He is implying that Rippaverse is no better than Marvel Comics. A position also adopted, and likely originating from, EVS's camp. It is meant to associate Eric July with all that is bad for comic books. To cast him as the big bad.
The funnier part of this is that Nicky isn't entirely incorrect, however a reading one could do looking at the industry as a whole is that Rippaverse is indeed very similar to Marvel/DC.
Unfortunately for Nicky it's not similar to their modern iterations but the silver age ones, the golden age of comics ended because of comic audiences being sucked out of the medium (TV shows) and self censorship (quite possibly with good intentions back then, not so now I'd argue), it took both DC editors doing a ballsy shakeup and then Marvel, who back then was utterly irrelevant and only published thrillers and horror stories, dumping all of it to start doing superhero stories that might be slightly more relatable to the common reader and had more complex character driven stories (consider the context here, this was during the late 50s) to prevent the industry imploding on itself.
The self censorship bit is quite interesting in on itself because it came in the form of the CCA (comics code authority) and lasted quite a while (as late as the early 2000s for some publishers), funnily enough what started at the time as a way to avoid a moral panic and possible government regulation ended up being indirectly enforced by advertisers as they looked at adherence to the CCA for reassurance that putting their ads on display was safe (see: modern retardation with internet vs Internet or how I learned to hate advertisers)
Now back to my main point, while I would not consider the Rippaverse to be American comic trailblazers like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were, one can draw quite a few parallels: you have an industry that's limping along because it chose to ignore and think little of their readers, the people who chose to tackle comic books in a way that's not insulting to whoever picks them up (be it for characters and 'complex', at the time, stories or to actually be a fun read nowadays) and these same people finding quite a lot of success because of it.
tl;dr Nicky is so retarded that he doesn't realize that to anyone who has any knowledge of the history of American Comic books saying EJ is literally Marvel could be construed as a glowing endorsement. Also fuck advertisers.