User blog comment:TheVision185/Marvel vs. DC/@comment-1895174-20121209202709/@comment-1895174-20121210003609

1) I don't get what you mean here - do you mean a character's villains are not characters associated with them? This may be less true with Marvel, where, perhaps because the majority of the characters were made by a small handful of people (Stan Lee) around the same time, they share a lot of the same villains.  But you can't really say that the Joker isn't a Batman character because he's a villain.  With Marvel properties I could see it - Doctor Doom is primarily a Fantastic Four villain but he could fight nearly any major Marvel hero and I wouldn't think twice about it.  But for Superman to fight the Joker without Batman involved in the story or for Batman to fight Sinestro without any Green Lantern is just bizarre.

2) Right, a character's believability has nothing to do with superpowers. But Vision's post asserts that Marvel's characters are more believable because they don't have superpowers, which is a claim that just doesn't hold up to any scrutiny.

I'd still say Batman's villains are more well known than Spider-Man's. The core of Batman's rogues gallery - the Joker, Catwoman (although she's not much of a villain anymore), the Penguin, etc. are all incredibly well-known, even to people who have never watched or read anything Batman-related. Doc Ock, maybe Venom and Green Goblin are the only Spider-Man villains who even come close to that level of saturation. Whatever, it's a moot point.

And that's about the same list of non-powered DC superheroes I can think of, but the point is they have them, unlike the assertion in Vision's post. And the only non-superpowered superheroes I can think of in Marvel are Iron Man, War Machine, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Elektra, Pym, the Punisher, and a bunch of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents (if you even want to consider them superheroes). Missing from that list are characters like Spider-Man, the Hulk, Wolverine, Captain America, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four - most of Marvel's widely-known and most interesting characters.