Was the 1949 serial the one where Vicki Vale confronts Batman about why he's driving Bruce Wayne's car? Even if the budget didn't allow for Batman to drive around in a special vehicle, surely they could have at least managed to have him drive around in a different car. Since when can't a millionaire crime-fighter afford his own wheels? I do give the creators credit that rather than try to hide it, they actually addressed the issue in the script by having Vicki question it!

For the record, I don't consider this a Bat-mobile. Since Batman admits in the serial to borrowing the car from his good friend Bruce Wayne, I propose that it officially be referred to as The Bruce-mobile!

I hated Bernie Wrightson's monster truck Batmobile from the Cult.

As if I needed another reason to regard The Dark Knight Returns as a piece of stupidly overrated drek, but Frank Miller also gave us this monstrosity:

LOL! Yeah.

Definitely Marvel. Heck, just the material by Starlin alone in his Warlock and Captain Marvel stories would be enough to tip the scales for me. Also liked the Galactus stories in FF, both from the Lee/Kirby years and then Byrne run - but also the sprawling space opera in those roughly dozen issues during Wolfman's run. I'd also put Gerber's Guardians of the Galaxy stories in this category, and I enjoyed those quite a bit as well.

As an old Legion fan, I look fondly on the days of the Sun-Eater, the Khunds and the Great Darkness saga. I also recall many an sf-oriented DC title like Green Lantern and JLA in which our heroes encountered all kinds of unique and memorable conflicts with other worlds and their peoples. And there was nothing quite like the aliens vs. Rann battles that Adam Strange faced whenever the Zeta Beam took him off-Earth.

All that being said, beyond the annual Earth-Two/Earth-One team-ups, DC never really attempted to weave together all (or even a few) of its extra-terrestrials into a cohesive story, let alone into a universe until long after Marvel had left them behind in both grandeur and imagination. A major contributing factor to that missed opportunity was DC's lack of editorial control on a company-wide level. Editors neither shared nor gave a damn about continuity between those fiefdoms.

A huge part of Marvel's success in this area had to have been because of the creativity of Jack Kirby, who brought grandeur, weight and unearthliness (Is that a word?) to all of the realms and characters he designed. It was one thing for Stan to drop names like Asgard, the Negative Zone, Galactus, and so on (I know, I know, if he even did, right?), but quite another for Jack to give the places and the characters who inhabited them such vivid life.

And then Marvel took it another step and wove so many other worlds, galaxies, races, universes, dimensions and cosmoses together. During my reading years, Marvel did the galaxy/dimension/cosmos-spanning stuff so well in the pages of books like Silver Surfer, Thor, FF, Dr. Strange, Captain Marvel and Avengers.

Granted, the tropes got old and tired, but that was long after I got out of the regular comics-reading business. Thus I was spared Contests of Champions, Secret Wars, continual Crises, and other various and sundry "events" in both of the Big Two lines.

But when it counted most, Marvel got the cosmic saga right.