DC Becomes the Industry’s Eight-Hundred-Pound Gorilla

“All of a sudden it hits me—I conceive of a character like Samson, Hercules, and all the strong men I ever heard of rolled into one. Only more so.”

—Jerry Siegel, cocreator of Superman

Walking into DC’s offices in 1960, visitors would have been forgiven for thinking they’d mistakenly turned up at an insurance company.

The spacious digs on the tenth floor of New York’s Grolier Building at 575 Lexington Avenue exuded a particular blandness, as though someone forgot, “Hey, we’re doing superheroes here.” They were clean and comfortable—the building with its gold anodized aluminum facade had just been constructed—but did not accrue major points in the personality department. A row of offices lined one wall, surrounding a middle production area. Flat file cabinets holding the original art pages were scattered about.

“They could have been any kind of office,” recalled Steve Mitchell, who toured DC as a teenager and would go on to work in the production department. “Very few reminders that comics were published there were in evidence. Sure, each editor had a corkboard with their latest covers, but otherwise not much else. If you’ve watched the fourth season of the TV show Mad Men, the DC offices had similar frosted glass walls seated in metal frames.”

“It was a very traditional company,” says Mike Friedrich, a fan-turned-pro who began writing for DC in the late sixties. “They kind of aped corporate culture.”

One of the nods to that conventional culture was that everyone wore a suit and tie—absolutely everyone. The kids who were enjoying the fun, colorful books about space explorers and masked heroes probably had no inkling they were produced by men dressed for a job interview at IBM.

“Even the people in the production department were wearing ties when they were cutting up balloons and whiting letters out and all the stuff they did,” Friedrich says. The janitor probably shopped at Brooks Brothers.

Jim Shooter, a Pittsburgh boy wonder who began writing stories for the company in 1965 when he was just thirteen, visited 575 Lexington in 1966 to discuss business. His editor insisted on meeting the young scribe at a nearby hotel first to make certain Shooter was properly dressed and wouldn’t “embarrass” anyone.

When Shooter was allowed inside, what he found was a stifling environment populated by “dignified” people tiptoeing around, speaking in “solemn voices” as though they were discussing mutual funds or something.

And what of the men being strangled by this neckwear on a daily basis? DC’s editors were hardly the scruffy, art-school dropouts one might expect in a business whose foundation was ink and Bristol board. Instead, they were middle-aged careerist types whom one might mistake on the subway for a bank branch manager. They had wives and houses and mortgages and belonged to professional organizations. These were serious men, respectable men whose passing would later be noted by the New York Times.

“The editors had this great little gentleman’s club,” the late artist-editor Joe Orlando, who joined DC in 1968, said in 1998. “Every day a two-hour lunch. They wore leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets, sucked on empty pipes, and debated the liberal issues of that day.”

They lorded over their fiefdoms from on high, each controlling a stable of titles—sometimes for decades. One freelancer who worked for DC in the sixties recalled that he was required to buy his editor a Christmas present, not the other way around.

Arguably the most powerful of the bunch at the time was Mort Weisinger, who was in charge of DC’s best-selling Superman family of books, which also included Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen.

Weisinger had been born in the Bronx in 1915 and had gotten into publishing through sci-fi fandom. He joined DC in 1941 and would ultimately stay for nearly thirty more years. He was steady. He was Yale educated and intelligent. He was also a world-class jerk.

The stories of his abuse number in the dozens if not hundreds. If you ever met him, you probably have one worth telling. Shooter, who wrote for Weisinger in the sixties, says the editor treated him like “dirt” and hurled slurs at him, such as “retard.” One boy who took the DC office tour claimed he rode the elevator down with the editor, and Weisinger proceeded to jokingly tell him about an exciting upcoming story in the Lois Lane title. Lane, in yet another desperate attempt to figure out if Superman and Clark Kent were one and the same, concocts a crazy scheme to feel Superman’s balls to see if they match Kent’s.

A telling—almost certainly apocryphal—story involves Weisinger’s funeral in 1978. As is the tradition at Jewish farewells, the attendees were invited to stand and speak about the good qualities of the deceased. The offer was greeted with silence. Finally someone in the back of the room stood and said, “His brother was worse.”

Despite his foul temperament, Weisinger was able to consistently moonlight for prestigious publications outside the comics industry, and he penned a trashy beach novel called The Contest. He liked to brag that he had received $125,000 for the movie rights alone, and the man never seemed to be hurting for money. He drove a huge white Cadillac, and his old mansion in Great Neck, the same ritzy New York City suburb that was once home to F. Scott Fitzgerald, is now worth $3.2 million.

Weisinger’s childhood friend, Julius Schwartz, also served as a longtime DC editor and in 1960 ran a slate of titles that included Westerns and sci-fis. As teenagers Schwartz and Weisinger had met at a sci-fi group called the Scienceers, and the duo later published a sci-fi fanzine. As adults they opened the first literary agency specializing in science fiction and fantasy, repping Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, and Leigh Brackett (cowriter of The Empire Strikes Back), among other genre names.

Schwartz, known affectionately as “Uncle Julie,” could be grouchy and demanding. He was hands-on and often sat with writers, working out stories. In his forty-two years at DC he played a part in numerous significant moments and ultimately became one of the most important people ever in the biz.

“Julie Schwartz made a point of being crusty and a curmudgeon,” says Joe Rubinstein, an inker who has worked for Marvel and DC since the 1970s. “That was Julie’s way. It was somewhere in the Bible or the Talmud: don’t show them love—it’ll make them soft.”

Robert Kanigher lasted nearly as long as Schwartz did at DC, having gotten into the comics biz in 1945. By 1960 he was in charge of the company’s war books as well as Wonder Woman. Pictures from the era reveal a professor-ish man with a full head of black hair, wearing a smart suit and gripping a pipe. He enjoyed mountain climbing and skiing, once calling it “intoxicating.” He was a literary man who liked to reference Dante and El Greco in interviews.

Like Weisinger, Kanigher could be abusive. He was notoriously difficult to get along with and had a volcanic temper. Stories abound of him tearing into someone who criticized his writing or an artist who dared to make a small change to his script. He is rumored to have given one penciler a full-on nervous breakdown.

Kanigher, Weisinger, and Schwartz made up the core of DC’s editorial staff in 1960—just one year before the dawn of the so-called Marvel age of comics—and they represented an old-fashioned mentality that would, in a few short years, find itself woefully out of step with the changing times. They had different values and priorities from the younger generations. DC’s brass grew up during the Great Depression, which had imprinted on them a respect for work and the firm that employed you. In short, they were company men.

“That was the attitude particularly among Depression-era guys,” says Mark Evanier, who broke into comics in 1969 working as Jack Kirby’s assistant. “The company put bread and butter on your table, and all those guys who grew up in the Depression had a very, very strong orientation about who pays you your paycheck at the end of the week. It was like you didn’t mock your company like you didn’t mock your father.”

It wasn’t just DC’s editors who were particularly unprogressive. Conservatism was in the company’s blood. It was baked in from the company’s very start. DC had been founded in part as a way for its shady founders to purify their image. And then the publisher came of age during an ugly era when comic books were facing constant attacks from moralists, and the industry was desperate to purge any hint of impropriety from its pages in hopes of placating the critics and keeping the lights on.

DC’s beginnings go back to 1935 when a former US Cavalry officer and pulp writer named Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson created New Fun Comics. The black-and-white tabloid was notable in that it was the first comic book to include original material. Publishers had been reprinting flimsy collections of Sunday funnies since at least the 1920s, but New Fun Comics is considered the first modern comic book.

Wheeler-Nicholson’s company, called National Allied Publications, released five more issues before it ran out of money. In need of funds, the major teamed up with a company called Independent News. The publishing and distribution venture had been launched in 1932 by a Jewish immigrant, Harry Donenfeld, and his business manager, Jack Liebowitz. Donenfeld was fast talking and rumored to have mob connections. Liebowitz was a buttoned-up numbers man.

Donenfeld had been in the magazine business since the 1920s, and he’d earned his money by backing a series of racy pulps.

His magazines and those like it came under fire in the early 1930s. A group calling itself the New York Citizens Committee on Civic Decency launched a campaign against the smut, and in 1934 Donenfeld got into serious hot water after publishing a photo of a naked woman, a sliver of pubic hair exposed, in Pep!

It was within this hostile social environment that Donenfeld and Liebowitz struck a deal with Wheeler-Nicholson to fund more comics. Independent News was looking to diversify away from its girlie-heavy portfolio and expand into more innocent publishing arenas. Comic books seemingly offered just that.

The new venture was called Detective Comics, Inc., and it would later lend its name to the consolidated publishing company. The first title released under the new partnership was March 1937’s Detective Comics #1. The issue offered several short stories, including one featuring lawman Speed Saunders battling a villain named Cap’n Scum and another starring private eye Slam Bradley, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

Wheeler-Nicholson, still suffering from cash-flow issues, was forced out in 1938, and Donenfeld and Liebowitz took control of Detective as well as two other titles, More Fun and New Adventure.

The company would soon expand with June 1938’s Action Comics #1, the debut of Superman.

This was the one that started it all—and Donenfeld paid just $130 for the rights. This was the book that gave us the superhero archetype as we now know it and marked the start of an American art form. Creators Siegel and Shuster deftly combined the fast-paced adventure of Sunday comic strips, such as Tarzan, with the costumed crime-fighting heroics of pulp characters, such as the Shadow, and out came something new and exciting, something kids and adults across America were willing to plunk down 10 cents to read. Superman was an innovation that would change the publishing and entertainment industries forever, and it would help put its publisher, DC, atop the spandex heap.

The Superman of 1938 was a far more down to earth (literally) hero than the one he would later evolve into. His powers were limited. He couldn’t fly, instead having the power only to leap one-eighth of a mile. He had enhanced strength but was far from invulnerable. An artillery shell was said to be able to pierce his skin.

The kinds of cases he chose to tackle were equally earthbound. In his early appearances he tossed a wife-beating husband against a wall, tangled with a corrupt judicial system, and broke up a lynch mob. Superman acted less like the heartland-born do-gooder he would later become and more like that activist hippie who lived down the hall from you in the college dorm.

Superman—and the flood of four-color heroes that would soon follow—racked up massive sales by delivering inexpensive escapist entertainment at a bleak time when the nation was hobbled by the Great Depression, battered by the Dust Bowl, and teetering on the brink of war. They provided power fantasies for the many Americans who were feeling powerless.

DC printed 202,000 copies of Action Comics #1 and sold 64 percent of a print run—an astonishing success. The brass, however, wasn’t sure which of Action’s eight stories was driving sales, so in Action Comics #4, a survey was included asking readers to rank their top five. An overwhelming 404 of the 542 responses named the Man of Steel as their favorite.

The superhero—and especially Superman—was clearly becoming a cash cow. Sales of Action Comics climbed month by month, and by 1940 DC was moving 1.3 million an issue, with companion title Superman selling 1.4 million. Stores were also flooded with merchandise, including shirts, soap, pencil sets, belts, and watches.

Superman’s first appearance was followed the next year by Batman—a dark vigilante created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger and made his debut in 1939’s Detective Comics #27.

The third member of DC’s so-called Trinity, Wonder Woman, appeared in 1941. She was created by William Moulton Marston, a Harvard-educated psychologist who imagined a “feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman,” as he wrote at the time.

The happy days wouldn’t last long.

Just two years removed from the debut of Action Comics #1, a serious existential challenge to DC and the medium of comic books itself was brewing. In 1940 a newspaper writer named Sterling North published an editorial in the Chicago Daily News entitled “A National Disgrace,” attacking the “poisonous” effects of a fast-growing new medium: comic books.

It marked one of the first national salvos against comic books and helped launch a protracted war that would rage for fourteen more years and culminate in nothing short of federal government hearings.

In his editorial North claimed to have examined 108 books available on the newsstand and found, to his horror, that at least 70 percent contained “material that no respectable newspaper would accept.” He went on to report, “Superman heroics, voluptuous females in scanty attire, blazing machine guns, hooded ‘justice’ and cheap political propaganda were to be found on almost every page.”

Other critics soon piled on, including Fredric Wertham, a New York City–based psychiatrist who blamed comics for bad behavior he’d seen among his young patients.

The backlash reached its climax when, in April 1954, a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency convened a hearing on the medium’s evils.

The publishers didn’t wait around for the committee’s findings to be released that next March. In the fall of 1954 the industry produced its own code of conduct by which nearly all the comic book companies agreed to abide. The lengthy list of rules governed everything from magazine titles to depictions of violence to costume appearances.

Many publishers were unable to adapt, and within three years of the Code’s adoption twenty-four of the twenty-nine original subscribing members had gone out of business. In 1952 some 630 titles had hit newsstands. That number had dropped to just 250 in 1956—a staggering 252 percent fall. The comic book business was being slowly strangled to death.

DC was one of the few publishers that managed to weather the crisis, due in part to its family-friendly rep. In the summer of 1941 it had formed an in-house editorial advisory board to ensure its content met “wholesome” moral standards. Post-Code, Irwin Donenfeld, Harry’s son and DC’s then editorial director, traveled the country speaking to PTA groups and appearing on TV programs to talk about how comics helped teach kids to read.

The era helped establish DC even more firmly as the class of the field, far different from the schlocky publishers—with their cheap production, amateurish art, and fly-by-night existences—that had once populated the industry.

“DC was part of National Periodical Publications, a real company,” says former DC writer Jim Shooter. “They had a mentality that they were a cut above. DC has always clung to the pretense that they were classy, and they stuck with that for a long time.”

This haughty attitude that crystalized in DC’s early years would be one of the reasons the publisher would have trouble adapting to changing tastes and times in the coming decades and part of the reason why it still lags to this day.

“The thing that allowed DC to survive the fifties and the Senate subcommittee was Liebowitz and Donenfeld and [editor] Whit Ellsworth going for clean, accessible storytelling and characters so that you didn’t mind if a six-year-old was reading the comics,” says comics historian and former DC editor Bob Greenberger. “It then kept them stuck,” he says—stuck in a defensive posture and a conservative mindset.

One of the reasons DC’s trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman have become such iconic characters is that, unlike their peers, they’ve been in continuous publication since their debuts. Their longevity has been truly remarkable and speaks not only to the appeal of the characters but also to the stability of their publisher, DC. (As well as to the amount of money being raked in from themed merchandise, but that’s a story for a bit later.)

The marathon run these characters have had has not always been a given. The comic book industry is cyclical, with genres and characters falling in and out of favor like a pair of high-waisted jeans. Westerns are hot for a few years, then they’re gone. Romance comics are all the rage, then you can’t give away a copy of Flaming Love. The same has been true of superheroes.

Some ten years after Superman first appeared, audiences began to get a bit bored by the whole idea of superpowers, and the genre faltered. Titles across the market got the axe, including some at DC. The adventures of the ring-wielding hero Green Lantern came to an abrupt halt in 1949, and in 1951 DC swung the axe on the Justice Society of America, a superteam composed of the publisher’s roster of World War II–era characters, including Hawkman, Hour-Man, and Doctor Fate.

As anyone who reads comic books knows, however, a hero never really stays dead for long.

But it wouldn’t be magical chicanery or some interdimensional deus ex machina that would revive the superheroes; it would be down to another tried-and-true device of the genre: recycling old ideas.

Even with the anticomics crusade crippling the market, DC was in need of fresh material, but DC head Jack Liebowitz was cautious about releasing new titles, fearing that canceling a series after just a few issues would create panic among readers and distributors. Irwin Donenfeld came up with a novel solution: a series to be called Showcase, in which each issue would feature a new character. It was a smart way to cheaply test new concepts without having to invest in the launch of a brand-new title.

DC’s editors would take turns producing issues of Showcase, and Weisinger handled the debut. He floated an idea for a story about firefighters, in no small part because it offered a chance for a potentially appealing cover image.

“DC had all these little lists circulating about what covers sold, and they’d argue about it in editorial meetings,” Evanier says. “Weisinger believed that fire on covers was commercial and that kids had an interest in firefighters.”

Turns out, not so much. “Showcase #1 was a spectacular flop,” Evanier says. “It sold so badly, they couldn’t believe it, and all the other editors jumped on Weisinger and mocked him.” (From that point on, Weisinger would rarely stray from the safe, reliable world of Superman.)

Issue #2 featured a Native American hero from Kanigher, and #3 another Kanigher-penned tale about Navy frogmen. Those two, like #1, bombed.

By Showcase #4 the responsibility fell to Schwartz. The idea he tossed out at an editorial meeting would change the history of superheroes and launch the so-called Silver Age of comics. He suggested reviving the Flash, a speedster whose popularity, like nearly every other costumed hero, had tailed off during the late forties and early fifties. His solo title had been canned in 1949. Schwartz’s coeditors were skeptical.

“I pointed out that the average comic book reader started reading them at age 8 and gave them up at the age of 12,” the late Schwartz wrote in his autobiography, Man of Two Worlds. “And since more than four years had already passed, there was a whole new audience out there who really didn’t know that the Flash had flopped, and maybe they might give it a try.”

To draw the strip Schwartz tapped Carmine Infantino, a Brooklyn-born artist who’d gotten his start in the business as a teenager. Infantino’s smooth pencil style would come to define DC in later years, due in part to his success on the Flash.

The original Flash had first appeared in 1940’s Flash Comics #1, written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Harry Lampert. He was Jay Garrick, a college student who’d gained superspeed after exposure to heavy water.

Showcase #4 featured a new spin on the character. He was now Barry Allen (named after talk show hosts Barry Gray and Steve Allen), a police scientist who gains his powers after lightning strikes a shelf full of chemicals. Kanigher wrote the story and introduced the fun detail that the hero’s red costume—newly designed by Infantino—would magically pop out of Allen’s ring.

The October 1956 issue shocked National with its success. It sold 59 percent of a 350,000-print run. A sequel was quickly scheduled, and the Flash returned eight months later in Showcase #8, then again in #13 and #14. The subsequent issues also sold well, and the character was promoted to his own title. The Flash debuted in 1959, though as issue #105 instead of issue #1, picking up on the numbering from the character’s previous 1949 series.

Even though the Flash had a legacy number on its cover, the contents were obviously something fresh, and audiences responded. The character’s reintroduction ushered in a new superhero craze that led to a second explosion of superhero titles—a big bang that would help trigger the rebirth of Marvel Comics a few years later.

“The Flash jump-started the whole superhero business again, and went a long way in saving the comic book business from extinction,” Infantino wrote. “DC followed with Green Lantern and then the whole group of superheroes.… So the Flash started the superhero party all over again, changing the course of the entire industry.”

DC would soon also unveil revamped versions of the Atom and Hawkman. By 1960 the company was enjoying profitable sales on its titles and was virtually unchallenged in the superhero realm. Certainly not by the company that would become Marvel, which had by the end of the fifties spiraled into has-been status.

“Back then both of the companies were family-owned businesses that have just gone through an existential crisis that almost killed them, with the political situation in the fifties and the collapse of their distribution system,” Friedrich says. “There was not much competition. They were part of a beleaguered industry that was trying to survive together.”

That situation would soon change with Marvel’s emergence as a superhero company once again.