Anya

I submitted a really long post that bad-WiFi ate, so I'll summarize here:

Unlimited rage is two words we can understand separately (Actually, 'unlimited' is probably nonsense) but make no sense together. Even if the Hulk's rage were capable of becoming 'infinite' the mental effects would make him insane, like a man on a gallon of PCP, and the strength effects would be suicidal (he would kill himself on accident). Even ignoring that, Pre-Crisis Earth One Superman had automatically unlimited strength and speed, barring special circumstances and inconsistent writing he easily moved galaxies at faster than light speed and could do so forever without tiring. DC - now and then - uses a much higher logorhythmic scale for the top tiers of strength than Marvel does. Marvel likes to confine their ultra-brick battles to city or at most mountain busting levels, so that characters regularly classed as much stronger than the Hulk - like Thanos - are at best planet busters. Even the New 52 Superman, who is a cripple compared to PC Earth One Superman, can move a planet's mass without any significant difficulty in his mid-20s.

DC just tends to like spacey-sci-fi more, and they feel freer to let physical battles ascend to the absolutely physics baffling. Marvel tends to like to keep things 'closer to home', in terms people can more readily understand (Helicarriers, holding up mountains) while DC likes to actually demonstrate (Rather than throw out as hyperbole) unlimited mechanical strength.

Also, I don't understand why people take in-comic statements of a character's potential seriously, given that those making the observations are clearly and frequently proven wrong. Some assclown of a supervillian overestimating his robot gimmick does not prove the Hulk has unlimited power, it only proves he's able to overcome a hyperbolically inflated robot. Objective strength feats and demonstrated failures and limits show you a character's strength, not the barely-informed subjective opinion of some scientist or scanner gadget which has all the reliability of a Star Trek holodeck.

Basically, you can't take statements of a character's power seriously in comics. With rare exceptions, like Jim Shooter's Solar, any statement of their power level will be shown wrong by several orders of magnitude in the next five issues. Hyperbole, more hyperbole, one-shot freak feats and subjective character judgments never pan out in actual story terms.

Most impressive Marvel strength feats tend to be attributable to Silver Age Thor and Wonder Man (popping the adamantium Ultron's head off like a doll's), Hulk has almost never shown to operate anywhere near that except in Planet Hulk and Secret Wars. Hulk thinks he's the strongest there is, but yet again - why does a rage-maddened childish expression of Banner's feelings of helplessness have an opinion we take seriously? Characters can, and obviously are, frequently wrong about how 'powerful' they and others are. I don't get why people think that someone saying something proves it in a comic anymore than it does in real life.

The Incredible Hulk's power levels adjust to his stress, physical and emotional. However, just because 'the madder he gets, the stronger he gets' does not, logically, entail that he has unlimited strength. There is a feasible limit to the amount of psychic stress a human brain can generate, and even as a personality disordered mutant and a monster I can see no reason for Banner to have an unlimited capacity for rage - try for a second to imagine what that even means, it's just two words - unlimited and rage - which we can understand apart, but really make no sense together.

Even granting that it were possible for him to express 'unlimited rage' there is no reason to think he could possibly reach those levels before his mind or body failed to be able to process it - he would go insane and kill himself with his own power.

'Silver Age' aka classic Earth One Superman has, most of the time, literally unlimited strength - barring a special problem with using his strength or achieving a grip, he can move anything he can get his hands on at unlimited speeds. This is far from consistent, but Earth One Superman was so powerful that no amount of comic book hyperbole could supplement Hulk's feats enough to make them even remotely comparable - Kal-El regularly does on-panel feats that make Reed Richards look like a college dropout and Marvel's top-tier in the Silver Age (never mind today's vastly depowered counterparts) unimpressive. The same, in fact, is true of Wonder Woman, even in the late post-Crisis/Pre-52 era. DC just, as a stylistic choice, uses vastly higher strength levels. Marvel always has a much lower level - even ignoring the bogus Strength classes they give out in the HBotMU, etc. the greatest physical strength feats in Marvel tend to be on the Helicarrier-to-Continent level; even the guys 'in a class of their own' who make Hulk look weak - such as Starlin-written Thanos - are planet busters if that.

As a matter of top-level feats DC just feels freer to allow physics-baffling levels of mechanical strength in their Universe, whereas Marvel prefers to confine their brawls to something that won't result in one-punch-orbital-launches.

I was not fond of Captain Comet's new costume and Dormammu-type head (of course, most people could give a piss who Cap Comet even is, so I doubt that'll get much attention). Superboy's costume does nothing for me, either. The lightning-Kirby-dot chest thing going on with Captain Marvel and Black Adam is not to my liking, it's just way too busy.

Other than that, I liked Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and most of the villains. I am definitely a fan of Superman's indestructible plasteel-looking (Supermanium?) armor, it gets lots of protests but as a fan of Wildstorm's Mr. Majestic I was sold on it before it even came out. I liked the old cloth costume just fine, but for my part I prefer the sky-blue to the dark blue. If they're going to make it look like it's woven plastic they may as well just make it into armor, and it makes a lot more sense than him constructing an invulnerable body sock for no apparent reason.

I was mostly familiar with the Pre-Crisis DCverse and Triangle-era Superman. When I decided to re-enter comics, it was the New 52 which - different tone aside - seems to have a lot more in common with the Pre-Crisis verse than it does with the Byrne and JMS 'You'll Believe a Man Can Walk' eras. So, for me at least, coming into the DCVerse in the New 52 was less confusing than if I had entered in Pre-Flashpoint or the late 1980s. Kryptonite has gone back to doing crazy things, and they even imported the 'Kryptonian Dragon' from an old Superman/Supergirl story where he was transformed by Red Kryptonite.

I was following about half of the titles before, but I've cut back to the Superman titles, the main GL book and the JL/JLA stories. I found some of it initially confusing but when I realised it was made for TPB these days I stopped picking it up by month. If you read the story arcs all at once they're a lot easier to follow.

I thought Superman (the main title) had a rough start but I am pleasantly surprised by Lobdell and blown away by Rocafort's pencils in the book.

As regards the Martin Manhunter, I don't think DC has been Marvelized so much as science fictioned up. 'The Marvel Style' to me means soap operatic characters and a lot of drama, and that hasn't been especially pervasive in the New 52.

The Marvelverse isn't always that cohesive - Thor's own books are often written like they're in a different Universe, as Batman's books are - the Avengers Thor and the Justice League Batman are similar but clearly don't live in the same technical/metaphysical plane, otherwise Batman would have no excuse for not wielding godlike Supertech and Thor would be able to solo 90% of all villains and teams. The 'shared Universe' is nearly always an illusion (for example, crime was virtually eliminated in the Earth One Superman books, yet was a serious problem in the Green Arrow books). We pretend for the sake of the team-books that they exist in the same world, but their own titles are never consistent with the worlds presented in the team books.

The Wildstorm Superman expy Mr. Majestic has not shown up, which is probably attributable to him more or less being re-merged with Superman (indestructible armor, superhuman intellect, etc.)

I was pleasantly surprised to see Captain Comet show up, even though he's changed a lot I am surprised they even acknowledged him.