Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
Both settings also come down hard on any attempt to spread technology developed by supers, to the the point that Tony Stark has more than once purged the Earth of other people who dared to try and use his armor designs.

This is partly a natural reaction to the burden of long-timeline stories, which impose limits on how much change you can have. Any world with powerful supers is unstable and will diverge from the course of history of a world without one hard and fast. However, in Marvel and DC supers hit the scene early in the 20th Century, and if you role with that it gets messy fast. Watchman is actually a pretty good example of how unwieldy the alternate history quickly becomes - Dr. Manhattan wins the Vietnam War for the US and Nixon ends up as president for life and that's...very weird.
In fairness, Stark's goal (initially at least) is to purge it of people who have STOLEN his technology. Of course, he then usually escalates.

Law and the Multiverse did a good piece noting that one of the problems with comics is that they tend to keep the world roughly the same as ours except for super. But given how long supers have been around, things should have changed dramatically.