superheroes behind, superheroes instead came with me.

With the publication of more mature titles, including Watchmen and Saga of the Swamp Thing, as well as the recent spate of comic-sourced TV shows and movies, the material has grown up. As a result, my generation became the first who didnt need to age out of superheroes. Head to any comic convention nowadays, and youll find loads of full-grown adults, browsing the booths and jousting with plastic swords while wearing bright-red Deadpool costumes. Its probably still not a great look for a Tinder profile, but in terms of the cultural mainstream, these people have never been more in.

The superhero industry is now worth billions of dollars, and as was the case more than fifty years ago, Marvel and DC remain the only major playersthe Coke and Pepsi of spandexcontinuing to battle each other like Batman and the Joker.

Not that Id ever personally characterize either company as the villain. Ive got no dog in the Marvel vs. DC fight. I dont read comics from either these days, instead preferring independently published, nonsuperhero titles such as Saga, Criminal, Queen & Country, and The Walking Dead.

If I have any bias, its for the Marvel movies, which I think its safe to say are objectively better than those from DC. At least when it comes to DCs recent output. For ten years I covered movies for the New York Post