Quote from: Bobloblah;586898This is a bit of a derail, but...

I'm mostly a Marvel guy, so I haven't read Doom Patrol. Another Marvel-reader I know tried to argue that DP was a rip-off of the Fantastic Four (which was earlier). Is there anything to that?

I think that it's more a case of parallel evolution. Doom Patrol came out 3 months before X-men, which means that they were probably being worked on at the same time. 3 months isn't long enough in comic book creation to see an idea, copy it, and publish it, at least not at the time these books came out.

Also there was a great deal of cross-pollination of ideas going on between DC and Marvel at the time. Artists and writers would switch from project to project often changing companies. It's very possible that 'pieces' of ideas were exchanged as well.

To me what's even more important is how much the two titles have differed over the years. In the beginning there were superficial similarities between the characters, the biggest being their leaders (Dr. Caulder and Prof. Xavier), but as the books progressed they took radically different approaches.

Quote from: Bobloblah;586898This is a bit of a derail, but...

I'm mostly a Marvel guy, so I haven't read Doom Patrol. Another Marvel-reader I know tried to argue that DP was a rip-off of the Fantastic Four (which was earlier). Is there anything to that?

Eh, not really except that Marvel kicked off the deconstruction of Silver/Golden Age tropes and Doom Patrol followed in that style. But there's no real resemblance to the FF.

QuoteBack to the original topic, supers adventures really are mostly analagous to mysteries; I'm not sure how you could argue otherwise. They may not be structured exactly like Agatha Christie or Call of Cthulhu, but:

1.) Villain has plan
2.) Villain puts plan in motion
3.) Heroes notice initial stage of plan
4.) Heroes go through multiple stages of trying to discover and thwart plan
5.) Heroes foil plan
            or
6.) Heroes fail to foil plan, must now recover

...is pretty much the standard supers/comics adventure. Step #4 is the heroes attempting to solve a mystery (e.g. who is the villain and/or what is he doing). How is that not a "mystery" adventure?

That's very much how I plan things, usually with a progression track for the villain's plans. Although that really only covers one genre of superheroes; it's great for Spidey or Cloak & Dagger, etc...but a Thor game would probably be structured more like a mythic quest, an X-Men game would be more about political struggles, whikle a Silver Surfer or Infinity Watch game could be more like an exploration tale akin to the Odyssey or Voyages of St. Brennan.

QuoteMoreover, arguments that personal complications are the drivers of adventure just seems whacked to me. I'll admit that I really never read DC, but on the Marvel side stories were rife with personal complications, but those were never the reason for the story. The reason was almost universally the above list. Personal drama merely made the trip through the above list interesting.

I always likened early Spider-man to a cross between Willard and Gilliam's Brazil. Spider-man was like Peter's daydream life, where he was everything he wasn't in his real life. I remember as a kid being annoyed by the interludes into his life at school/personal problems because I wanted to get back to the Spidey actions. These days when I reread the old issues it's the opposite...I find his personal life fascinating and am only really interested in the fight scenes when they're done by a really good artist .

Quote from: TristramEvans;586882Other way around, actually. Doom Patrol first appeared in June, 1963. The X-men came in September of that year. Not that I think the X-men are a rip-off of Doom Patrol, it was just one of those "different people come up with similar ideas in a short time". Something to do with the zietgeist of that time period.

Yes, I didn't remember which came first, but I was aware that neither was actually a copy of the other, they were both a simultaneous development of something in the air (based on the dates, probably something to do with the Civil Rights movement).

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