If it seems that way, it's because you're not understanding me. I don't know if that's my fault or yours, but I never said The Heroic Age and The New 52 were the same thing. I said
Marvel NOW and The Heroic Age were the same thing. They are both branding initiatives that included a small slate of new #1's and some relaunches. They are nothing like the New 52 because they didn't push the reset button on the characters themselves the way New 52 did.
The creativity has been mostly at DC over the past 15 years? Let's recap a little of what's happened in the last 15 years - that puts us back to 1999, yes? Nothing happened in 1999. Nothing happened in 2000. 2001 gave us
Our Worlds at War, a minor event similar to 1988's
Invasion event. 2002 was a small Joker event,
Last Laugh. 2004,
Identity Crisis, a genuinely good series. 2005,
Infinite Crisis, another Crisis event. Total lack of creativity. 2006,
52, the big news there was that it was a weekly series. Ooooh. Yeah, that's never been done before, except it absolutely has - and DC themselves did it with
Action Comics Weekly in the late 80's. Let's see, what else. 2007,
Countdown to Final Crisis, another weekly series just like
52, nothing particularly creative there. Then
Final Crisis in 2008, yet another Crisis event - the second in three years! It took DC twenty years to do another Crisis after
Infinite Earths, but the lack of creativity was so massive at DC in the 00's that they went back to that well twice in three years. They wrapped up the old universe with
Blackest Night in 2009 - Marvel had already done a couple of
Marvel Zombies series at that point, so zombified heroes weren't exactly new - then another weekly series in 2010 just like
Countdown and
52. Then we got the New 52! A massive reboot of all the classic characters! Surely that's never been done before! Except that totally had been done before when DC themselves rebooted all their Golden Age characters in the early 60's to catch up with Marvel, who was ushering in the Silver Age. The only difference was back then, they didn't do a
Flashpoint-style event to make the transition, they just introduced all the rebooted characters organically.
Whew. Now, obviously that's just the events, but if you want to talk about individual story arcs or series or characters, that's beyond the scope of this thread, which I acknowledge that I've completely derailed already (but I'd like to turn that around after this).
I've been collecting comics and keeping up with the industry for 30 years. I'm not perfect, I don't have all the answers or every scrap of information in my head. But I know the trends. I'm not always right, but I've got the broad strokes down. DC Comics over the last 15 years was getting killed so badly that they felt they needed to wipe out their entire universe and start over. What you see as creativity? It wasn't. It was a response to decades of getting crushed by Marvel at every turn. It was a business decision.
Lastly, I'm a huge DC fan. I know it doesn't sound like it, but my first comic was
Crisis on Infinite Earths #10, and I was a staunch DC fanboy for years. I only started reading Marvel in the early 90's, and even then, I thought it was inferior to my beloved DC. I've since gotten older and more objective, but my heart still lies with DC. I just hate what the current executive team has wrought. Jim Lee continues to be the worst thing that ever happened to the industry and Dan DiDio needs to be booted out of the industry. And maybe they should stop hiring people, like Bob Harras, who were in charge at Marvel in the 90's and who ran the company into the ground. DC needs a turnaround because even after alienating all their die hard fans with the New 52, they're still losing to Marvel. And I hate that.
Let's go back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe discussion. This has been fun, but waaaaay off-topic