The branding lesson behind how Stan Lee spanked Superman
Published: Tue, 06/29/21
“Slugfest”
It’s about the corporate warfare and rivalry between early Marvel Comics & DC Comics. And while there are all kinds of marketing & business lessons between the lines you will never see in a marketing & business book or course or seminar… one of my favorites has to do with the branding side of things.
First, some context:
In the early 60’s DC was by far the biggest fish in the pond.
Marvel — just finally leaving the primordial ooze of the industry where they had merely chased trends and wrote purposely dumbed-down stories (Stan Lee was given the mandate to never use words with more than two syllables, and his boss thought the readers morons) — was relatively small.
They weren’t rivals in any real way.
And, ironically, the whole Loki quote in the first Avengers movie applied:
“An ant has no quarrel with a boot”
But after Stan Lee created what became the Marvel Universe of characters in his own image, all that changed.
Their sales started catching up to DC.
Entire markets of fans (like college students) opened up that DC had always ignored.
And Lee was starting to get all the media and other attention.
Still, that didn’t faze DC.
As one of their editors said at the time:
(Paraphrased)
“We do $100 million per year, Marvel only does $15 million”
Thus, they didn’t really pay much attention.
Until those sales figures started getting closer.
And closer…
And closer…
And finally, just 11 years after the first issue of Fantastic Four (the issue that started it all), Marvel’s sales finally blew past DC. And, for the next 30 years (and maybe longer, I don’t know, I stopped caring in the mid 90’s when corporate idiocy took over) there was literally only one month where DC had more sales.
Back to the early 70’s when Marvel became #1:
The suits at DC started to finally notice what Marvel was doing.
And, like your typical goo-roo fanboy does today… started blindly swiping, copying, and mimicking, in some inane quest to capitalize on “What’s working now!”
And copy Marvel they did.
To the point where it became an open joke.
In fact, Stan Lee would troll the hell out of DC in his “Stan’s Soapbox” columns month after month, mocking and making fun of what he called “Brand Eck!”
Some things DC did to try to regain the lead included, for example:
Trying to give their characters personalities.
If you look at any pre-1970 Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, etc comics… you could literally swap out the dialogue bubbles of the characters (give Batman’s dialogue to Superman or Superman's dialogue to the Flash, etc) and it wouldn’t matter.
They all sounded the exact same:
Boring, plain vanilla, and way too squeaky clean.
This was probably the only thing DC did that worked.
But they even screwed that part up because when giving their characters personalities, they blindly swiped what Stan Lee did with all this snappy banter. Something that worked with Stan Lee’s books & characters because they were an extension of his personality.
Not so with DC’s characters.
Giving Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman snappy banter sounded inane.
And it was all because the stiff suits (literally suits… as everyone had to wear a suit to the office at DC — whether a writer, artist, or anyone else — like an insurance agency) wrote characters that had no (as Stan Lee put it):
“Heart”
Heart is something lacking in a lot of direct marketing today, too.
And certainly in emails.
I blame all the idiotic swiping and blind devotion to “what’s working now.”
But there were a lot of things Marvel did to give their company more heart than DC. And because what they did were things that weren’t as obvious as something one would swipe, DC was slow to catch on. Plus, even when they did catch on, they bungled it because they did it to swipe and copy.
Swiping and copying can work with pure technique.
But what Marvel did went way beyond technique.
Yet, what they did made their technique probably a thousand times stronger.
(Even the occasionally terribly drawn or written stories were often successful…)
Like for example:
* Creating a fan club that brought millions of fans together long before ComicCon was even a brain fart
* Giving the creative team “credits” (like a movie) at the beginning of each issue, so fans started having relationships with the writers and artists and not just the corporation
* Building up the mythical Marvel Bullpen of creators — making it sound like all the writers and artists were a unified team of zany people having lots of fun and doing nutty things… so the fans could feel like they were a part of it all. (World-Building lesson: the reality is, most of the creatives barely knew each other… many disliked each other... and even fewer saw each other except in passing.)
* Creating an actual integrated universe — while DC’s universe was full of continuity errors due to editors not talking to each other, Marvel’s characters were very clearly in the same world, and a lot of work was put into keeping continuity clean and logical
* And the list goes on and on and on
I could probably write several “Email Players” issues just on this topic.
But one of my favorite stories about this is when DC had this big meeting to figure out what made Marvel tick. And some blue flame special in the room bleated out it must be Stan Lee’s covers.
So they examined a bunch of Marvel covers.
And then they started copying what Stan was doing on his covers.
When Stan got wind of it, he started purposely screwing with them.
For instance:
He’d do a bunch of covers with a lot of red on them, just to see DC do the same.
Then he’d put a bunch of dialogue on his covers, while watching DC copy that.
And he kept doing that sort of thing for months - while DC's sales didn't budge, or even went down - purposely screwing with them, as they watched him like a hawk, assuming what Stan was doing was “what’s working now!” when it had nothing to do with that.
Stan Lee was simply telling great stories the fans wanted to read.
It wasn’t about tricks & gimmicks.
It was about a whole slew of things that had nothing to do with those things.
Anyway, Stan Lee also brought something else to the table with Marvel that DC never figured out. I am not sure they have figured it out even now, going by their movies. And I can’t remember Stan Lee ever verbally even saying what it was.
But I will say this:
This “what” I am referring to is baked in to every page of the July “Email Players” issue.
There is a reason Marvel got all the Berserker customers, while DC didn’t.
Even to this day, this is the case.
It’s why nobody gets excited about seeing a “DC movie!”
Yes, they get excited for a Batman or Wonder Woman or Superman or Joker movie.
But not a "DC" movie.
On the other hand:
And this won’t last much longer probably (due mostly to wokeness), people do get excited to see a “Marvel!” movie. That’s why they can make movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man— which most people had never heard of — and still turned a fat profit. Yet, DC makes movies like Birds of Prey and it just results in abysmal failure.
Wokeness and bad writing is an obviously big part of it.
It is tanking the entire entertainment industry fast right now.
But it ain’t the whole story.
And those who read the July “Email Players” issue will see what I am talking about. It does not mention Marvel or DC. But it’s all about something Marvel has done (more like Stan Lee did, but whatever…) to create Berserker customers that DC never has never really been able to do.
All right, enough of this.
You either want in on the July issue or you don’t.
If you do, realize the deadline to subscribe in time to get it is tomorrow.
As soon as I send it to the printer, I turn it off in the cart.
And it’ll be too late to get it.
Here’s the link:
https://www.EmailPlayers.com
Ben Settle