A few months back we were all surprised by the news that Disney had swooped in and bought Marvel Comics in one of those deals in which phrases like “corporate synergy” and “leveraging assets” get thrown around a whole lot.  Supposedly the idea would be that Disney would benefit from exploiting, I mean leveraging, the Marvel properties through their innumerable media channels, and Marvel would benefit by becoming another cog in a mulitnational media conglomerate.  At worst, we could hope that Marvel would get the Pixar treatment and would be left mostly along to do what they do best (which right now is to make comics and some pretty decent movies).

Upon further review, it really wasn’t that surprising at all, considering that Marvel’s chief rival, DC Comics, has been operating under a similar arrangement, being part of the Time Warner empire for some 40+ years.  What is a bit surprising, though, is that DC themselves have decided to follow Marvel’s blueprint, at least pre-Disney, for best utilizing their own creative resources in order to produce both comics and movies that are of top quality and are somewhat synchronized with each other.  The details were announced last week and you can read more about it in this New York Times article.  The short of it is that they’re handing the creative keys over to Dan DiDio, Jim Lee and Geoff Johns in promoting all of them to executive-level positions, in a move that similar to Marvel Comics setup with Dan Buckley (Publisher) and Joe Quesada (Editor-In-Chief) that seems to work pretty well.

The thing is, this makes a great deal of sense, to let the people who know the most about the characters and the comics themselves, and what they mean to the world at large, run the show.  But see, that isn’t how most corporations work, the creative folks are often viewed suspiciously, and the assumptions is that they don’t know the first thing about business (although it is true that a fair amount of them don’t).

The other thing it seems that DC has learned from Marvel is that they themselves own a huge library of properties, many of which could be made into lucrative movies (the holy grail in the comic book world).  Not every character is a Batman or a Superman or a Spiderman, but as the Iron Man movie recently taught everyone, it’s possible to start up a successful franchise with a (slightly) lesser-known character, at least to non-comic book readers.  And so it seems that DC is hoping to emulate Iron Man’s success with the Green Lantern.

Personally, I’m a much bigger Marvel fan (even after spending 5 years working there) than a DC fan, but I think, in the end, only good things can happen if both companies emulate the success of the other (and hopefully avoid their mistakes as well).