DC To Marvel: Gimme A Hand With This Can Of Worms, Will Ya?

Allen had a point related to DC's upcoming Final Crisis yesterday:

DC has always seemed to work much more in a cyclical fashion than Marvel has, and I think twenty (or so) years since the last universal shakeup probably means it's about time for the cycle to end and begin again...

Quite true, but why? Why is it always DC and never Marvel that finds itself in that paradox: being in a cycle of trying to break the cycle, where each big shakeup is intended to be the Last Big Shakeup? Look at the titles alone: DC's following up a series called Infinite Crisis (which implies that there is no end) with one called Final Crisis (which implies that there actually is an end, and this is it).

The simplest answer is that DC had a nice little Golden Age headstart on Marvel proper, from Superman's debut in the late thirties until Marvel got their ball rolling with Fantastic Four over twenty years later. Stan and Jack (and later Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and others) quickly realized this apparent deficit was actually an advantage. They could see the future through DC's innovations and also through the continuity minefields DC blindly strolled into first.

Around the time Marvel began picking up steam with FF and then Spider-Man, DC was putting the finishing touches on its perfectly circular universe. Barry Allen met Jay Garrick, the Justice League met the Justice Society, about fifteen multiversal cans of worms opened wider and wider, and DC found itself having to answer questions they never expected from their audience. An audience that had only gotten older and weren't about to let DC loose from their commitment to continuity.

I bet Stan Lee read "Crisis on Earth-2", went to the office, burned all evidence of his Brand New Captain America concept, and asked Jack Kirby for his thoughts on drawing icebergs.

40-something years after Flash met Flash, DC's still trying to get those worms collected and re-sealed, while some Marvel editor is asking why all those sealed cans are sitting on the shelf collecting dust.

^{"I CAN'T EVEN TELL WHICH SUPERGIRL THIS IS AND I'M FREAKING SUPERMAN!!"}