Earth-M (or, Earth-1938)

[Avenger Assembled]

Track 1: Let's Marvel goes bankrupt in the late 1970s, as they very nearly did in real life. DC, flush with cash after the Superman movie and stepping into the market now left vacant by Marvel's failure, picks up the license to Marvel's superheroic characters and Earth-M joins the DC multiverse sometime in the early 1980s. (With a fight between Thor and the Bronze Age Superman on the cover of the issue where they're introduced? Sure, why not)

Track 2: (less likely) Some bad decisions are made and the Superman movie tanks utterly; attempts to fix it make matters worse, and the after-effects of the DC Implosion is enough to make Warner pull the plug on publishing comics. The suits at Warner decide that funny books and their spinoffs aren't profitable in the long term anymore, and they wind up selling the DC multiverse to Marvel in the early 80s for lots of $$$ and all the cocaine they can snort. (They can snort a lot of cocaine).

Track 3: (least likely) They both go under! Pacific Comics stands astride the superhero world like a colossus! Bwahaha!

Thoughts?

[Azuth65]

/digs out the stamp of approval.

I love when people try and mesh 616 and New Earth and given the world building I've seen in the Oddballs thread... yeah, you need to do this.

[Avenger Assembled]

I might get some Oddballs out of it, yas, though only in the broad strokes: I don't want to be using this space for Marvel/DC fanfic!

I don't think a collapse of either company was terribly likely; DC was in more trouble than Marvel but they had the corporate backing to go with it. But Marvel could have gone belly-up; perhaps if they'd botched the switch to the direct distribution market, or if they hadn't picked up the Star Wars rights by good luck, or Claremont and Byrne...

(Probably the best single POD is to make Jim Shooter some sort of terrible ogre, perhaps driven mad by his experiences as a teenage comics writer/artist, who chases Byrne and Claremont out of comics, spits in George Lucas' eye, and clings to the newsstands of his youth with gusto)

The subsequent comics are going to be pretty terrible; DC is likely to conclude that Marvel's problem was too much innovation. No Crisis, no British invasion; Bronze Age uberalles...