Why Write DC: The Super-Writers

Over at Superman fansite theages.superman.ws, they've put up an interview with Elliot S! Maggin and Cary Bates from The Amazing World of DC Comics 2, from 1974.

There are some interesting (I use that word too much, don't I?) comments about That Other Comic Book Company:

MAGGIN: I really don't think Marvel is competing with National. They're not working for the same market. I work for National because I'm not interested in writing for college students what should be read by kids. I think the only reason anyone over fifteen should enjoy reading a comic is a kind of whimsical one - because it would have made him happy when he was a kid, not because it boggles his mind now. It should take more than twenty well-illustrated pages to stretch the perceptions of someone that age or older.
***
MAGGIN: Letter columns, ad campaigns, promotional gimmicks, even fan magazines National puts out, they're not as SILLY as at Marvel. They take themselves much more seriously at National for some ridiculous reason that's beyond me. Where Marvel will call their magazine FOOM, spend six months trying to get people interested in what FOOM means, and it turns out to be "Friends of Ol' Marvel", with "old" spelled "o-l-apostrophe"... National will put out a magazine called THE AMAZING WORLD OF DC COMICS. It's an uninteresting name. FOOM is, too, but at least FOOM is dumb and silly, and everyone will say, "FOOM - what a stupid name." Nobody will think twice about a name like THE AMAZING WORLD OF DC COMICS, it seems to me.

BATES: This is the difference between National and Marvel. Marvel's readers are older, so they look at the books as more "camp," to be made fun of. National has younger readers who take the books much more seriously. If National wrote dialogue that tried to be campy, I'd be offended.

INTERVIEWER: DC TRIED THAT DURING THE BATMAN TV ERA. IT SEEMED VERY FALSE FOR OUR CHARACTERS.
***
BATES: If they're good stories, they should hold up as stories and still be fun, whereas Marvel's are just fun, fun, twenty pages of fun. There's no story - just action. There's nothing there.

MAGGIN: I take it that in your midwestern neo-puritan parlance, "fun" is roughly synonymous with "peurile." If that's the case, I agree.

Wow, of all the different arguments in the tiresome Marvel versus DC debate I've heard over the years, I've never encountered these ones before.

I don't think I agree with them, for that matter, but all the same, it's an interesting (there's that word again) insight into how two of the major Superman writers of the period approached writing.