Everyone Loves Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch, But It’s Time to Admit the Truth: DC Has Better Magic Characters

Magic has been a part of superhero comics since the beginning. Superman first appeared in DC Comics‘ Action Comics #1, an anthology book that also introduced readers to Zatara. Soon, characters like Green Lantern and Doctor Fate would show up, and the various publishers jumping into the superhero game would create even more magical characters like Sargon the Sorcerer, Captain Marvel, Ibis, the original Black Widow, and many more. Magical heroes would became big in the Silver Age as well, as Marvel Comics introduced two characters who would become the most popular magic-using superheroes – Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch.

It’s easy to look at characters like Strange and Wanda and their associated mythos and think that Marvel has the better magic users. After all, characters like Strange and Wanda have been key fixtures of the Avengers for years (Wanda longer than Strange, but you get it), their stories influencing the overall direction of the Marvel Universe. However, when you really take a look at who has the better magical characters, it’s plain to see that DC has long been beating the pants off the House of Ideas. While magic can seem more uniform and developed in the Marvel Universe, DC’s magical community has always been a much better place to tell stories.

Marvel Magic Has the Stars but DC Has the Glory

I think the main reason that everyone thinks that Marvel has better magic-users is Doctor Strange. Much like everything else in superheroes, DC premiered magical heroes in the Golden Age, and Marvel was able to take their example and go in different directions, redefining what a magic hero could be with Doctor Strange. Putting a magic hero up front was also different from what DC was doing with their Silver Age heroes in that it showed readers that magic was important to the Marvel Universe. By comparison, DC wouldn’t really have a magical character in the Silver Age with the same kind of placing until Zatanna joined the Justice League. Even then, she wasn’t a solo hero until years down the road. In fact, in DC Comics, magic was usually the power of a bad guy like the Wizard, Felix Faust, the Demons Three, and the like.

Strange also gave the impression that the Marvel magical community had some kind of structure. He was the Sorcerer Supreme, which implied a group of powerful magic users out there, ready to show up in future stories. Meanwhile, Scarlet Witch was being developed and characters like Agatha Harkness would start taking a bigger role in the Marvel Universe. At DC, though, magic never really had the structure that Strange gave it. The Justice Society had numerous members whose powers were basically magic – Green Lantern, Doctor Fate, Johnny Thunder, and the Spectre – and each of them worked entirely differently. From the beginning, magic in DC was chaotic and unformed, and I think that this difference – Marvel magic having structure at the beginning and DC’s being wild – influenced the way people saw magic at the two companies.

However, that chaos is why magic in DC works so well. Magic is often referred to as the aftereffects of creation, the leftover energy of possibility, and is considered one of the chief forces in the multiverse. There are a million different kinds of magic, all of the gods are considered magic, and every magical discipline you can imagine exists, even on alien worlds. Zatanna serving as Prime Magus is a new thing; up until now, DC never had a de facto head magic user. Instead, there were magic users all over the DC Multiverse, working with the major teams, fighting the forces of darkness or, in the case of the villains, light, and basically starring in some of the best stories in comics.

The ’80s were amazing for DC, with the growth of their horror comics giving them the ultimate magic character – John Constantine. While the publisher had already created favorites like Zatanna, Doctor Fate, and the Spectre, Constantine was the character that showed that DC wasn’t scared to take magic comics in directions they didn’t always go. It was this freedom that helped the horror side of DC grow by leaps and bounds, with the saga of Tim Hunter in the Books of Magic comics giving readers Harry Potter before it was cool. DC magic gave us comics like The Sandman, Garth Ennis’s run on The Demon, John Ostrander’s spectacular ’90s run on The Spectre, and the like, books that changed the way magic comics worked.

Freedom has been the watch word for why DC magic has been so awesome over the years. While Doctor Strange helped make Marvel magic popular and showed that it was important in the Marvel Universe, he also introduced boundaries that kept it from growing too far past him. Meanwhile, DC just established magic as this amazing chaotic power and used it to fuel a magical community that was massive and diffuse. There’s a reason I haven’t sat here and tried to explain the DC magical community and that’s because there’s no way explain it succinctly, which is its greatest strength. You can tell any kind of story in any kind of setting with magical DC characters because they aren’t magic-using superheroes, like Marvel’s magic users. They’re fictional characters who use magic and that’s allowed DC to do things with them that Marvel never could.

DC Handily Wins the Magic Race

I always find the way Marvel and DC use concepts to be very interesting and I’ve noticed something that separates both companies in the same way. Marvel is all about superheroes, taking every kind of genre and looking at it through the superhero lens, which is why Doctor Strange makes sense in the Marvel Universe. DC doesn’t do this; sure, it tells lots of superhero stories and uses the concept to look at many genres, but DC has more genre characters who live in superhero universes but aren’t technically superheroes, allowing them to explore something like magic in ways that Marvel can’t. Magic in Marvel will always just be a part of the superhero stories being told. Magic in DC can be the focus.

Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch, Agatha Harkness, and Magik are all great characters, but they’re also just about the entirety of interesting Marvel characters. Meanwhile, at DC you have Zatanna, John Constantine, Spectre, Amethyst, Doctor Fate, the entire Sandman Universe, Tim Hunter, Phantom Stranger, Raven, Swamp Thing, and that’s before you get to the villain. Those are just off the top of my head, as well – there’s way more. There is every kind of magical character you can think of in the DC Multiverse. Magic is wild and free, without boundaries, and DC is able to do magic stories than Marvel. Marvel magic is fun but DC magic is out of this world.

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