It might just be personal taste 'cause I don't actually disagree on the innate quality of the talent - but I can come up with quite a few DC superhero books I quite enjoy.  And, very, very little from Marvel.

And can we count Marvel's out-house (heh) books, because....




There is nothing in the world worse than Street Poet Ray.  

But DC was solid!  Take Karl Kessel's Superboy.  It spun out of a big event crossover (boo!)  but ihad a well-developed supporting cast, an interesting location, fun callbacks to DC history, and just generally good action and character beats.  It's not Alan Moore/Steve Gerber/Jack Kirby groundbreaking but just a solid, consistently fun book.  And DC had A LOT of those during the '90s....

*  Nightwing - everything I said about Superboy applies here.  
*  Birds of Prey -  Cool ongoing mystery led to a superhero comic centered in female friendship, which I don't think had ever been done before.  (Unless you count Daughters of the Dragon)  
*  Young Justice - Honestly my favorite take on the teen titans concept.  Good mix of action and comedy, felt like real teenagers hanging out.
*  Suicide Squad - Doesn't belong on this list PER SE because it is too good.  Just a brilliant book, beginning to end.  But it was winding down .
*  Hourman - Okay, I haven't read this one in two decades but I have fond memories of the couple scattered issues I did read wayyybakwen.
*  Justice Society (Early '90s, not the other one.) -  Hell, I didn't know Parobek was that young when he died.  Wikipedia makes me sad.  Maaaaybe the best superhero artist of his generation.  Love this series.  
*  Heckler -  See my avatar.  
*  Flash - Mark Waid.  Actually, the stuff before Waid was good too, at least what I've read.
*  Impulse -  Liked it even better than the Flash.  
*  Major Bummer
*  Scare Tactics -  (I might be alone in this.)  
*  The Tangent Universe.  (I L-O-V-E the Tangent Universe.  Nobody try to take this away from me!)  
*  Martian Manhunter 
*  Kingdom Come
*  The Golden Age
*  Vigilante:  City Lights, Prairie Justice -  (Only read one issue of this.  It was good.)  
*  Dr. Mid-Nite
*  Superman Adventures
*  Batman Adventures
*  The Green Lantern stuff that Wildfire was reviewing
*  And while I personally hate Starman it at least had a distinct feel and you could tell the creators were interested.  

And a couple (IMO) Stone Classics:

*  Justice League
*  Hitman

I keep saying "solid" but I can't think of a better way to describe it.  DC always had a good, consistent, line of bread 'n butter superhero books throughout the '90s.  If you take away the imprints it's not my favorite decade - SHOCKINGLY I'm a late silver/early bronze age guy - But it wasn't like a majority of the line sans Vertigo, Pardox, Milestone,Helix, etc. was absolute dross.  

And say what you will about those line wide crossovers (I'll probably agree with you) but that level of coordination meant that editorial  actually had their #$%^ together.

This was a new and novel concept at DC comics.  

Let me tell you a story about 1975...  Gerry Conway and Steve Dtiko (!) are the creative team on Man-Bat # 1.  Martin Pasko and Pablo Marcos are the creative team on Man-Bat # 2.

And nobody is the creative team on Man-Bat # 3 because Man-Bat is cancelled.  Long before anyone knew if the book was selling.  

DC in the '60s, '70s, well into the '80s* was a constant series of stop-and-start confusing decisions.  

*  Ok, DC got better in the late '80s, but by the (fairly arbitrary) decade by decade comparison that I'm trying to pull off here, we also have to include the early '80s.  I could fill a BOOK writing about how DC screwed up Thriller, drove the creative team off, and replaced them with people who had no idea about what the book was even about.  Just one example.  I been reading early '80s Comics Journals.  There are more.  

DC in the '90s seemed like it was run by grown-ups.

Creative teams were generally kept in place for a decently long time, and books were given a chance to see if they actually were selling before they were cancelled. '90s Man-Bat would have had at least one of the same creators in place for it's 18 issue run.  Also - There seems to be very little of the tumultuous anger at editorial that, say, Mort Weissinger or Jim Shooter or Bob Kanigher or even Tom Defalco attracted.  Creators generally liked working at DC, at least until the turn of the millenium.

Now  I'm not saying that "organized" and "good" are synonymous in terms of corporate art.  (I'd probably argue that Marvel peaked in the '70s, for God's sake.)  But organized and good are better than disorganized and good, and organized and bad are better than disorganized and bad.*

I'll cheerfully concede that, while there wasn't a lot of crap at DC in the '90s, the Venn diagram between "Terrible DC Comics" and "Extremely High Profile DC Comics" is basically a circle.  Have you guys read Superman # 75 lately**?  

And on a completely unrelated note why DON'T we have a vomiting smiley?  

But overall, DC's company owned line was organized and solid in a way it had never been in decades.  Organized and solid is not enough to sink the company that published Sandman and Stuck Rubber Baby, even with a couple big, terrible books dragging it down.***

*  Except for the '70s Atlas line, which was so disorganized it never had a chance to be good but you could kind of see how it might have gone right. That is fascinating.  

**  Return of Superman holds up great, though!  

*** Many of which I haven't actually read.  But Justice League Task Force couldn't be that bad, right?  It was written by Christopher Priest.  Or was that Extreme Justice?    










  

All I know is that DC lured me back into comics in the '90s with titles like Sandman, Sandman Mystery Theatre, Starman, The Power of Shazam, the Ostrander/Mandrake Spectre and Martian Manhunter, the Strezewski/Parobeck JSA, the Big Book of... books, the various titles based on the DC animated series, and a number of Elseworld books, all still in my collection. All Marvel had that tickled my fancy was the Busiek/Perez Avengers and a couple of Steve Rude-drawn minis.

But I would argue that as a business, DC peaked in the 1940s.

Cei-U!
I summon my two cents' worth!