DC Comics

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DC Comics is one of the largest American companies in comic book and related media publishing. Today a subsidiary of Time Warner, DC is responsible for such famous characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and their teammates in the Justice League. For decades, DC Comics has been one of the two largest American comic book companies (the other being Marvel Comics). The initials "DC" are an abbreviation for Detective Comics, after one of the company's flagship titles.

Located in New York City for many years at 575 Lexington Avenue, DC Comics moved to 75 Rockefeller Plaza (which is still Time Warner corporate headquarters) and then to 666 Fifth Avenue. Relocating at 1325 Avenue of the Americas in 1992, DC took over several floors when it moved to 1700 Broadway in the mid-1990s, and Mad abandoned its 485 Madison Avenue address at that time, relocating under the DC umbrella at 1700 Broadway.

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History

The corporation was originally three companies: National Allied Publications (founded by Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson in 1934 to publish the first American comic book with solely original material rather than comic strip reprints); Detective Comics (founded in 1937 by Nicholson, Harry Donenfeld and Jack S. Liebowitz); and All-American Publications. The first two companies merged in the 1930s to become National Comics (later National Periodical Publications) and the third shared offices until it was bought by the merged company in 1945. At this time "DC" was simply an informal logo regularly used on the cover; the name National Periodical Publications remained the company's official name into the 1970s.

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The Golden Age

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Wheeler-Nicholson's company pioneered the American comic book, publishing the first such periodical consisting solely of original material rather than reprints of newspaper comic strips, starting with Fun: The Big Comic Magazine #1 (Feb. 1935), called New Fun after the first issue. The evolving DC was also the first to feature superheroes, beginning with Action Comics #1 in 1938. During this period enthusiasts call the Golden Age of comic books, the company introduced such popular characters as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and the first superhero team, the Justice Society of America.

When the superhero genre faded in the late 1940s, the company focused on other genres, such as science fiction, Westerns, humor and romance. They largely avoided the crime and horror trends of the time, thus avoiding the backlash against crime and horror comics in the 1950s. A handful of the most popular superhero titles (most notably Action Comics and Detective Comics, the medium's two longest-running titles) continued publication.

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The Silver Age

In the mid-fifties, there came a renewed interest to explore superhero properties. Instead of creating new characters, editor Julius Schwartz decided to recreate popular older characters starting with the Flash. This heralded the beginning of what is commonly referred to as the Silver Age of comic books. The Flash's civilian identity, costume, and origin were all changed for a modern audience. The new treatment proved popular enough that it soon led to similar revamping of Green Lantern, and the introduction of a new series featuring a team-up of the company's popular characters, Justice League of America — a modern-day Justice Society.

In 1967, Carmine Infantino became the company's art director. Faced with declining sales, in part because of the growing popularity of Marvel Comics, he attempted to remedy the situation with an infusion of new titles and characters, and recruited major talents such as Steve Ditko and promising newcomers such as Neal Adams.

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In the late 1960s, many veteran creators petitioned DC management for health plans, pensions, and similar considerations. DC responded by firing most of the offending staff and replacing them with young people who had largely grown up with the Marvel influence in comics. Yet while the new employees strove for sophisticated storytelling and characters, they had little experience in the industry, and their work's relative lack of professionalism hampered their efforts. Some new talent, however, such as Dennis O'Neil, who worked on Green Lantern and Batman, became industry lights. Image:New Gods 1971 1.jpg

In addition, Jack Kirby defected from Marvel to create his most artistically ambitious creation, The Fourth World titles, in which Kirby attempted to create an original sophisticated sub imprint that could appeal to a loyal fan audience. However, conflicts with management who had little faith in the concept led to the venture's premature cancellation, although the characters and concepts would become integral to the DC Multiverse.

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Late 1970s and 1980s

The company was acquired by Warner Communications (now Time Warner) in 1976. During this time, DC attempted to compete with Marvel by dramatically increasing its output, a move the company called the "DC Explosion". This included series featuring new characters, such as Firestorm and Shade, the Changing Man, and several non-superhero titles. This proved unsuccessful in the short term, with many of these series being abruptly cancelled in what industry watchers dubbed "the DC Implosion". Image:Teentitans2.JPG

In the early 1980s, the new management of publisher Jenette Kahn, vice-president Paul Levitz, and managing editor Dick Giordano decided to address the problem of talent instability in their series. To that end — and following the example of Atlas/Seaboard Comics and such independent companies as Eclipse Comics — DC began to offer more concrete financial rewards to their talents, such as royalties. In addition, the company created the publishing concept of the limited series that allowed more flexible arrangements for storylines that could be successful without the pressure of immediately following them up on an indefinite basis.

These policy changes immediately paid off with the success of The New Teen Titans by writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Pérez. That superteam comic earned significant sales in part due to its creative quality and the stability of the talent, who kept with the title for years. In addition, the creative team took early advantage of the limited series option to create a spin off title, Tales of the New Teen Titans, to present the origins of their original characters without having to break the narrative flow of their main series or obliging them to double their work load with another ongoing title.

This successful revitalization of a minor title led the editorship to look at doing the same to their entire line comics. The result was the limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths, which gave the company an opportunity to dismiss some of the "baggage" of its history, and revise major characters such as Superman and Wonder Woman. Yet DC did not abandon their history completely. In 1989, they began publication of the DC Archive Editions, a series created to collect their early, rare issues into a permanent hardback format.

Meanwhile, British writer Alan Moore had re-energized the minor horror series Saga of the Swamp Thing, and his highly acclaimed work sparked a comic book equivalent of rock's British Invasion, in which numerous British talents, including Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, came to work for the company. The resulting influx of sophisticated horror and dark fantasy material led not only to DC abandoning the Comics Code for particular titles by those talents, but also to the later establishment in 1993 of the Vertigo imprint for mature readers.

Acclaimed limited series such as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller and Alan Moore's Watchmen, also drew attention to changes at DC. This new creative freedom and the attendant publicity allowed DC to seriously challenge the dominance of Marvel.

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1990s

The comics industry experienced a brief boom in the early 1990s, thanks to a combination of speculative purchasing of the books as collectibles and several storylines which gained attention from the mainstream media. DC's extended storylines in which Superman was killed and Batman was crippled, resulted in dramatically increased sales, but the increases were as temporary as the substitutes, and sales dropped off as industry sales went into a major slump.

DC's Piranha Press and other imprints in the 1990s were introduced to facilitate diversification and specialized marketing of its product line. They increased the use of nontraditional contractual arrangements, including creator-owned work and licensing material from other companies. They also increased publication of trade paperbacks, including both collections of serial comics and original graphic novels.

The Vertigo line was aimed at an older and more literary audience, largely free of the "kid stuff" stigma its main superhero line still held. DC entered into a publishing agreement with Milestone Media, which gave the company a line of comics featuring a more culturally and racially diverse range of superhero characters; although the Milestone line ceased publication, it yielded the popular animated series Static Shock. Paradox Press was established to publish material that would be considered "mainstream" in the book trade - including the large-format Big Book of... series, and crime fiction such as Road to Perdition - but paradoxically remained a niche in the comics industry. DC purchased Wildstorm Comics from Jim Lee and maintained it as a separate imprint with its own style and audience. Likewise they added the Wildstorm imprint America's Best Comics, created by Alan Moore, including the titles Tom Strong and Promethea.

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2000s

Comics sales stopped declining but remained weak in the early 2000s, as DC continued diversifying its publishing activities to reach new markets. In March 2003 DC Comics acquired publishing and merchandising rights to the long-running fantasy series Elfquest, which had previously been self-published by its creators Wendy and Richard Pini under the Warp Graphics banner. In 2004 it established the CMX line to reprint translated manga volumes (an already-booming market at the time), and temporarily acquired the North American publishing rights to graphic novels from European publishers 2000 AD and Humanoids. It also rebranded its titles for younger children with the mascot Johnny DC.

Starting in 2004, DC's began laying groundwork for a "sequel" to Crisis on Infinite Earths, promising substantial changes to the DCU to come out of it. In 2005 they published several limited series establishing increasing conflicts between the heroes of the DCU, which are expected to come to a climax in the limited series Infinite Crisis. At the conclusion of that series in 2006, all of DC's ongoing series will skip to "one year later", showing the medium-term consequences of that crisis and continuing from there.

In 2005 DC Comics launched an "All-Star" line, featuring some of DC's most famous characters, written and illustrated by popular creators. These series were intended to appeal to more casual readers, featuring familiar versions of the characters without tight continuity with the main line of books. All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder was launched in July 2005, with All-Star Superman beginning in November 2005 and All-Star Wonder Woman soon to follow.

2006 has proved early to be an interesting year in DC history, with their little-known affiliate CMX picking up the popular webcomic Megatokyo's published form. Megatokyo had previously publised volumes 1-3 of their print version with independent competitor Dark Horse Comics.

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Logo history

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DC's first logo appeared on the March 1940 issues of their titles. The letters "DC" stood for Detective Comics, the name the company used at the time. The logo was small and did not have a background. It simply said, "A DC Publication".

The November 1941 DC titles introduced an updated DC logo. This version was almost twice the size of the first one, and also was the first version with a white background. The name of Superman was added to "A DC Publication", effectively acknowledging both Superman (the company's flagship character) and Batman (star of Detective Comics). This logo was also the first version to occupy the top left corner of the cover, where the logo has usually resided ever since.

In November 1949, the logo was modified, incorporating the company's current name (National Comics Publications) into the logo. This logo would also serve as the round body of Johnny DC, DC's mascot in the 1960s.

In October 1970, the circular logo was briefly retired in favor of a simple "DC" in a rectangle with the name of the title, or the star of the book (i.e. many issues of Action Comics said "DC Superman"). An image of the lead character either appeared above or below the rectangle. For books that did not have a single star, such as House of Mystery or Justice League of America, the title and "DC" appeared in a stylized logo, such as a bat for House of Mystery. This use of characters as logos helped to establish the likenesses as trademarks, and was similar to Marvel's contemporaneous use of characters as part of their cover branding.

DC's "100 Page Super-Spectacular" titles and later 100-page and "Giant" issues published from 1972 to 1974 featured a logo that was exclusive to these editions, the letters "DC" in a simple sans serif typeface, in a circle. (A variant had the letters in a square.)

The July 1972 DC titles featured a new circular logo. The letters "DC" were rendered in a block-like typeface that would remain through later logo revisions until 2005. The title of the book usually appeared inside the circle, either above or below the letters.

In December 1973, the logo was modified, adding the words "The Line of DC Super-Stars" and the star motif that would continue in later logos. This logo was placed in the top center of the cover from August 1975 to October 1976.

When Jenette Kahn became DC's publisher in late 1976, she commissioned graphic designer Milton Glaser to design a new logo. Popularly referred to as the "DC bullet", the logo first appeared on the February 1977 DC titles. Although it varied in size and color and was at times cropped by the edges of the cover, or briefly rotated 45 degrees, it remained essentially unchanged for nearly three decades.

On May 8, 2005, a new logo was unveiled, debuting on DC titles starting in June 2005 with DC Special: The Return of Donna Troy #1 and the rest of the titles the following week. In addition to comics, it was designed for DC properties in other media, such as Batman Begins, Smallville, Justice League Unlimited, collectibles, and other merchandise. The logo, which some have dubbed the "DC spin", was designed by Josh Beatman of Brainchild Studios.

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Noteworthy creators

In roughly chronological order

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Imprints

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See also

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References

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External links

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