What was the difference between the 70's Marvel and DC?

So my latest collection idea was to put together the complete list of books from the month/year I was born which was May 1971. Yeah, yeah, I know those weren't actually the books on the shelves that month, but those are the books that the CGC label will have 5/71 listed on them.

When I started doing research on those books I started with listing all the Marvel books and tried to list all those that still are living that worked on the books. Amazingly, with the list I have there were only 4 books I was either unsure of because of a lack of information or would not be able to get at least 1 single person to sign the book that originally worked on it or has some credit to it (I'm not counting Editor-Stan Lee, only writer Stan Lee).

Now DC was a whole new ball-game. Almost every book I looked up everyone that worked on the book was already deceased. If it wasn't for Neal Adams, there would truly be very few left. Same could be said for Marvel, but not to the same extent. So those more familiar, was DC using an older wiser bunch back in the day and Marvel was a bunch of young hipsters or did the DC bunch chain smoke while the Marvel guys hit the gym? The revelation totally changed my collection focus since I now won't be able to obtain even 50% of the DC titles with at least one signature.

Charlton is next but information on them is scarce!

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