In a previous thread, Greg stated:

The problem with that analysis is that the JLA had ample characters that it "owned" that it could muck with. Red Tornado and Zatanna lead that list, but there's a spectrum of other characters during Conway's tenure that JLA could levy a primary claim on to a greater or lesser degree, including Atom, Aquaman, Hawkman, Hawkwoman, Phantom Stranger, Elongated Man, Black Canary, even Green Arrow (after GL 123, corresponding to JLA 174, I think).

Heck, Conway only needed to follow in the footsteps of Steve Englehart, who gave us soap opera mopiness with several of the JLA second-tier characters...

[gpm--learn to use blockquote tags, or at least italics, Chris, you knob.]

I think that misses the point (that the Detroit JLA was more "X-Men-ish") a bit.

There's more to the soap opera vibe (heh) the X-Men and early New Teen Titans had than "mopiness." First, there's a different sense of team that you get on a book when the characters exist "for" that team (i.e. this is the home of their adventures; the characters "belong" to this book). You're not going to get that with a team in which Superman is a member. Second, I don't think you get that with a team in which half the members are "untouchable" and half are second-stringers (especially when some of those second stringers are iconic characters in an era when it was still verboten to really mess with them).

That isn't to say it couldn't be done -- the Avengers at various times have managed to pull it off quite nicely, but -- well, not to get metaphysical, but that's one those nebulous differences between DC and Marvel back in the day. I think it worked with the Avengers, even with Cap, Thor, and Iron Man on the team, in a way it couldn't work with the old big guns JLA. So I think the Detroit JLA (Lake Michigan...good lord) may well have been an attempt not to go in an Avengers direction but in an X-Men direction in a sense. (Although I'm sure there were other factors involved as well.)

In what way did Robin belong to New Teen Titans that Elongated Man did not belong to JLA? In what way did Vision belong to Avengers that Red Tornado did not belong to JLA?

I think it worked with the Avengers, even with Cap, Thor, and Iron Man on the team, in a way it couldn't work with the old big guns JLA.

You're begging the question.

Maybe so, but I still think it's true given the way that DC handled its properties at the time.

Conway did muck around with the second-stringers from time to time. He married the Atom to Jean Loring in #157 and, with Roy Thomas, made Black Canary her own daughter in #220. Character change didn't happen that often in JLA, but it could happen at any time.

Absolutely. Again, I'm just speculating on the probable mindset that led to the creation of JLA Detroit.

Are you guys implying that Detroit is not on Lake Michigan?

Obviously Detroit is on Lake Michigan ... the Earth-1 Detroit, that is. The Earth-Prime Detroit is on the Detroit River, which connects Lake Erie to Lake St. Clair (Lake St. Clair is a relatively small lake which is in turn connected to Lake Huron by the St. Clair River).

This has been your lesson in Great Lakes geography for the day.

I think it's a good idea. No, I don't think DC benefits from having a book with all it's best heroes all the time.

"This has been your lesson in Great Lakes geography for the day."

Thank you. Now can someone refresh me on what is meant by Bob Harras x-Menizing the Avengers? Was that when they wore leather jackets?

Conway even mucked around with the non-second-stringers: Flash dated Zatanna for a while in Justice League.

The problem with the Detroit JLA, geography aside wasn't the team members. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby could get away with a 2nd stringer Avengers because there weren't 100 different comic titles on the shelf at that point in time. Also they made sure at least one member of the team, Captain America was reasonably well known and popular. And of course it was Stan and Jack.

The Detroit League had Martian Manhunter and Aquaman as the established heroes, neither of which ever seems to be quite as big a draw as the other members of the original 7.

Basically you have a choice if you want some level of commercial success: big name creative team or big name characters. Both works best of all. JLA Detroit had neither.

If you approach this question from any sense other than comic book geekiness, the answer is OF COURSE DC BENEFITS. Casual readers are much more likely to buy a comic book that has all their favorites in it ("Superman, Batman, and Flash together? Neat!") than they are to buy a comic book with a bunch of nobodies like Elongated Man and Zatanna in it ("WHo's this Plastic Man ripoff?"). Only comic book geeks are worried about characters being "mucked with" and fool themselves into thinking that anything ever actually changes in the DC or Marvel Universes. Everybody else just wants to read a story with a solid plot and their favorite characters solving the mystery or beating up the villain.

Lewis, when the Avengers went from being the headliner heroes to Cap's Kooky Quartet, it did not have Stan and Jack, but Stan and Don Heck.

Even when Goliath and the Wasp came back to the Avengers, they were no longer headliners, and Captain America left the group as he went from sharing Tales of Suspense to having his own magazine. For many years the Avengers were clearly a title that did not have headline heroes.

I believe that all titles tend to experiment and make changes in the first several years of existence to see what works and what doesn't. Then things settle down and thereafter what is canon has been established. The JLA's canon obviously is that it is made up of DC's headliners. While in the Avengers' case it was decided to make the group have its own characters and keep the headliners separate. Although many fan favorite line-ups include the 3 main headlining Avengers (Cap, Thor, Iron Man) there was never a strong push to include other Marvel headliners in the title (until recently, everyone knew Spider-Man would never be an Avenger) and much of the Avengers core mythos has characters that were never headliners (Vision, Wonder Man, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye).

But that ended up OK though. While the JLA is defined by a large extent to its membership including the headliners, the Avengers only needed to be "Earth's Mightiest Heroes." The Avengers had a much stronger mythos tied to things associated with the Avengers as a whole (the Mansion, "Avengers Priority Clearance," Quinjets, and writing that made other Marvel characters defer to the Avengers as top of the totem pole) rather than membership of its headliners.

These things were established early enough that fans could accept changes to the Avengers in a way they could not to the JLA. In this sense, the Avengers and JLA are not true analogues even though both represent the "ultimate hero team" of Marvel and DC.

I'm posting separately here because certain ideas need to be distinguished from others.

Over all, it's a bad idea to make fundamental changes to the book. It tends to alienate the fan's core titles. It also makes for embarassing retrospectives that harms a title's mythos.

However, I think it easy to see why companies do it - sales. If X-Men is selling a gajillion issues, and the Avengers aren't, a natural tendency is to assume that if the Avengers become more like the X-Men then their sales numbers will near X-Men status. However, this is a flawed assumption.

Companies need a better understanding of their own market. An approach that is successful now does not mean it will be successful in 1, 2, or 5 years. If the X-Men is popular now, it does not mean that the FF or Avengers or Spider-Man will not be the favorite title in the near future. Rather than make fundamental changes to titles to homogenize them, companies should appreciate how diversity reduces their risk in the marketplace and should protect their core assets for when the market changes. If they want to bandwagon titles for short term sales boost, they should use new titles which they can freely do whatever they want with, rather than risk damaging the brand value of currently less popular titles.

Mutt, by "X-Menizing" Avengers I mean the emphasis on angst, an incestual relationship with a title's own continuity, and an obsession about alternative/future timelines of characters. I think that sums up the Crossing.

Last point for right now, if any writer needs to make major changes to the title he's writing because he's bored or burnt out (an accusation some have made now with Conway) then that writer needs to be taken off that title and given other work, or simply given a sabbatical.

Matt: thank you.

I'm not sure I understand Matt's point. I would agree with the basic premise, but in the 80's and 90's, which intellectual property, as a soulless business concern, would you rather own, the Justice League (any incarnation) or the X-Men?

It doesn't have anything to do with geekness -- if you discount Superman and Batman merchandising (which have nothing to do with the Justice League), the X-Men easily trounces the Justice League in merchandising and licensing, to say nothing of actual comic book sales, which I imagine DC was fairly concerned about in the early 80's.

Having said all that, I'm not clear on what we, collectively, are arguing about at this point. What exactly is the point of disagreement?

As I recall, initially the point of the Justice League was to showcase the Green Lantern, Flash, Aquaman, Martian Manhunter & Wonder Woman - then Green Arrow, Atom and Hawkman. Some of these were "Silver Age" revivals of "Golden Age" characters, a couple (GA & WW) were ongoing from the '40s. All of these had their own titles, or appeared each month as one of two or three stories in an ongoing title. Superman and Batman were charter members of the Justice League because they were the most popular DC characters, so it was a drawing card to get readers interested in the JLA to begin with, whereupon hopefully they'd become interested in the other characters in their own books, but in most of the early stories these two were deliberately downplayed (E.g. happened to be on some other mission at the time) to give exposure to the others.

Superman and Batman were de-emphasized due to demands from the Superman and Batman editorial offices (sort of like the post-Crisis spasms), which were ended a year or two in when the publisher of DC stepped in and overrode them.

If you really think X-Men merchandising outsells the combined sales of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, et al., you need a refresher in basic mathematics. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, guess who sold more action figures, Underoos, lunch boxes, cartoons, and the like? It ain't X-Men. Only comics geeks even know who the X-Men are. Everybody knows Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman.

Give us some citations on those claims, Matt.

X-Men worldwide gross: $296,250,053
X-Men 2 worldwide gross: $407,557,613
X-Men 3 worldwide gross: $445,818,072

Yeah, only comic readers know the X-Men. Pull the other one.

Not to mention the, what, 3 X-Men cartoons that got fairly high ratings? Yeah, I'd say the "only comics fans have heard of the X-Men" thing stopped being accurate by the mid '90s.

That being said, I've no idea about the relative money made in marketing. I'd suspect Batman to be the champ there, though. Still, if it comes down to branded X-Men vs. branded (i.e. not individual hero) Justice League, then yes, X-Men's gotta be the stronger brand, even after the JLU cartoon. Just my opinion, of course, I don't have the numbers to back up my feeling...

What I was saying -- which, again, was just speculation on what may have led to the Justice League Detroit approach -- is that it would have made sense at the time to try to remove the big three and try to achieve some sort of X-Men-like response from fandom. Superman and Batman (and Wonder Woman to a far lesser extent) merchandise and comics will sell regardless of whether or not they are in the Justice League. There is a sharp drop off at that point to the next tier of characters (Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman).

While in 1985 the X-Men's popularity may have been entirely fandom-driven, the 20 years between now and then have seen them far outstrip everything at DC with the possible (and likely) exceptions of Superman and Batman as solo characters -- and Ralf's numbers on the movies alone back this up, to say nothing of the cartoons and action figures and all the rest. The Justice League in itself in comparison to the X-Men is, as Jonathan opines, no contest.

As an amusing aside, if you did a survey of a large and genuinely diverse group of Americans and asked them which superhero team Batman and Superman belong to, I wonder what percentage would say "Justice League" and what percentage would say "Super Friends."

Ralf, first let's subtract at least 10% from those figures since we all know studios inflate their reported gorsses. Then let's divide those grosses by $10 to see how many tickets were sold. We're down to about 40,000,000. Now let's figure in the fact that comic book geeks went four times each. We're down to 10,000,000 people worldwide saw the third film. Hmm...over a billion people could tell you Clark Kent is Superman. X-Men are still nobodies. Comic book geeks get in a huff because no one takes their hobby seriously, but you have to admit that no one knows, nor do they care, who Professor X is.

"Fairly high ratings" for a cartoon is a joke. Just like "fairly high comic book sales" today are a few thousand copies moving each month. Nobody reads comics anymore. Because they are too expensive, shoddily produced, and basically an unattractive product.

P.S. Are the X-Men cartoon ratings higher than the Batman, Superman, or JLU cartoon ratings?

I don't think it's relevant whether the X-Men or Justice League is better known. DC may look at higher sales figures for X-Men versus Justice League and want an X-Men like title to capitalize on it. However, that does not mean the best way to do that is to make Justice League an X-Men like title.

Justice League has its own "brand" and it makes sense to preserve that. Instead what DC needs to do is have its own X-Men like title. They can either create new characters in a new title, or revive an obsolete, defunct, or cancelled title and see if that works. If it goes wrong, DC loses nothing. Neither a new property or an already failed one will damage DC if they are unpopular. But confusing the Justice League brand would be damaging.

Would anyone really complain about Vibe, Gypsy and the rest of the Detroit Justice League if they simply were not the Justice League? They'd simply be seen as somewhat lame characters who could be revived later. Instead, they are seen as embrassing by customers and are effectively of no value.

Matt, at this point you are doing the equivalent of stomping your foot on the floor and insisting that you're right because you say so. Superman and Batman are most likely the two most significant characters to come out of American superhero comics, but that doesn't mean that the rest, especially the X-Men, are insignificant. I saw Jay Leno do a joke last week where the punchline was "Isn't that the X-Men?" Sorry, Matt, the X-Men have far greater cultural penetration than what you want to believe.

Besides, you will recall that the argument was not Superman/Batman vs. the X-Men (in spite of your continuous efforts to frame the debate that way), but X-Men vs. the Justice League as team properties.

(And arguing that cartoons somehow don't count is just you being obstinate. The X-Men cartoon's ratings were high enough to keep it on the air, through several incarnations, for several years and to spawn the expected waves of toys and other merchandise.)

". . . but you have to admit that no one knows, nor do they care, who Professor X is."
Posted by: Matt at September 19, 2006 01:16 PM

-----All is not lost. Just had the pleasure of reading an anthropology master's thesis by a delightful young friend, in which she explored the use of non-standard names which have become prevalent in society over the past two generations. Although comic books were not the primary source of non-standard names, it was noted that one of the people surveyed was named "Xavier"; explicitly named after our hero the Professor.

Can't say with precision if "X-Men or JLA are more popular/sell more merchandise." However, purely as a non-scientific analysis, my daughter was always an X-Men fan, but she and her children regularly watch JLA and Teen Titans cartoons.

Everyone knows who Aquaman is? A billion people know that Clark Kent is Superman? The US population is only 295,734,134. Not to mention the shoddy math and reasoning behind "Now let's figure in the fact that comic book geeks went four times each. We're down to 10,000,000 people worldwide saw the third film."

I'm not sure why you're trying so hard to convince everybody that DC characters are less nerdy or more popular, but your arguments are really unconvincing. (but yes, it is better for the JLA comic not to try and turn itself into a second rate imitation of another franchise, I think everyone's in agreement over that)

I'm not. I think it's good for DC to not have a standard JLA comic at all times.

Oops, sorry. Then 'most are in agreement over that'.

Professor X, is Charles Xavier, I knew that in the 1960's, but I'm a comic Geek, now he's Patrick Stewart of Star Trek the next generation, all that Vulcan, Borg, and whatever that other races mind control, melding powers pays off now. Hey I also know who the Chief of the Doom Patrol is but what non comic reader would know that?