Comic books are the dreams and aspirations of human beings.
There is no better medium than comic books.
It's the medium.
You may not like comic books, you may not respect comic books...
...but they're something that people buy for themselves that they want to read.
There's a reason for that. It's because they love them.
I remember being given a box of comics when I was about 7.
And I loved it.
Still to this day, I have no idea where it came from.
My father, just before he died, I mentioned it to him.
He said, "I remember that box of comics. I'll tell you where it came from."
And I thought, "Great." And then he died.
A lot of these characters, they were special and different and unique.
And I definitely remember connecting to a lot of the superheroes in that sense.
This is a comic book from 1975.
I used masking tape, ha, ha, to actually hold it together.
I read it so much, it would literally fall apart.
I think you could have put any DC comic in my hands...
...and I still would have fallen in love.
My mom, when I was 8, made me sell all mine for 2 cents apiece...
...to Mr. West, the junkman, in the back of the Tupelo Hotel.
Once, there was a world without comic books.
Like jazz and like baseball, like so much that is distinctly American...
...the comic book was born in the country's margins.
Cheap, slight, juvenile.
An orphan child that would transform over time...
...into something vital and strong...
...but not by magic word...
...or accident of science...
...or ancient incantation...
...but by the efforts of writers and artists and entrepreneurs...
...whose ambition was simply to entertain...
...to challenge...
...to captivate...
...to enlighten.
These men and women of DC Comics...
...let their own lives and the world around them inspire their creations.
This is the story of the birth of the comic book.
This is the origin story of DC Comics.
I know I sound crazy to say it, but, ha, ha, guess what.
If you put the best artist in the world and the best writer in the world...
...they'll make the greatest piece of art in the world.
And do you know what you'll call it? You'll call it a comic book.
New York is fundamentally an immigrant and entrepreneurial city.
There's an enormous pressure that boils from the bottom of the hungry people...
...who come here looking for a thing they can do.
And that inevitably goes to either things that are new...
...or the things that the elite aren't interested in doing.
It's the early 1930s.
Two immigrant entrepreneurs, Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz...
...run a small but profitable publishing concern.
Harry was the backslapper, the glad-hander, the salesman, the con man.
Making people happy, telling dirty jokes, drinking, going out to girly shows...
...you know, that was Harry.
He had mob connections, or so went the rumors at the time.
It didn't help that he bragged about knowing Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello.
He didn't have someone who knew how to balance books and run a company.
And so that's where Jack Liebowitz entered.
Harry and Jack make their fortune putting out pulp magazines.
Not just pulps, but what we call the spicy pulps.
Lascivious pictures of half-naked women on the cover...
...and these sort of racy stories inside, or at least racy for 1935.
About as naked as the law would allow...
...and sometimes sort of pushing over that line.
People did jail time for these magazines in the '30s.
They were pornography by the standards of the '30s. Donenfeld almost went to jail.
He had to talk one of his employees into taking the rap for him...
...in exchange for a job for life.
The handwriting came on the wall about '37, '38.
He thought, "Maybe spicy pulps is not where I wanna be...
...if the law's gonna be breathing down my neck."
For a country in the midst of the Great Depression...
...newspaper comic strips were a popular and cheap amusement.
Collections of these, the very first comic books, begin to appear on newsstands.
And Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson...
...a prolific pulp-fiction writer and former cavalry officer...
...is inspired to put out his own.
January 11, 1935. You go to the newsstands in New York.
You find Fun Comics Number One, the very first DC comic.
Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson had a sense not just that this is filler...
...but that new material might find its own audience.
The major needs business partners...
...and Harry and Jack need less racy material to publish.
And in 1937, their very first collaboration, Detective Comics...
...the comic that would give DC its name, hits the stands.
Why Detective Comics? Because it's an outgrowth...
...of this whole urban culture that is fairly new to us as Americans.
And the idea of urban crime was something that, 50 years ago, didn't even exist.
Suddenly, you know, we have to worry about...
...muggers and pickpockets and street crime.
Detective Comics was clearly a response to that.
After buying out Wheeler-Nicholson...
...Harry and Jack set out to grow their new venture.
And with comic-book pioneer Max Gaines...
...they launch National Allied and All-American...
...the companies that will eventually become DC Comics.
At the same time in Cleveland...
...two teenagers, sons of Jewish immigrants...
...are escaping the pain and struggle of their everyday lives...
...into a fantasy world of their own making.
Together, they would create something revolutionary.
Jerry was the nerdy science-fiction fan.
Jerry was the one who read any kind of crappy, pulp, fantastic story out there...
...and was constantly making up his own stories.
And Joe was the artist. Joe was very poor.
It was very hard for him to get paper, to get art lessons.
He found things to draw on. He was just always scribbling.
And they were both rejects. They were both outcasts.
The kids who are coming of age in the 1930s...
...that first generation of creative talent for comics...
...have lived through an astounding moment of transition in society.
The world is changing very, very rapidly. Amazing things are happening.
It's a marvelous world in a very literal sense.
And the comics seize on a very visual dimension of it...
...which is, if you can take a human being to the next level...
...what will that next level be?
Jerry and Joe imagine a man...
...with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.
Superman, I believe, was the most personal of Jerry and Joe's creations.
In large part because Jerry had lost his father...
...when he was 17 years old in a robbery.
It clearly left a mark on Siegel.
You can see how that would make you long for a father figure who was bulletproof.
Shuster gave the vision of the character.
Shuster's the one who designed the costumes, the one who gave it the visuals.
But Siegel was completely the heart of that character.
You know, the passion of it really came from Siegel.
Jerry and Joe submit their creation to editors across the country.
And in turn, every one of them promptly rejects it.
Some more than once.
Nobody liked it. This was an anomaly.
Nobody else was doing it. Everybody was doing cowboys, detective...
...science-fiction-type things.
These two 17-year-old Jewish kids in Cleveland, Ohio, created a genre.
It's not until four years later...
...that DC finally brings Superman to Earth's newsstands.
That spring, Action Comics Number One is born.
And there he is, Superman, in his red cape and blue tights...
...signature S emblazoned on his chest.
A modern-day Hercules, sending hoodlums on the run.
A refugee from a distant planet.
A newly minted American who becomes an unapologetic social crusader.
Leaping through the night sky.
A murderess under his arms in a race to the governor's house...
...to save an innocent woman from death row.
Superman, even as he was drawn originally in his raw form...
...was one that I felt was alive.
Understanding or feeling at that time that this was possible...
...that really had a tremendous effect on me.
He's throwing guys right and left, he bursts in through walls...
...and smashes the doors, and that's how you meet Superman.
He's two-fisted. He's knocking stuff around. He takes no prisoners.
He's a giant ball of energy and force just bulldozing his way through the story.
Clark is there and is instantly recognizable...
...as the meek, mild, bespectacled alter ego.
"If you saw inside me, you'd see that there's something big...
...exciting and dynamic if you'd just look behind the glasses."
I was quite meek and I was quite mild.
And I thought, "Gee, wouldn't it be great if I was a mighty person?
And these girls didn't know that this clod here is really somebody special."
I was very small and I was always pushed around by bullies and so forth.
So that was one of my dreams.
I took courses in bodybuilding and weightlifting.
I don't know if it helped, but I made an effort.
Action Comics introduces another iconic character, Lois Lane.
She was smart, capable. She was a bulldog, passionate.
When she saw a story, she went for it.
She didn't think, "Gosh, it's gonna get me killed."
She would just do it.
I loved that. I loved her tenacity and her intelligence.
And in Superman, Lois met her match.
In that very first issue, he takes on government corruption...
...domestic violence and urban crime.
Really, Superman was the first crusader for social justice in comics.
He was sprung from, you know, two Jewish kids from Cleveland who were picked on...
...and this was their idea of empowerment.
There's an assumption that there is an absolute standard...
...of justice in the world.
It's also very true to the immigrant experience at that point...
...in their hope for justice.
We have come here, we've come to this land.
It will be okay here. It will be just here.
These are families that have come over from Europe.
And they're watching whoever they left behind disappear in a very scary fashion.
So the characters live for them.
Nazism was rising up and a lot of innocent people were being killed.
Countries were invaded, innocents slaughtered.
And I felt that the world desperately needed a crusader, if only a fictional one.
Superman was about the immigrant experience in a very, very powerful way.
It's the kid from the old country who brings the best values from the old country...
In this case, the old planet. - To America...
...adds it to the pot, and accepts the best part of America.
It's a really powerful set of ideas...
...that was really important to people in the '30s and '40s.
The newsstand dealers couldn't get enough.
Within three issues, they were up to a million copies. It was a phenomenon.
There was never anything like it. There was that Supermania...
...that hit in 1939 and in 1940.
We've not seen anything like it in American pop culture since.
Beatlemania was not that big.
Over 100,000 boys and girls...
...in the U.S. And Canada...
...are members of the Supermen of America. One mother says:
I should like to thank the publishers of Action Comics magazine...
...for including a health page in every issue.
Billy has been eating his cereal and drinking his milk regularly...
...since Superman told him to do so.
Say, he can do about anything, can't he?
Everywhere you go, Superman.
He's in your newspaper strip. He's on your radio.
There's short cartoons in your theater. He's on clothing.
You know, he's in the Macy's Day Parade as a balloon.
He's at the world's fair in costume.
It's Superman Day at the world's fair. It's a big deal.
Everybody would've known Superman...
...from your grandmother down to the immigrant who just got off of Ellis Island.
Everybody would've known him.
After Superman's unprecedented success...
...editors at DC send out a call:
"Bring me another Superman."
And for an 18-year old kid from the Bronx, that call does not go unheeded.
And at DC Comics at that time,
"Would you like to create another superhero in the genre of Superman?"
And let's see, I was making about $25 a week.
And I said, "How much does Siegel and Shuster, who created Superman, make?"
"Well, they make $800 a week apiece."
I said, "For that money, you'll have a superhero on Monday."
Kane enlists his friend...
...a shoe salesman who wants to be a writer, Bill Finger.
"You know, I've got this idea. It's a character named Batman.
And he's basically Superman, but without powers."
And the two of them sit down and they start knocking the idea back and forth.
And with Finger's help...
...Kane spends the weekend refining the character into something remarkable.
By Monday morning, you know, Kane comes back to his editor, Vince Sullivan.
Says, "Here's what I got."
And Vince Sullivan knew something good when he saw it.
And he said, "I love it. What do you call it?"
I said, "That's a good question, ha, ha.
Maybe we'll call it The Bat-hyphenated-Man."
Less than a year after Superman's debut...
...Detective Comics introduces The Batman, hyphen optional.
Here comes this mysterious bat-shrouded character...
...carrying a gangster under one arm and swinging in.
The first cover was unlike anything we'd seen in comics before.
This was new.
A superhero detective in the urban-crime tradition.
He takes on the case of the Chemical Syndicate...
...and solves it with his brain and his fists...
...dispensing vigilante justice.
And it's not until the final panel that the Batman's alter ego is revealed:
Young playboy millionaire Bruce Wayne.
I wanted to be Bruce Wayne in my reverie.
Instead of a poor kid, I imagined I'd like to be a rich playboy and fight crime at night.
He made himself up in the same way that Bruce Wayne makes up this Batman.
He was born Bob Kahn, went for the Bob Kane name very early.
Everyone who knew him said he got a nose job as soon as he had the money.
He was very dapper, very concerned with his appearance.
He really wanted to be, I think, a movie star.
And he also wanted to be a successful, non-ethnic New York socialite.
I can probably count on the fingers of one hand...
...the comic-book characters that have ever been created by affluent...
...successful people.
The characters of longevity always come from a place of oppression.
Always come from a place of wanting to break out of the world that you're in.
We all were kids from the Bronx.
We were all a bunch of schmucks, talking Jewish. Schmucks.
We were innocent, talented guys who were schmucks.
We never drew ourselves.
Why?
Why should we draw poor little guys?
What would inspire us to draw poor little guys?
Comic books is an industry made up of people who aren't accepted...
...who desperately want to be accepted.
So they desperately want to be like mainstream America.
It's why Batman's a millionaire and Superman is a farmer.
Real mainstream, real, real, real America.
So they imprint themselves on heroic images...
...that embody all the stuff they wish they were.
Rich and handsome and muscular...
...and able to handle any situation and not tongue-tied.
The public loved Batman. The public embraced Batman very quickly.
Especially when you get into the fourth or fifth adventure...
...and you start to outline his origins.
The classic scene of young Bruce Wayne with his parents out behind a theater.
His parents are gunned down before his eyes.
And that's the moment that made him want to turn into Batman.
That's why Batman works so well.
Whatever he does, you understand why he does it.
He's lost his parents at a random crime in the city...
...and he wants to make sure that no one else suffers the same horror...
...that he had to go through.
Batman's popularity soon rivals Superman's.
And now with two signature characters, business is booming.
But with success comes scrutiny.
And wouldn't you know it, before long, the comics have their first critics.
Comic books were still targeted very much toward adolescent boys...
...with the things that made boys excited.
You know, violence and no time for girls.
Girls are for sissies.
Pop psychologist and celebrity Dr. William Moulton Marston...
...pens an article criticizing comics for not reaching their full potential.
Hire him.
They hired Marston to be an editorial advisor.
He was very much one of the world's first feminists.
He also helped create the lie detector.
Marston would reportedly give lie-detector tests...
...to anybody who visited his home, just to break the ice.
Dr. William Marston tests his latest invention, the love meter.
He's going to find out whether blonds or brunettes react more to love.
Dr. Marston declares gentlemen may prefer blonds...
...but brunettes prefer love scenes.
He had a very interesting home life.
He had a wife...
...and he had a graduate student who lived with him and his wife.
Sort of became her co-wife.
It sounds like a very amicable arrangement that he had.
And somehow he talked his wife into working to support the family.
The family being him and his mistress and the kids by each.
He may have believed in female domination, but he had some manipulative brilliance.
Marston writes that the comics' worst offense...
...is their bloodcurdling masculinity.
He insists something important is missing. That something?
Wonder Woman.
Wonder Woman makes her first appearance...
...buried in the back of an issue of All Star Comics.
A child of the gods, called by the rumblings of war to bring peace to man's world.
She was a vehicle with which you could introduce pacifism...
...give comics a mother figure where they didn't have one.
They were just full of father figures, or angry uncles.
Princess Diana is a native of Paradise Island, untouched by men...
...until Captain Steve Trevor crash-lands into her world.
Against her mother's wishes, Diana competes for the right to take him back.
Driven by love, she bests her sisters at every challenge.
And with her mother's blessing, Wonder Woman is born.
A statuesque Amazon wrapped in the American flag.
She's not an unreasonable icon to have been created.
During World War II, women took over a lot of male roles.
She's a Rosie the Riveter, only a goddess.
Defending her adopted nation with a lasso of truth...
...an invisible plane...
...and bulletproof bracelets...
...thugs cower before her.
And Wonder Woman soon pushes her way out of the back pages.
Marston wanted to portray Wonder Woman...
...as a character of strength, but his definition of strength was very interesting.
It was all about the willingness of women to submit themselves.
That was a symbol of power and a symbol of defiance.
What that translates to on the comic-book page...
...more often than not, is Wonder Woman tied up.
There is a lot of bondage in those comics.
It's hard to convey how often. I mean, I say that and people think:
"Well, like maybe once an issue," somebody said.
But it was like every page, ha, ha, Marston found a way...
...to have his artists draw somebody tied up, manacled to walls, spread-eagled.
You could see where he was going.
Wonder Woman was one of the comics most troubling to DC's editorial advisors...
...because on the surface, it seemed to be saying all the right things...
...but then there were all these scantily clad women getting tied up or tying men up.
"Is that one of the reasons Wonder Woman was popular?"
I'm not entirely sure. I wouldn't rule it out.
Wonder Woman is instantly embraced.
Mostly by little boys and servicemen.
And America has its first superheroine.
And she takes her place in the pantheon alongside Superman and Batman.
And now with three iconic characters, the Golden Age of DC Comics is underway.
Justice-seeking superheroes hit a nerve in an America on the verge of war.
And by 1945, comics triple their circulation, selling millions each month.
And so they would jam these creative young guys in these little rooms...
...just drawing side by side, hour after hour.
Gil Kane, one of the artists of that time, walked into one of these...
...said it looked like an internment camp. It was sweaty, foul-smelling.
Maybe one reason many women weren't in the business was it looked unappealing.
It was a scene of desks. That's all.
And of secretaries, one.
That was the way it was. It could have been a hell of a lot worse.
It was an escape.
We wanted to be with each other, the brotherhood.
Publishers all over New York were inspired by DC's success...
...to home-grow their own superheroes.
And before you knew it, the newsstand was just flooded.
There wasn't enough of it to sate the public.
There was the appetite for more. By the time you get to 1940, 1941...
...literally hundreds of comics and dozens and dozens of costumed characters...
...not just from DC, but from all over.
Here comes The Flash, the fastest man alive.
The Spectre, Sandman, Hawkman, Green Arrow...
...The Spirit, Star-Spangled Kid, Aquaman...
...Mr. Terrific, Phantom Lady, Plastic Man, and Green Lantern.
He had a mask, blond hair...
...an emblem on his chest and a ring on his finger.
I never forget... I never remember which finger.
Sheldon Mayer used to go, "Hasen, ring is on the left hand."
I was never a finger man.
As hero after hero arrives on the newsstands...
...one grabs young fans more than the others:
Fawcett Publications' Captain Marvel.
There was this sense of whimsy.
The genius stroke of Captain Marvel is that he's a child.
And then he says this magic word and becomes this big, all-powerful adult.
Well, hello. I mean, that's what every kid wanted.
In his heyday, the Big Red Cheese outsells even Superman.
And with new superheroes come super-villains.
Batman takes on the Joker, Penguin and Catwoman.
Wonder Woman battles the Cheetah.
And for Superman?
Luthor, a criminal mastermind with a full head of red hair, briefly.
And to help fight these super-villains?
Sidekicks.
Robin, the Boy Wonder, is first.
Costumed sidekicks just didn't exist.
Robin is this young, youthful acrobat. He's cracking jokes, he's making puns.
It radically changes the tone of the book.
Robin gives young readers a chance to see themselves in the comics.
He strikes a chord and kid sidekicks...
...become almost obligatory for new superheroes.
And superheroes are everywhere.
Up in the sky, look. It's a bird.
- It's a plane. - It's Superman.
The Adventures of Superman radio show...
...is broadcast into living rooms across America.
Every week promises a new thrilling adventure.
But Superman also finds time to fight against religious intolerance...
...juvenile delinquency and even the KKK.
Superman was the first figure outside of my family...
...that influenced me toward an unbigoted view of the world.
Certain that Jimmy Olsen and Perry White...
were in the hands of hate-mongers...
...and terrorists known as The Clan of the Fiery Cross...
...Clark Kent tracked down a boy...
...he believed knew the identity of the hooded bigots.
The Anti-Defamation League had an operative in the KKK.
And every day, he would call us and give us the code word for the KKK.
And we would reveal it on Superman. And we drove the KKK crazy.
In all, more than 2000 episodes air.
- Up in the sky, look. - It's a bird.
- It's a plane. - It's Superman.
Soon after his radio premiere...
...DC gives audiences their first glimpse of Superman in action.
Max Fleischer Studios, famous for their Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons...
...adapts the hero's adventures.
The Fleischers didn't wanna do it.
They made up this insane figure for Paramount...
...so they would just have an excuse to not do it.
And Paramount said, "Okay."
But you see every penny.
The infant of Krypton is now the Man of Steel, Superman.
They were ambitious beyond belief.
They got what they paid for. It looked phenomenal.
The Superman of that era, he doesn't say much.
Just rolls up his sleeve when there's a problem and says:
This looks like a job for Superman.
And then goes out there and kicks ass.
I think the Fleischer Superman cartoons...
...are like a pinnacle of cinematic achievement in the 20th century.
I'm sure people would laugh at me for saying that.
But they're like beautiful little poems that I never get tired of hearing.
December 7th, 1941...
...a date which will live in infamy.
When America enters World War II...
...DC writers, artists and editors...
...immigrants and sons of immigrants, answer the call.
The comics brim with their patriotism.
Suddenly, they were in there, helping us fight the war.
Really, characters like...
Well, especially Wonder Woman, with her star-spangled bloomers...
...were perfect for that kind of context.
The Justice Society of America...
...the first superhero team and the club every kid wants to join...
...dives into World War II headlong.
Batman and Robin deliver guns to soldiers on the front line.
Wonder Woman uses the heads of Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini as bowling pins.
We were in a war. The Army and the Navy were involved.
Boys and sons and daughters and fathers were all involved in this.
And so putting the superhero into these stories...
...meant we would be saving, not the world, but saving our own.
Superman supports the war effort back home...
...rousing Americans to grow victory gardens...
...buy war bonds and recycle scrap, including comics.
The moment you put him in Nazi Germany, you know, war is over.
In fact, Look magazine did a piece with Siegel and Shuster early on.
The question was, "How would Superman end the war?"
And the answer was, he flies over, he grabs Hitler by the scruff of the neck.
He flies to Russia, grabs Stalin, takes them before the World Court.
And that's two pages, by the way.
So, Superman could have ended the war in apparently 14 panels of comics.
You can't have Superman stop the war.
Because there is no Superman to stop the war in reality.
And Superman's creators don't wish to disrespect...
...the struggles of real-life fighting men and women.
Many of the brightest talents in comics join their superheroes in the fight...
...like The Spirit creator, Will Eisner...
...publishers like Irwin Donenfeld...
...artists like Sheldon Moldoff and Irwin Hasen...
...and writers like Jerry Siegel.
Many enlist. Not all of them come back.
Bert Christman was a young illustrator who...
...with Gardner Fox, created Sandman.
But his real love was flying. His real love was adventure.
So he joined the Flying Tigers in World War II...
...and tragically was shot down over Burma in the line of service.
Comic books are wildly popular among fighting men and women.
Millions are shipped overseas to boost morale.
Over 30 percent of all printed material shipped to military bases are comic books.
I'm sure it took them places that they just needed to go.
After they came back from the war...
...they associated comics with the war experience.
And the sales in comics dropped.
You know, the war's over and suddenly...
...with the Nazi scourge out of our hair, there's this giant void.
You can't just go back to fighting bank robbers at that point.
The DC characters had all this might and all this energy...
...and they didn't quite know where to put it.
In the early '50s...
...the only characters to survive were Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.
A couple third-string characters survived by being in the backs of these books.
That's it. That's your whole list of ongoing characters...
...that survived from the Golden Age into the 1950s.
Women were forced out of careers that they had had back into the home...
...because the soldiers were coming back and wanted their jobs back.
Again, a whole societal shift.
And at that point, Wonder Woman's role shifted as well.
She went from being the fighter to worrying more about her boyfriend.
Wonder Woman's progress, in a way...
...reflects the place that society wants women to be at that point.
In the late 1940s, superheroes all but disappear from the comic pages.
And Westerns, romance, crime fiction...
...and child-friendly titles emerge in their place.
The only new superhero comic of the era, Superboy, reflects the demographic shift.
With comic-book superheroes on the decline...
...DC follows their audience to a new medium, television.
Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, I've made Metropolis my headquarters.
And I've done my best to give you a clean, healthy city.
Back then, there wasn't anything like it. And it's just fascinating.
This great heroic character also pretends to be an ordinary person.
My God, that's wish fulfillment. That's pure wish fulfillment.
If you can take off your glasses, you can become Superman.
If you wear that cape, you can become Superman.
But Superman, as played by George Reeves...
...is more than just wish fulfillment.
He offers TV audiences a model of themselves...
...as useful contributors to a polite and peaceful society.
Men like you make it difficult for people to understand one another.
You were warned nothing would come of this but trouble.
But not everybody shares that interest in the status quo.
Our young people are getting out of hand everywhere.
Well, I know, Mrs. Robinson.
Every report I get from the field tells me how enormous the problem is.
And while DC's comics are becoming safer...
...other publishers are emerging at the edges...
...with titles like Dark Mysteries...
...Out of the Shadows...
...Crime, Horror and Terror.
Just dripping with horror and irony...
...and they did not go over well with America's parents.
The public becomes galvanized around the publication...
...of Seduction of the Innocent by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham...
...where Wertham asserts that children who read comics...
...grow up to be juvenile delinquents.
And DC is not exempt from his brush.
To Wertham, Superman is a fascist un-American...
...and Wonder Woman is a poor role model for girls...
...because she emphasizes power and independence over nurturance.
Of course, most damning, he's decided that...
...because Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson...
...are two men unchaperoned who share a house together...
...that they must be homosexuals, because it's right there on paper.
This, of course, is absurd...
...but all across the nation, parents are up in arms.
They're having bonfires, burning comics publicly.
They're telling children to give them away.
"Don't bring a comic book into this house."
The same houses that kids brought comic books into all the time.
It was a cultural revolution.
A very bad cultural revolution...
...but it was nonetheless a cultural revolution.
So they actually had hearings on comic books.
Comic books are an important contributing factor...
...in many cases of juvenile delinquency.
My name is William Gaines.
I was the first publisher in these United States to publish horror comics.
I'm responsible. I started them.
Bill Gaines, son of DC Comics pioneer Max Gaines...
...is the only person who testifies on behalf of the comic-book industry.
A horror-book publisher at EC Comics...
...Gaines would go on to publish the widely imitated MAD...
...which later went on to become DC and the nation's most popular humor title.
It became successful with issue four when we lampooned Superman.
We ran a feature called "Superduperman."
That's hilarious.
Uh, it was then. Ha-ha-ha. You had to be there.
He was a very courageous man.
Unfortunately, his courage sort of exceeded his...
You know, his eloquence. Not intending to, but he came off as glib...
...and sort of weaselly and nervous, which was not fair.
But he came off like Nixon during the debates.
Attorney presents him with a cover showing a severed head held in a hand.
- Do you think that's in good taste? - Yes, sir, I do.
For the cover of a horror comic.
Almost single-handedly sank the whole ship, God bless him.
The hearings are a major blow for the comic-book industry.
And many smaller companies, including Bill Gaines', fold.
This is the way the public wants it.
The way it'll have to be, as far as I'm concerned.
In an effort to survive...
...DC comes together with the remaining publishers...
...to form a self-censoring body, the Comics Code Authority.
At that time, comic books were so attacked for the material that they were doing.
If that Comic Code emblem was not on the book...
...the book did not get distributed.
These guys were decent family men.
And suddenly, somebody had told them, "You're pernicious. You're evil."
Then they had to stunt whatever artistic growth might have happened.
The worst censorship is self-censorship. They erred on the side of caution.
They had comic books like My Greatest Adventure.
My favorite, Pat Boone Comics.
Pat Boone and his family. Isn't that nice?
Oh, I was just, um, reading through this comic book.
- Were you reading a good story? - No.
The characters that began as rebellious agents against the status quo...
...now in the 1950s, fall into that envelope of conservative America...
...as policemen for the status quo.
Batman would walk down Gotham's equivalent of Fifth Avenue...
...and there would be contests that he would judge.
Or there was one, spend the day in the Batcave with the Batman.
As Batman transforms from vigilante to Gotham City's leading citizen...
...Superman gets his own makeover...
...from a rough-and-tumble social crusader to an establishment figure.
And things aren't much better for Lois Lane.
This tenacious reporter gets to the '50s...
...and suddenly, she's not the tenacious reporter anymore.
Her real focus is:
"Is Clark Kent really Superman, whom I love dearly?"
Even as a child, I was annoyed by how Lois was portrayed.
I was annoyed by what she was doing. It aggravated me.
I wasn't so happy with Superman at that point either.
There's a suburban psychedelia that suddenly emerges at that time.
In the '50s, Superman could represent the men who were home from the war...
...who suddenly had to make suburban lives for themselves...
...in strange circumstances.
If you look at the Superman comics at those times, he's no longer a reformer.
He's no longer a patriot.
What he is is a dad with woman troubles and relatives from the 31st century...
...and old friends who come back to pester him.
With comic books floundering creatively...
...the whole industry finds itself on the verge of collapse.
An editor said to me, "Kid, I saw your samples."
Said, "They're really good.
I'm gonna do you the biggest favor in the world. I'm gonna turn you down.
There are probably not gonna be comic books in the next year or two."
Just one year after the Code's implementation, sales plunge by 75 percent.
DC needs a new strategy for the new times.
It looks to reinvent itself in the Silver Age.
Superheroes had been in an eclipse for almost a decade.
We had to come up with new ideas.
Someone at the editorial meeting suggested:
"Say, why don't we put out The Flash again?"
They said, "Good idea. Who's gonna edit The Flash?"
Everyone looked at me.
Julius Schwartz has been with DC since 1944.
There would not be a comic-book business today if it weren't for Julie Schwartz.
He and his childhood best friend, Mort Weisinger...
...who for many years edited Superman, were also early science-fiction fans.
They were among the people who founded science-fiction fandom.
They produced the first fanzine for science fiction, called The Time Traveler.
Julie was a curmudgeon.
I started writing for him by accident.
Julie came storming into the office and looked at me.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
I said, "Uh, I'm waiting to sell Mr. Bridwell a Lois Lane story."
And he literally grabbed me by the scruff of my collar...
...dragged me out of the guest chair, slammed me down in his own and said:
"No, you're writing The Flash.
You couldn't do a worse job than the son of a bitch I fired."
Julie was just one of those people without whom an industry would not have existed.
I could have continued Flash as it had appeared in the '40s.
Or I could have done a variation, something different.
I had to put out a magazine with a costumed character who was speedy.
And that's all I kept. Everything else, I changed.
Well, the original Flash was stupid.
The old Flash was a guy in a doughboy's helmet with two little wings on it.
And I think he had wings on his boots too. Very strange.
No offense to whoever designed it, it looked silly.
Observers without goggles must face away from the blast.
We are in the atomic age now.
You can't get away with saying guys got their powers through magic.
The original Golden Age Flash got his powers...
...by inhaling the fumes of hard water.
Hard water is ice.
It's not...
You know, kids were hipper than that in the 1950s.
We're in an era where science is gonna solve all our problems.
So this new Flash was Barry Allen, a police scientist...
...a forensic specialist who was working late in his lab one night...
...in front of a big bank of chemicals and suddenly, bam...
...lightning strikes the chemicals...
...and splashes him with these electrified substances.
And poor Barry gets up and he's dazed and he doesn't know what to do.
He realizes he's late for a date, so he starts running down the street after a cab.
And before he knows it, he overtakes the cab.
This is very strange. He goes to a diner.
And he orders some food and the waitress accidentally spills some stuff.
And he sees it falling in slow motion...
...to the point where he can grab the plates and food...
...and put everything back where it's meant to be.
So inspired by the comic-book adventures of the Golden Age Flash...
...he's inspired to don, really, a superhero suit...
...unlike anything we'd seen in comics before.
It's sleek, it's one piece, red and yellow with a lightning motif.
The response to Flash was gangbusters. They did one issue and it sold out.
The Flash is successful. We revived one of our Golden Age characters.
Hey, Julie. What else you got?
And the Silver Age of comics was on.
I liked the Green Lantern...
...but once again, I said I'm making a complete change.
To show how things are gonna be different...
...while the Golden Age Green Lantern wore his power ring on the left hand...
...I'm gonna put it on the right.
Green Lantern is reborn as Hal Jordan, ace test pilot.
A comic-book Chuck Yeager rocketing into the jet age.
With the ring of power conferred to him by a dying alien...
...he becomes a model space patrolman.
"In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil's might beware my power, Green Lantern's light."
I remember that so well, I still love to say it.
Under Julie Schwartz, dozens of characters are reborn...
...and given science-fiction origins.
And even more new heroes are created.
Here comes Metal Men, Adam Strange...
...Metamorpho, Teen Titans...
...and the Challengers of the Unknown.
And once again, the heroes band together to fight...
...but not as the Justice Society.
I hate the word "society." It sounds like a social club.
I'm gonna use a better word, "league."
There's baseball leagues, football leagues.
Youngsters identify with leagues. Societies, they know from nothing.
And when that came out, boom, boom, boom...
...it rocketed into space.
Julie revived the characters, created the Silver Age of comics.
His revival of the Justice League...
...very directly led to the formation of Marvel Comics.
Marvel Comics publisher Martin Goodman...
...and DC's Jack Liebowitz play golf together.
So Jack Liebowitz kept boasting to Martin Goodman:
"Hey, we have a big hit on our hands."
Martin came back from the golf game, talked to Stan Lee, his editor, and said:
"DC's got this really good-selling book called, uh, Justice something.
You gotta do something like that."
And Stan Lee, the nerve of that guy, puts out a magazine...
...called The Fantastic Four. It proved to be a big hit.
So in a sense, I not only saved DC Comics, I saved Marvel Comics too.
While Julie set about reinventing forgotten superheroes...
...his childhood friend takes editorial control of Superman.
Mort Weisinger has the reputation of being...
...perhaps the grumpiest editor in comic books.
One day, I said, "Look, you're really mean to people."
And he said, "Imagine you're me.
You get up in the morning, and you look at this face.
How would you feel?"
Mort was kind of a toad.
And I say this in the friendliest possible way...
...but he just wasn't attractive.
On the other hand, he was smart.
When he really took command of Superman in the late '50s...
...he created this strange world of cats and dogs and horses...
...that were actually humans that had been transformed.
He made it kind of like a big playground.
Weisinger also oversees the expansion of the Superman family.
And the introduction of Supergirl.
I actually had a copy of the first Supergirl.
I remember thinking, "Gotta be some trick in this story.
There won't really be a Supergirl. It'd be like an alien or..."
And then I read the comic. "Oh, my goodness. It's really Supergirl.
It's really, like, his cousin."
DC wants to bring the Superman magic to Batman.
These real crazy flights of fancy created all these amazing villains...
...which are now super creepy because they're so weird.
Bat-Hounds and Batwoman and Batgirl...
...and all these sort of spin-off things that worked well in the Superman universe...
...in the Batman universe, very quickly drove them down.
The books were about to be canceled in the 1960s.
At that point, sales were so anemic...
...that they were just gonna stop it.
Luckily, a TV producer was looking for something big and splashy...
...to put on TV screens, and Batman fit the bill.
The camp and self-aware take on the caped crusader...
...makes stars out of Adam West and Burt Ward.
I took it seriously as a kid.
I didn't know that that stuff was supposed to be satirical.
I mean, it seemed riveting and dramatic to me.
It was an overnight sensation.
Batmania swept the nation. It was enormous.
Batman was everywhere.
They started making all this stuff.
The licensing for the Batman TV show was unprecedented.
As the '60s draws to a close...
...both the quaintness of DC's heroes and the high camp of Batman...
...begin to feel out of touch in the midst of race riots and draft-card burnings.
DC Comics was still sort of stuck in the '50s.
Nobody really had personalities or opinions.
Everybody kind of liked each other. They were all hail-fellow-well-met.
Justice League was kind of the Kiwanis Club.
And Wonder Woman was their secretary.
Teenagers had pretty much abandoned comics...
...after the censorship battles of the mid '50s.
Marvel is bringing them back...
...with these much more sort of relevant, restive, challenging superheroes.
One company was doing things that the readers actually did want to see...
...and the other company was floundering.
It falls to a new generation to make DC Comics...
...in the slang of the time, hip in the Bronze Age.
The first generation of editors are largely fading out of the business.
Companies aren't sure what to do next. There's no Donenfeld on the floor anymore.
That creates a moment of opportunity.
In the late '60s, DC and Warner Bros...
...become a part of the same corporation.
Ironically, that newly corporate DC brings in a whole new wave...
...of anti-establishment writers and artists, like Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil.
Denny started as a reporter and I was, um, an asshole.
We both grew up at the time that we grew up...
...and we were very angry at society...
...but not angry in a way like we're picking irrational things to be angry at.
There's a lot of bad stuff going on.
This was a shirt-and-tie business back then.
My hair was all over the place and I wasn't wearing a suit or tie anymore, Lord knows.
I was not an authority-loving kind of guy.
Ha, ha, the ruination of the business was my generation.
We were happy if we were wearing socks that particular day.
Hippies. Guys whose hair was longer than their careers.
We'd work Friday night at the office till 1 in the morning.
Until one Friday, where we decided to play hide and seek.
Tackle hide and seek, because we were idiots.
At one point, Neal saw me and tackled me and we went through one of the cubicles.
Put a me-and-Neal-shaped hole in the wall.
- Now, we see we have radar. - Yeah.
What happens if the rockets start appearing?
The real clash of counterculture started not in the books, but in the offices.
I don't know what weird hippies were doing in the hallways...
...but they're doing something right. Long-haired freaks.
We're also the first generation that got into comics who wanted to be in comic books.
We're the first generation who grew up with the comics...
...who said, "This is what we want to do."
There was an artist named Neal Adams...
...and you had the writer, Denny O'Neil.
And what they started to do were stories that were much more naturalistic...
...and not "funny."
Denny and Neal seek out a platform...
...where they can express themselves.
Not only artistically, but politically.
Throughout the Silver Age, Green Lantern had been off fighting crime in outer space.
I thought of him as a cop, but the best cop who ever lived.
A really competent, decent man.
But one who thought his job was to carry out orders.
And in one issue, Denny and Neal bring him crashing down to earth.
And we needed somebody to articulate the non-establishment viewpoint.
And we had this rebel, Green Arrow...
...this arrow-slinging guy who didn't trust anybody over 30.
In fact, didn't probably trust anybody wearing a necktie.
Not all these characters were invented when there was thought going into...
...who they are behind the mask and powers.
Green Arrow was one of those characters.
As soon as they took him and pushed him in this direction...
...not only did it make sense, it was very unique.
It was something that was, I think, desperately needed in the DC Universe...
...and comics in general.
First six pages of that story are significantly important in comic books...
...in that they broke so many rules.
It got into black versus white. It got into integration.
It got into rich versus poor.
This man was emptying tenements of people who couldn't pay their rent.
And a young man was attacking him on the street.
Not really doing much to him, just shoving him.
Why? Didn't matter why to Green Lantern.
Green Lantern beat him up and sent him off to jail.
And then Green Arrow watched the neighborhood...
...throw garbage on Green Lantern and then explained to him why.
"See that old lady over there?
That young man that you just put in jail is her only source of income.
And when that fat pig downstairs throws everybody out of this building...
...they won't have a place to live...
...and he's gonna level it and turn it into a supermarket.
And that's what you did today."
Page six, an old black man turns to Green Lantern and he says:
"You've done lots of things for people on another planet out there with purple skins.
Have you ever done anything for people with black skins?"
"You're doing all that stuff for the extraterrestrials.
You're not dealing with problems right under your feet."
Not only Green Lantern...
...but every American you could scratch had not done anything for their brothers.
That was a time of change. Remember the '60s.
Big changes in America.
And that was right there in that comic book, bam, right in your face.
Green Lantern and Green Arrow embark on a quest across America...
...confronting real-world problems.
They discover racism, government corruption, labor strife...
...overpopulation and poverty.
It forced Green Lantern and, through him, the readers...
...to look at America as it really was at that time.
Denny and Neal grow the Green Lantern family...
...to include John Stewart...
...DC's first African American superhero without the word "black" in his name.
We practically destroyed the Comics Code.
We attacked Nixon and Agnew in our comic-book pages.
Governor of Florida wrote a letter to DC Comics.
Said they weren't gonna distribute DC Comics in Florida...
...if we do one more thing like that.
Under the Comics Code Authority...
...one of the biggest taboos is depiction of drug use.
I drew a cover.
Speedy, Green Arrow's ward, was in the foreground...
...with bags under his eyes and the fixings for a heroine injection.
And in the background is Green Arrow looking on in shock...
...and Green Lantern turning to him and saying:
"So you're such a big deal. How come your ward is a drug addict?"
Cover.
Took it in to DC, gave it to Julie Schwartz and I said, "This should be our next issue."
And Julie said, "Gah!"
We undid 15, 20 years of lousy Comics Code.
DC became the company that brought new artists in.
So you got a tremendous amount of experimenting.
You got a new generation of comic-book artists.
These are all guys who saw...
...that comics didn't have to made by stodgy, old white guys.
You know, they should be a reflection of the times.
I read everything, but had this special place in my heart...
...for the DC horror comic line.
The first time I remember falling in love with a writer, it was Len Wein.
I just thought Swamp Thing was beautifully written.
It was special and weird and magical and odd.
And I was in love. And these were my comics.
As DC's characters change, Wonder Woman, too, sits for a makeover.
Denny O'Neil spearheads her reinvention.
She loses her star-spangled costume and her powers...
...and trains as a martial artist under the tutelage of her mentor, I-Ching.
An ordinary woman, but possessed of extraordinary combative powers.
And we put her in ordinary adventures and give her boyfriends.
Boy, did I screw that up.
My thinking, such as it was, was this:
She is a superbeing beholden to a male god.
Let us make her somebody who achieves on her own.
What I did, in effect, was take the feminist icon and depower her, dial her way down.
And then to compound the sin, give her a mentor who is a male.
And then to compound that sin...
...name the male after one of the classics of Chinese literature.
Whew.
Leading feminist Gloria Steinem decries this new Wonder Woman...
...as a mere mortal who walks around in boutique clothes...
...and takes the advice of a male mastermind.
James Bond made boring and without the sexual liberties.
Thank you, Gloria Steinem, for not mentioning my name in that article.
I really dropped that one. I thought I was on the side of feminism.
Sorry.
Steinem leads the campaign...
...to bring back the strong female role model she grew up idolizing...
...and in 1972, puts a costumed Wonder Woman...
...on the very first cover of Ms. Magazine.
Now a symbol of a burgeoning women's lib movement...
...Wonder Woman, the superhero, returns.
And then Lynda Carter comes along. They found their perfect Wonder Woman.
I don't know that I've ever seen a better translation...
...from comic-book page to real life...
...as seen in Wonder Woman to Lynda Carter.
It fit perfectly for the time period and was a role model for teenage girls.
Excuse me, that's very rude.
- Get out of here, broad. - It's also dangerous.
A girl can be a powerful character that throws guys around.
They're not gonna stop her. You can take charge of yourself.
And Super Friends was the same thing for little kids.
Gathered together from the cosmic reaches of the universe...
...here in this great Hall of Justice...
...are the most powerful forces of good ever assembled.
Super Friends cartoons are notable because they made...
...Aquaman a household name.
Aquaman!
That's the stuff I was growing up on.
I couldn't wait to get to my TV every Saturday morning.
It wasn't quite the Justice League I knew.
Wonder Twin powers, activate!
Form of a seagull.
Shape of an ice gondola.
Come on, Gleek. Let's go.
But it was still cool to see them on my TV screen.
It did last a long, long time...
...because those guys, even though they're fictional characters, become your heroes.
It hits everybody when they're young.
You get older, you wanna understand why they do what they do.
And you wanna know more about the depth of their mythology.
While the television shows awoke the interest of a new generation...
...DC's defining adaptation of the '70s would appeal as much to adults...
...as to their children.
Nobody had thought of a superhero movie as a potential blockbuster...
...but producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind decided to take a chance.
I believed it could be very good as a major film...
...if it would be done right.
With Richard Donner directing...
...the only hole left is the Man of Steel himself.
I thought it should be an unknown at the beginning.
Now, they all started working on me...
...and the commercial side said we need a star.
There's a moment where you weaken and I said, "Right."
So we started looking for stars.
And thank God, Redford turned it down.
Dozens of hopefuls were screen-tested.
Even Salkind's first wife's dentist.
I won't have to fly anywhere after you tell me where the controls are.
Wouldn't you know it? Story of my life.
The single most important interview since...
But the role goes to a 25-year-old Juilliard graduate...
...Christopher Reeve.
Good evening, Miss Lane.
Careful, you'll...
Heh. Okay, so you won't.
Thank you for finding the time for this interview.
There must be many questions about me the world would like the answers to.
What sets Superman apart is that he has the wisdom to use his power for good.
He's got the kind of maturity, or innocence, really...
...to look at the world very, very simply.
That's what makes him different. When he says:
I'm here to fight for truth, justice and the American way.
Everybody goes, "Heh, ahem," you know? But he's not kidding.
It was just so perfectly cast, Christopher Reeve as Superman.
Nobody else can touch the hem of that cape.
January 26th, 1979, was the most important day in my life.
The Movie.
And I saw it twice in that one day, and I walked out...
...and I knew that no matter what the rest of my life was gonna be...
...it had to involve Superman.
I remember literally running out in the parking lot afterwards...
...with my hands in front of me, pretending I was flying.
My favorite scene in the movie was the helicopter save.
Superman full-blown for the first time on your screen.
What the hell is that?
- Aah! - Easy, miss. I've got you.
You...? You've got me?
- Who's got you? - Heh.
He's just sort of like, "Oh, good one." It just looked so understated.
You're focused on her. You don't see that.
That, to me, is Superman. That's that sort of, "He's just one of us."
Everyone, stand back. Stand back. Nothing to get worried about.
Here is a character in a world where I didn't feel I was being paid attention to...
...where I didn't feel like I mattered...
...here's somebody who cares about everybody.
Whether you're rich or poor or black or white, Superman cares about everybody.
A new wave of Supermania hits in the wake of the film's success.
A wave that rolls into three sequels...
- Unh! - Aah!
- Now watch the trees. - Whoa!
- A challenge from Muhammad Ali...
...and a merchandizing bonanza.
And it really cemented this idea that these characters are timeless.
That this is not your father's Superman.
This is a Superman for a modern era.
Two years before the Superman film swept across America...
...behind the scenes, DC had hired its very own Wonder Woman.
Jenette Kahn became the company's first female publisher.
At 28 years old, the youngest one as well.
Jenette wasn't plucked from the ranks of comic books.
She was an erudite, experienced person in the world...
...and not a neighborhood guy.
She wasn't married to any concepts in comics...
...because she came from the outside.
She was very much responsible for royalties, which changed all of our lives.
And really came into the business intending to make changes.
Jenette let DC be DC.
One of the first things she did was change the name of the company...
...from National Periodical Publications to DC Comics.
One of the first times I met her, she talked about the literary potential of comics.
How you could tell any kind of story and she'd love to be able to do that.
There was this revolution really happening, and at DC in particular...
...they wanted to foster that new thinking and that modern sensibility.
DC seeks out new audiences and again rebuilds their iconic characters...
...as reflections of the time in the Modern Age.
I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear...
...that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States.
In the '80s, there was a whole new conservative grip to the nation.
Some of the younger comic-book creators were not as keen on that.
Chief among them, Frank Miller.
One of seven children from a blue-collar family...
...Miller moved to New York City's Hell's Kitchen as a teenager...
...and established himself as a striking new voice in comics.
He's not afraid.
And you gotta kind of be punk.
You just gotta be punk once in a while.
Miller sets out to re-envision Batman in the age of new conservatism...
...in The Dark Knight Returns.
There's something very antiquated about the notion.
The effort of Dark Knight was to revive it. It wasn't to bury the idea.
It wasn't to kick it around the block a few times or do an autopsy.
It was to make the idea work in a modern context.
In The Dark Knight Returns, after Batman's retirement...
...the world crumbles into a police state.
And now, as a man in his 50s...
...Bruce Wayne is moved to don the cape and cowl once again.
He's rolling over Gotham like a tank. And if you're in his way, God help you.
Most of the basic assumptions of comics, up until the past few years...
...everything happened in a benevolent world.
You can always trust the cops, can always trust elected officials...
...can always trust your parents.
It's unfortunate that for so many years...
...the basic idea of superheroes was made impossible...
...by putting it in a world that didn't need any.
Superman is painted as Ronald Reagan's right-hand man...
...the force of law and order that must contain the vigilante Batman.
The whole climax of the book ends up being...
...Superman and Batman trading blows...
...as Batman rains upon him with kryptonite gloves.
And really, in that moment, you're seeing the fire of liberalism...
...pound the crap out of the staid, conservative era of the 1980s.
The first press run of The Dark Knight Returns...
...sells out each and every copy.
We haven't done a second printing of a comic book for possibly 50 years.
Book ultimately went through four printings.
Really was something everyone was looking at.
Wow, wow, wow.
And I remember getting to the end of the third installment.
Like, "Oh, my God, this is just brilliant."
When it came out, it was a very startling new approach to Batman.
It was getting written up in the music-industry press.
But it also found a whole new audience.
So I did a Plastic Man book years ago, and it was for kids.
And this was when I found out that the superhero audience is no longer kids.
- I want you to tell all your friends about me. - What are you?
I'm Batman.
The success of The Dark Knight Returns...
...gives rise three years later...
...to Batman, directed by Tim Burton.
Tim Burton's first Batman movie explodes the audience for comics.
The size of the business about doubles in that one year.
And to many, it's irrelevant what this movie is about.
They will tell you this movie is a happening unto itself.
The film spawns three sequels.
Meow.
And a Fleischer-inspired animated series.
The industry was really starting to see the first sort of quake.
You know, the first trembles of, "Hey, this can be something else."
My name's Alan Moore. I write comics.
Alan Moore grew up in poor working-class Northampton.
An underground comic-book artist, Moore was also a vegetarian...
...practicing magician and self-proclaimed anarchist.
The most important thing that you have to understand about Alan Moore...
...is that he's a genius.
I do like to try and put my finger upon the exact nerve, if possible...
...of what really scares people.
Sort of, it's sadism. I'm getting paid for it.
Wherever he had taken his talents, in whatever medium...
...he would have changed the game.
I needed a writer for Swamp Thing, I thought of Alan.
I liked Alan's work and I called him up.
"Len Wein. I'd like to talk to you about working for me."
"Who is this really?"
"It's Len Wein."
"Who is it?"
"Len Wein."
"Goodbye."
He hung up on me.
I thought one of my friends was playing a joke...
...putting on a funny American accent.
But, no, it was the real Len Wein.
And he said, "Would you like to write Swamp Thing?"
And, you know, when I'd picked myself up off the floor, I said yes.
"I'd love to, but do I have to do exactly what you did?" I said, "I hope not."
The Swamp Thing had always been a man transformed into a monster.
Moore reverses it.
Creates, in his words, "a plant with delusions of grandeur...
...a monster who thinks it's a man."
I'd given up on comics and I picked up a Swamp Thing.
I loved the intelligence. I loved the passion.
And Alan had brought me back.
The next big project of Alan's, of course, after that was Watchmen...
...which was just this absolute and utter game-changer.
Watchmen actually examined the implications of the superhero.
If these absurd characters were real, just what they'd do to the world.
If there had been a Superman ever, the world would be unrecognizable.
I don't want everybody to agree with me. I want people to think.
Seems anything these days which is slightly to the left of Genghis Khan...
...is immediately labeled subversive.
If in this current time...
...tolerance and sensitivity of any kind are labeled "loony left" or "subversive"...
...then I would be quite proud to be considered a subversive.
The whole concept of Watchmen is...
...very much a reaction to Thatcher's England.
That very Orwellian sense of government power...
...and sense of censorship and sense of personal freedoms being curtailed.
What frightens people these days...
...is not the idea of a werewolf jumping out at them.
It's the idea of a nuclear war coursing through our society at the moment.
And I think that to really frighten people...
...you have to somehow ground the horror in their own experience...
...things that they're frightened of.
Watchmen just sort of stretched the limits of what we thought a comic book was...
...and found a way to use superheroes or genre conventions...
...as a metaphor for talking about the Cold War.
It was like, wow, these things can be about something.
Superhero stories can actually be about something.
I remember being a teenager reading those at the time.
There was something you could show your college professor or your doubting uncle.
And he'd say, "Wow, you know, this is a literary work."
Watchmen was the culmination of something...
...that had been happening for years which people were calling the British Invasion.
It was a bunch of English writers and artists...
...suddenly being brought in, mainly by DC.
Editor Karen Berger is tasked...
...with finding more up-and-coming U.K. Artists and writers.
For me, being a woman coming from outside of comics...
...what they were doing was the stuff that interested me.
What they wanted to do, to change things.
They wanted to mature comics. They wanted to be provocative.
We had a whole generation of people who'd grown up reading this...
...had been obsessed by it, always imagined doing it.
And to finally get this chance was just unbelievable.
People lived up to the sense that we've got something to prove.
I'd really wanted to write comics. That's what I wanted to do.
An ambition I gave up...
...after an unsatisfactory meeting with a careers counselor.
I explained that I wanted to write American comics.
He sat there and stared at me. After a while, he said:
"Ever thought about accountancy?"
For years, I had to explain to people that comics was a medium and not a genre.
It is an empty bottle...
...and you can put anything you like in that bottle.
In Neil Gaiman's reinvention of The Sandman...
...an amateur sorcerer seeking everlasting life sets out to trap Death.
And mistakenly snares her brother, Dream, the Sandman, instead.
After seven decades of captivity, Dream is released and takes his revenge.
No one cared about the concept of the Sandman...
...until Neil Gaiman reinvented it.
Sandman really was a comic that I was writing to please myself.
I think there are lots of other people who like the same kind of stuff that I like.
The mythos Neil Gaiman creates in Sandman...
...soon outstrips sales of DC's flagship character, Superman.
And Sandman brings with it a whole new audience.
Every 14-year-old goth girl in the world is reading Sandman.
And the giant influx of new readers we have is unbelievable.
That comic became one of the most literate, most well-drawn...
...most well-written comics that we've ever done.
DC's realized it needs to create an imprint for that stuff.
It has a unique and distinct voice of its own.
There was that fire. There was that creative sensibility.
We were doing this whole bunch of cool, edgy, irreverent, literate comics.
It was V for Vendetta. It was Sandman. It was Animal Man. It was Hellblazer.
It was Shade the Changing Man.
It was Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol, Books of Magic.
They said, "What would you like to do?
Would you like an imprint or to do something on your own?
You know, separate it from the rest of, you know, the superhero stuff."
I'm like, "Are you crazy? Of course I'd love that."
That's pretty much how Vertigo started.
Under editor Karen Berger...
...Vertigo becomes the imprint for mature audiences...
...grabbing the attention of the mainstream press...
...inventing and reinventing genres...
...and consistently pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a comic.
If we're talking about making comics relevant...
...and treating this as a real literary form...
...you gotta let people, you know, create their own work and have a stake in it.
In 1993, minority creators come together to form Milestone...
...with Dwayne McDuffie as editor-in-chief.
Blacks in comics for many, many, many years were drawn as subhuman.
The Spirit, which is a relatively realistically drawn comic.
Ebony White could have been a gremlin.
I'm not sure a modern reader would understand that he was human.
You just got into the habit of looking past that so you could have entertainment.
The few black characters who had their own books...
...were mostly the children of blaxploitation movie fad.
As much like Shaft as they could get away with.
I just never had met anyone...
...who was anything like the black characters who existed in comics.
DC was very experimental, very open to new voices and new ideas...
...which was really the biggest part of Milestone.
Milestone initially launches four titles...
...that far outsell founders' expectations.
And Static is adapted into a popular animated series.
The industry changed.
It used to be dominated by white men. That's changed. That's good.
We're attracting a broader audience and I think the stories are more interesting.
A South Korean immigrant...
...Jim Lee turned away from pre-med studies...
...to pursue his love of comics.
He became a massively popular artist and in 1992, founds WildStorm.
We really did it because we wanted to change things...
...and control the stuff that we were doing.
WildStorm goes on to merge with DC...
...and the partnership continues to produce popular and enduring titles.
While Vertigo, Milestone and WildStorm are all reaching new audiences...
...Superman has again fallen out of touch with his.
A decade past the success of the films, sales are lagging.
Started having what we called Super Summits.
Everybody would get together, plan a year's worth of stories.
We had plotted out a continuity that involved Superman getting married.
Jenette Kahn managed to interest Hollywood...
...in doing a Lois & Clark television show.
And we said, "Ooh, gee, maybe we shouldn't get them married just yet.
Maybe they get married on the show and we do the comic at the same time."
Went to the room of writers and artists...
...told them we weren't gonna do the story they'd planned.
A whole year's worth of continuity that we just plotted is, whoosh, out the window.
Jerry said, as he always did, "Let's just kill him."
Up to this point, we'd say, "Ha-ha-ha, yeah, Jerry, that's right."
This time, we said, "You know..."
We thought that the world wasn't really as appreciative of Superman...
...as they ought to be.
And we thought, well, let them see what a world without Superman might be like.
A comic fan who works for the Miami Herald decides to write about it...
...and the whole world stops and says, "This is important."
Of course he's coming back. Does anyone believe they're killing Superman?
You know? And people did.
Superman meets his match in Doomsday...
...an indestructible monster from the depths of the earth.
With every issue, the art grows with Superman's peril.
From four panels to three to two until the death issue itself...
...all full-page panels of the slugfest that kills the Man of Steel.
And then we get to do the world without Superman.
How his death affects all of his friends and all the city and the world.
Superman's funeral cortege moves through Metropolis...
...and affects people as it passes.
People try to become...
In a way, embody Superman as they see him.
Every time I talk about it, I burst into tears.
And then his parents... I actually love the scene...
...where his parents are burying his little kid stuff in the grave...
...because that's all they've got to bury. Superman belongs to the world.
And they only have little things to bury.
And they create a grave for him.
They bury these little things kind of symbolically.
I think that people need an ideal...
...to look at and to try to become.
And I think that for me, maybe Superman is partly that kind of ideal.
Across the country, fans stage memorials for the Man of Steel.
And the "Death of Superman" issue becomes the bestselling comic in history.
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a '79 Ford.
But it's carrying some pretty important cargo.
Superman Issue 75, the issue in which the Man of Steel meets his maker.
We packaged it with arm bands and we ran out of silk to make the arm bands.
There were so many comics ordered that it was ridiculous.
The Superman team enjoys their success...
...and keeps Superman out of the books for months...
...until his inevitable resurrection, another bestseller.
But Superman is a heartfelt exception to the cynical comics of the time.
There is always an unfortunate backwash from the big success.
A tremendous amount of imitation.
Almost every superhero seemed to have to have some of that gritty...
...psychological darkness of Watchmen and Dark Knight.
They got darker and darker and forgot the core...
...of what most of these superhero comics are...
...which is about triumphing over adversity.
You could tell the villains from the heroes by whose logo was on the cover.
I mean, their behavior was evil, not morally ambiguous.
These guys were just flat-out, "Oh, I'm gonna kill this guy. He's a guard."
Dismayed by what they saw as a lack of meaning...
...in contemporary comic books...
...writer Mark Waid and artist Alex Ross come together...
...to challenge the decade's murky tone in Kingdom Come.
Alex and I both had this unbridled love for these characters.
And we both were coming off of a reaction to comics of the late '80s and early '90s...
...which was a dark era.
Our audience is looking at a world...
...where white picket fences sometimes hide some really creepy secrets.
That sort of wholesome America of the 1950s I associate with Superman.
I wanted to see if we couldn't pull him into the America of the 21st century.
It was a rebuke to '90s superheroes.
The old superheroes had gotten off the job...
...and let these new young guys who didn't have any morals take over...
...and everything went to hell. Superman has to come back and say:
"Hey, whoa, wait. This isn't how we do things."
Kingdom Come was very much a reaction to a world in which superheroes...
...had just become things that fight other things. They don't fight for anything.
Kingdom Come is the first expression of a new dissatisfaction...
...with meaningless, cynical storytelling.
A call to action that grows more profound with the events of September 11th, 2001.
You cannot live or work in New York...
...without being affected by the turn of events.
Even more so than most places in the country.
You saw people so much more guarded...
...so much more afraid than they ever were before.
That same moment, they were never more inspired...
...by the people who risked their lives.
These were normal average people, and there's story after story, tale after tale.
People continued to persevere and do their job...
...even though they knew death was upon them.
It makes it very hard to tell fictional stories...
...when you have real heroes out there doing that.
New York and Gotham City are the same.
And I do subscribe to this notion that the heroes, they're ciphers for us.
And they're ways for us to be able to speak about the world.
I think people do tend to see heroic projections of good as nostalgic or corny.
And I think there are some people, maybe people who have children...
...who wanna be able to provide stories.
Or if you think of it in a deeper sense, like ideas of good.
Post 9/11, people wanted heroes to look up to instead of heroes that were...
You know, that were not really heroes at all.
For me, I think that's probably why superheroes continue to climb up.
Because we do need heroes. We need aspirational, inspirational heroes.
That's why we like comic books. That's why we love comic books.
Because we think maybe if the conditions present themselves...
...we will be the hero of the moment.
Could the men that started DC Comics have guessed...
...what the company they began 75 years ago would one day become?
My favorite character is Superman.
He's someone that you aspire to be...
...becoming better than what you are right now.
Would it be unrecognizable to them?
Did they have a notion from the start...
...that the voices and visions of each generation of new writers and artists...
...might forever invent the company anew?
One of the wonderful things about working in comics...
...is you get to build on people and people build on you.
Have all that under you and then add to it and say, "I'm gonna make my mark here.
I'm going to tell the story that hasn't been told about this character."
Yeah, sometimes they just need the right take or they need the love...
Like somebody who really understands it or sees something new in it.
And it's not just entertaining people.
It's giving them something to think about and some values...
...and maybe something to live towards.
I don't really even wanna think about a world without DC.
I love superheroes because they're just like everything you wanna do in your life.
You like to help people, they help people. Live it through them.
Being 75 years is a good thing. Shows you longevity and staying power.
Seventy-five years, you don't wanna be your grandfather's superhero either.
The spirit of innovation that was there at the company's creation...
...is still its guiding force.
Shows like Smallville, the longest-running live-action superhero series in TV history...
With everything I've learned, apparently I'm just getting started.
Games like "Arkham Asylum" and the "DC Universe Online"...
...box-office smashes like Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins...
...and The Dark Knight...
...have given today's audiences distinctly modern interpretations...
...of classic DC characters.
A little fight in you. I like that.
Then you're gonna love me.
What began in two dimensions on pulp paper...
...has now become the basis for storytelling across genres and media...
...animated features and series, live-action television, and film.
- You're the hero. - Really don't like talking about it.
Are you ready to cooperate?
No.
Comics are a storytelling form that you can tell any kind of story in.
We provided this great space...
...for creative talent to really have a place to tell their stories.
It doesn't take a genius to see the world has problems.
We can save this world.
You have a lot of people that are very respected in the world of film...
...coming and writing comics, and vice versa.
They've made it a more sophisticated form of telling stories...
...and they've made it a more respected form of telling stories.
- In the sky. - It's a bird.
- A plane. - No, look, it's...
You wanted to see me?
You gotta make these characters into real people that you care about.
And if you can do that, then somebody's dangling off the side of a building...
...it really does upset you.
I really feel like I grew up with these people around me.
So when I talk about them, I say, "I really like Clark."
Or, "I really like when Bruce did this," or, "when Tim did this."
The average person eavesdropping could think I'm talking about friends or family.
The characters are so flexible, you can't break them.
They worked in every era because creators have always found a way...
...to talk about what's interesting to them now...
...what's happening in the culture now.
Superheroes are these archetypes that live within us.
And then somebody figures out a way to present them to us...
...in a way that is compatible with the realities that we live in.
They're still around after all these decades because they've been allowed to evolve.
Superman has become a household name.
Batman is recognized around the world.
In the '30s and '40s, you know, newsstands were choked...
...with comic publishers and characters that are forgotten today.
DC managed to guide those characters into the future.
What's exciting to me is that five, 10 years ago...
...there were kids reading comics I wrote that are about to break into the business.
And I can't wait to see what they wanna bring to the table...
...that is something that I could never envision.
That's what I wanna see. That's the future of DC Comics.
The size and scope of DC today...
...might well be far beyond the wildest dreams...
...of the ambitious men who began it.
But the characters continue to be built as they always have...
...by drawing on history and culture and personal experience...
...to convey the deepest hopes of the new generation...
...in whatever form the comics may take.
I have no idea how much longer books have for this world.
But I do know people like Siegel and Shuster...
...people like Bob Kane and Bill Finger...
...Julie Schwartz, bless his soul, then Alan Moore...
...these people came up with characters and stories...
...that are gonna be around forever.
Whether you're reading it on a small thing...
...that looks like a diamond that you tap with your finger...
...and it beams the entire content straight into your retina...
...or whether you're reading it on something you can fold up...
...and put in your pocket afterwards...
...and you wanna pile up out in your tree house, I don't know.
But I can tell you that a hundred years from now...
...there will be kids who wanna find out what's happening with Superman.
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