Tales From The Quarter Bin--DC's Lost Generation!

Would you like to know the difference between DC and Marvel right now?

Take a gander at this double-page spread (which I am too incompetent to present properly...) from DC Sampler #1 (1983):

Holy schnikes! What a wonderful collection of characters!! Through their own creations and their Borg-like assimilation of the characters from other comic companies, DC boasts one of the deepest rosters of super-heroes imaginable! Hell, even that stunning tableau is only a tiny percentage of the classic heroes DC has available:

But how many of them "exist" today?!? How much of their heritage has DC flushed away in an attempt to be modern?

DC has altered their timeline so that now, no heroes fought in WWII. There are no legacy heroes. For some reason, that would be distracting or confusing. Nope, no heroes until 5 minutes years ago. No history. No legacy.

And even the ones they've "revived" for Earth-2 are in another dimension, and are even younger than Earth-Prime's heroes, and a few of them they've even made villains, because that's cooler or something. These guys even let their homeworld be blown up, so, hardly the Justice Society there.

Meanwhile, there's Marvel:

Man, I'll never get tired of that cover...

Marvel also had a buncha characters who battled in WWII. But you know what?

Instead of putting these characters out to pasture, they're still here, still fighting.

Yeah, it defies all sense of probability and logic that pretty much all of the Invaders would still be alive today. But really, isn't it better that way?

Some characters have been updated, there's some legacy heroes, but they're basically the same heroic group as in the past. And you know what? Marvel didn't see fit to pretend that their history never happened, that all of these characters didn't fight the Nazis.

Modernization without denying/eliminating the past?? Someone please tell DC that's still possible.

I'm not sure exactly when DC became ashamed of their past. Or when they decided that the public would hate and fear their heroes, so they couldn't have them do anything that might make make them popular, like, oh, I dunno, punching Hitler in the jaw?!?

Man, whoever thought that Marvel would become better at legacy heroes than DC?