DC Desperately Chases Marvel

“Change had to come or we were going to get killed. We couldn’t stay still.”

—DC’s Carmine Infantino

The sixties were a simpler time, a time when a six-pack of beer cost 99 cents, the TV dial offered just three networks, and a couple of shady guys who ran parking lots could buy out America’s top comic book company.

Parking lots. Future multibillion-dollar properties Batman and Superman were then on the same level as a chunk of asphalt in Manhattan.

Marvel wasn’t the only one with new owners heading into the end of the sixties. DC had also been bought out in 1967. Beginning in the early 1960s DC head Jack Liebowitz, then approaching retirement age, had begun looking for a potential buyer for the company. He hired an investment banker to assist in the search, and in 1967 he began negotiating with Kinney National Service, a haphazard collection of businesses that had been formed after a New York parking company merged with a Jewish funeral parlor chain, a cleaning contractor, and other seemingly unrelated businesses.

Kinney was rumored to have nefarious connections, but Liebowitz didn’t seem to care.

“They were hamisha [comfortable] people. Jewish, Jewish-oriented,” he wrote in his memoir.

With DC riding high from the publicity and profits generated by the 1966 Batman TV series, Liebowitz knew he would be selling at an advantageous time. Kinney agreed in July 1967 to acquire DC for $60 million in stock. (Two years later Kinney, in its seemingly never-ending bid to gobble up other companies, bought movie studio Warner Bros. DC would later become a division of Warner Communications.)

The Kinney merger shook up DC mightily and led to the first major personnel changes in years. Liebowitz remained on the board of directors, but Irwin Donenfeld, the son of DC’s cofounder Harry, was forced out.

“They made me all kinds of promises of what I would be in this new company,” he would later say. “And none of those promises came to be.”

Donenfeld exited so abruptly that he left behind his own personal copies of Action Comics #1, Superman #1, and other vintage comic books that today would be worth millions.

Editorial was also in flux, with no clear leader. Mort Weisinger and Jack Schiff were considered most senior, but Liebowitz didn’t want to appoint one as editor-in-chief for fear that the other would quit, according to Arnold Drake. Bringing in a publishing executive from outside the company was also discussed, but Liebowitz ultimately concluded that none of them would get near the low-prestige comic book business.

So Liebowitz made a completely out-of-the-box choice.

“I went into Jack Liebowitz’s office one day and asked, ‘Jack, who do I answer to now? Who’s in charge?’” Carmine Infantino recalled in 2010. “He said, ‘You are.’ Pow, that was it. How do you like that one between the eyes? I was stunned. Everybody was stunned.”

Stunned is right. Infantino was well regarded as an artist—he’d drawn the revamped Flash in the fifties—but he had zero executive experience, and his promotion didn’t exactly inspire confidence among the troops. Artist Gil Kane nearly fell on the floor laughing when he heard the news.

Dig a little deeper, and the pick wasn’t all that laughable. At that juncture in DC’s history a safe choice just wouldn’t cut it. The market was changing, and DC was getting left behind. Handing the keys to an entrenched member of the old guard wasn’t going to do much to help DC catch up.

“Marvel was kicking the hell out of DC,” Infantino wrote in 2003. “DC was stuck in a time warp, very comfortable with what it was doing until Marvel came along with very clean, new, sharp material and chopped them up. DC needed a kick in the rump. And they brought me on board to do it.”

Infantino also proved a logical choice because he excelled in the one area of publishing his bosses cared most about: cover design. Before his promotion to editorial director Infantino had been put in charge of all of DC’s covers. Irwin Donenfeld, who analyzed sales via cover images like a gambler studying a racing form, had discovered that Infantino’s covers sold better than those drawn by other artists. So Infantino stopped penciling The Flash with November 1967’s #174 and concentrated almost exclusively on the publishing house’s covers.

The move drew the attention of Stan Lee, who soon reached out to Infantino to offer him a job at Marvel for $3,000 more than the $20,000 Infantino was currently making at DC. Money talks, and Infantino decided to take the offer. He even went as far as to tell his editor, Julie Schwartz, he was quitting.

Then Liebowitz called, asking to take Infantino out to lunch. Over the meal at a nearby French restaurant the DC president slyly challenged Infantino’s fighting spirit. He told the artist, “I like you a lot. But I never thought you were afraid of a challenge.” The line hit Infantino “between the eyes,” and he vowed to return to DC the next day.

With a raise, of course. Thanks to the offer from Lee, DC upped Infantino’s pay to $30,000 a year. It was money well spent. DC’s covers soon improved.

“It was a very seismic shift because the DC covers had been writer-driven,” says Mark Evanier. “They were about an interesting situation, which you could figure out if you read the word balloons. Most of the Superman covers for a long time had Superman and Lois Lane just standing around reacting to some plot point. And then after Carmine took over cover design, the covers more and more were depicting interesting visual scenes.”

At the time Marvel’s covers were leaping off the newsstands. They were about energy and dynamism and often captured the split-second before cataclysmic violence erupted, complete with cocked fists and gritted teeth. A streaking Silver Surfer is about to smash into a coiled Thor, or the Thing and the Hulk are set to unload punches to each others’ faces. (It was rumored that DC’s artists were discouraged from depicting violent conflict on the covers.)

“Marie Severin, who oversaw every cover coming out of Marvel, gave me a tutorial one day,” says Steve Englehart, a future star writer who began at Marvel in 1971. “She said the whole secret of Marvel is: you can stand across a room and look at a Marvel cover and know what’s going on. That’s not the case with DC’s covers. She said our covers are easier to understand.”

Severin really believed in the superiority of Marvel’s covers—not just for their ability to sell product but from a philosophical standpoint as well. Pinned to her office wall was a blow-up of the cover to Flash #198 (1970). The soppy image showed the hero on his knees, hands clasped in prayer, gazing heavenward with a tear streaming down his face, pleading, “Please make it come true, God.” When asked why she decorated her wall with that image, Severin replied, “Because they’re a bunch of spoongroins over at DC.”

Improving DC’s covers was a step in the right direction, but to quote an adage from DC editor Jack Schiff, “The cover sells that month’s issue. But the insides sell next month’s.” DC’s problem in 1968 under its new owners was that the insides of its books hadn’t changed all that much.

But Infantino, now in charge of editorial, set out to chart a new course.

“Infantino was certainly under a lot of pressure,” says Friedrich, who began writing for DC in 1967. “DC has corporate owners. Marvel is now releasing tons of titles and threatening DC’s space on the newsstands. DC was getting their hat handed to them, and they knew they had to do something different.”

The company’s new editorial director began trying to let some “fresh air” in by hiring new people. DC had been virtually a closed shop, with the same men in editorial working with the same batch of writers and artists for years. New talent wouldn’t even bother applying because they knew they had little chance of breaking in.

One of the only new faces who had been able to break through was Neal Adams. In the early sixties Adams had been doing advertising work and drawing a syndicated comic strip. When that was canceled, he went looking for work. He phoned DC, and to his surprise he was given a meeting with DC’s war books editor Bob Kanigher. The editors had shut him out previously, but now with Marvel’s surge, DC was in panic mode and needed new blood.

“I was the only one that they hired who came in out of the sky from their point of view, and they wouldn’t hire anyone else. I was the only one since 1953,” Adams says. “They had built up the habits of a decades—let’s keep all the other people out, give work to the people that you have, protect them, and that’s it. Don’t change. I was able to penetrate the insanity.”

“Have you noticed the sorry mess of Marvel IMITATIONS making the scene lately? Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery and all that jazz, but we wanna make darn sure no dyed-in-the-wool Marvel madman gets stuck with one of those inferior ‘Brand Echh’ versions of the real thing.”

—Stan Lee on the competition in October 1965

“That’s why everyone calls his magazines Brand I. I is for imitator and I for ‘I’m great.’ Actually, we feel this hambo will be remembered when Shakespeare and Scott are forgotten—not before!”

—Superman editor Mort Weisinger on Stan Lee in March 1966

Adams was assigned short stories at DC, beginning in 1967. As it turns out, he might have ended up at Marvel instead.

“When [Adams’s newspaper strip] Ben Casey was canceled, I rushed into Stan’s office to get him to call Neal to sign him up,” says John Romita Sr., a former Marvel artist and art director. “But he’d already signed with DC.”

It would be a missed opportunity. Adams would go on to create some of the most iconic images in DC’s—and comic book—history, and his art would become closely associated with the publisher during that formative time period.

DC gradually gave its new artist more substantial work, including the debut of Deadman, introduced in the October 1967 issue of Strange Adventures. Deadman was the ghost of a murdered acrobat who had the power to possess living things. The strip, written initially by Arnold Drake, was among DC’s more sophisticated offerings and would go down as an important step in the maturation of the art form.

Adams’s art was certainly a leap forward. Detailed and nearly photo-realistic, without a trace of cartoony-ness, it was something new for DC. Adams also shook up his pages with creative panel layouts beyond the usual grid pattern. The look was so jarring that it took some time for DC’s readers to get acclimated.

“Neal Adams’ artwork was just terrible,” a letter writer griped in Spectre #4 (June 1968), another superhero strip Adams was drawing. Today original covers and pages of that same “terrible” artwork would go for tens of thousands of dollars at auction.

In 1968 Infantino began airing out DC’s musty editorial ranks. He felt that the editors had too much of a “literary” bent (the pipes and elbow patches didn’t help), and he attempted to emphasize the art side of the business for a change. Comic books are, after all, a visual medium. Infantino helped bring in four new editors, all of whom were artists. The move was a risky one and represented a major break from tradition. Editors were typically writers, not artists. Did artists know enough about story and dialogue to oversee comic book production?

The first two hired were Joe Orlando and Dick Giordano. Orlando was an Italian immigrant who’d drawn for Mad and a horror magazine called Creepy. Giordano, considered one of the medium’s all-time best inkers, had been working at Charlton, a second-tier publisher in Connecticut that produced superhero, war, and horror comics.

“When I went to DC, they wanted me to respond to Marvel,” the late Giordano said in 1998. “They were looking for new editors because they had been comfortably sitting on their oars and Marvel sailed right past DC as the industry leader. So DC was looking for ways to get back into the business.”

Joe Kubert was also brought on staff. Kubert, a professional artist since the 1940s, was best known for his work on DC’s war titles and for cocreating the Silver Age Hawkman. In the seventies he would open a New Jersey school for cartoonists bearing his name.

“Wear a tie,” Infantino told Kubert. “We’re editors now.”

The last of the new batch of editorial hires was Mike Sekowsky, a tall, pale artist whose head was gashed by a big scar left over from a childhood accident. Sekowsky had worked for Marvel before embarking on a long run of DC’s Justice League of America.

Longtime editors Julie Schwartz and Murray Boltinoff were kept on for “balance,” in Infantino’s words, but those considered a drag on DC’s bold, new direction were let go, including George Kashdan, who’d been handling Aquaman and Metamorpho. Jack Schiff, who’d overseen Batman in the late fifties and early sixties, retired.

To Orlando and the others, coming into DC’s entrenched culture in 1968 was an intimidating experience.

“It was like walking into a bank and asking for a loan without any collateral,” Orlando said in 1975. “The analogy being that I didn’t have any collateral as an editor and here I was sitting behind a desk making decisions. I’d hear whispered things like, ‘This won’t last.’”

With the new editors came an influx of new talent—young new writers and artists, the likes of which DC hadn’t seen for years. The migration caused a bit of a culture clash.

One day in 1969 the DC executives were bitching to the editors that two delivery boys were being allowed to sit in an outer office all day. “Those aren’t delivery boys,” Giordano told them. “Those are our writers.”

The “delivery boys” were Steve Skeates and Denny O’Neil, both in their twenties. Skeates had previously worked at Marvel and had written Charlton’s Judomaster, a martial arts hero. O’Neil was a former journalist and a counterculture rebel. When he’d graduated high school, the principal told his mother, “We don’t ever, under any circumstances, want to see Dennis here again.” O’Neil had been attracted to comics by their outsider status.

“Comic books were disreputable, and that was fine by me,” O’Neil says.

Like Skeates, O’Neil had also worked for Marvel and with Giordano at Charlton and was lured to DC with the promise of more money. (During their early days at DC the two were forbidden from walking by the president’s office, lest the old man have a heart attack from their unkempt appearance.)

Mike Friedrich was another fresh face. He’d become acquainted with DC’s editors by writing fan letters, and he sold his first professional script in 1967 while still just a teenager. Desperate to shake up the aging company, DC was suddenly hellbent on working with people who were born after the horse-and-buggy era. New editor Orlando swore he wouldn’t hire a writer over the age of thirty-five.

“I wrote a couple of scripts for them my freshman year, and they rolled out the red carpet for me in the summer of 1968 and treated me like the second coming,” Friedrich says. “I was the guy who was going to deliver the young perspective.”

Marv Wolfman and Len Wein, longtime fans then in their early twenties, also began getting work. New blood began filtering in on the art side as well. Editors were pressured to modernize the look of their books, and the solution was often to bring in new pencilers and inkers.

“When Carmine rose to power he began throwing out a lot of old freelancers,” Evanier says. “There were a lot of guys who had been working for DC since the forties, and Carmine decided that their work was stale, which perhaps it was.”

Many of the artists who’d been handling the art chores on the Superman titles for years were cut loose, including Wayne Boring, Jim Mooney, and George Papp.

“Before Carmine was put in as the editorial director, there was a strict house style, and if you couldn’t draw that style, you couldn’t get work,” former production manager Bob Rozakis says.

Infantino continued to try to make DC a friendlier place to outsiders. He set aside a break room where freelancers and writers—but no editors—could sit around and talk shop. Adams, who often worked in the office, also began inviting artist friends to stop by and hang out. It ultimately proved to be a backdoor way into the company.

“When a problem came up, Joe Orlando or someone would come down and go, ‘I got a new story to assign. Want to do it?’” Adams says. “I’d say, ‘I have to finish some stuff. You want to try someone else? Bernie Wrightson is right over there.’”

In that way Wrightson, a horror specialist who’d go on to cocreate DC’s enduring monster character Swamp Thing in 1971, got in the door. So did Howard Chaykin, Alan Weiss, and others who would become industry mainstays. When DC editors needed an artist, Adams probably had one hiding in his room.

The writer ranks experienced their own culling after Arnold Drake, Superman writer Otto Binder, Batman scribe Bill Finger, and others approached DC publisher Liebowitz and asked for benefits, such as higher pay, medical insurance, and a retirement plan. Liebowitz, never one to be particularly generous with the checkbook, shrewdly—and cynically—used the industry’s two-party system to his advantage. He told the writers to speak to Marvel, and if the brass over there agreed to go along with the group’s demands, so would he. You can probably see where this is going.

Drake called up Marvel and was told Marvel would grant the benefits if DC would. And round and round they went until DC ultimately eased out the veterans.

“There were always pleas of impoverishment [from management]: ‘We can’t give you royalties, we can’t give you health insurance,’” O’Neil says. “Yet the guy who was saying that arrived to work in a chauffeur-driven German limousine.”

The writers’ purge ultimately left more work for the young bucks. The upheaval marked a generational transition at DC, as the old-timers who had helped create the superheroes in the thirties and forties were giving way to fans who’d grown up reading their work. The shift also marked the arrival of Marvel’s sensibility at DC.

“We younger writers were loving the Marvel books,” says Wolfman, who in the late 1960s was writing stories for DC’s mystery anthology. “But I believe the longtime [DC] editors felt as long as DC had Superman they’d never be beaten. But as a huge Superman fan then—and now—I didn’t agree. Marvel was doing really great books, and DC at the time was still aiming at little kids.”

Gerry Conway, another future star who started working for DC in the late 1960s as a teenager, recalls a meeting with the young staff to figure out which of Marvel’s strengths DC might be able to adopt.

“Their actual attitude was very defensive,” Conway says. “[Production manager] Sol Harrison started the meeting saying, ‘We want to talk about what it is about Marvel that’s so good. It can’t be the art, because the art is terrible, and it can’t be the writing, because everyone wants to write and draw for DC. So what do you think it is?’”

Conway raised his hand and politely offered that not everyone wanted to write and draw for DC. Most of the young staffers longed to be at Marvel. The DC executives’ jaws dropped.

“They thought they were the premier shop,” Conway says. “They couldn’t understand why people were leaving DC and going over to Marvel—people like Frank Giacoia and Gene Colan, John Romita. They were like, ‘Why are you leaving?’”

Some of the higher-ups may not have understood Marvel’s appeal, but Marvel’s success forced DC and Infantino to begin making aggressive moves to modernize its line.

Several new titles hit stands in 1968, handled by DC’s crop of new editors. The Creeper, an offbeat, demonic superhero with a wild orange mane, got his own series, courtesy of writer Denny O’Neil and artist Steve Ditko, the idiosyncratic cocreator of Spider-Man who’d left Marvel in a huff a couple of years earlier.

The Secret Six was about a team of skilled operatives who were brought together by a mysterious masked leader to battle a crazed villain. It was intended as a grittier—by DC’s standards, at least—real-world book.

The Hawk and the Dove, by Skeates and Ditko, featured two brothers who are granted superpowers and soon find themselves divided on how to use them, with Hawk arguing for aggressive action and Dove favoring nonviolence. The concept was a not-too-subtle take on the political climate of the day, when the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War were dividing America.

Without a doubt the strangest new title was Brother Power the Geek, a name that elicits bemused laughter to this day. Brother Power was Frankenstein by way of Haight-Ashbury. A mannequin owned by a group of hippies is struck by lightning and suddenly comes to life, inspiring wonder in some and fear in others. The series was written and drawn by another recent DC hire, Joe Simon, the cocreator of Marvel’s Captain America with Jack Kirby. To some the move smacked of desperation.

“You’ve got Jack Kirby doing all this new stuff over at Marvel,” Neal Adams says. “So what do you do over at DC? You hire Joe Simon, his ex-partner. That’s pretty fucking desperate.”

DC’s established superhero titles continued to be tweaked as the editors attempted to increase the hip quotient and get its line more in step with contemporary tastes. Or at least what they thought were contemporary tastes. DC had long coasted on the success of its founding heroes, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but now some three decades after their creation and with the industry evolving, due in part to Marvel, a new tack was required.

“What happened with DC was they ran out of successful things to duplicate, so that when their Superman and Batman started to fail, they didn’t have anything to imitate,” artist Gil Kane said in 1978. “Instead, they had to go to the only other style that was making any money and of course that was Stan Lee’s style.”

Back in his 1966 memo Arnold Drake had warned DC management that the company needed to evolve on its own terms, and if it didn’t, it would run the risk of being forced to ape Marvel to survive.

Which is basically what happened.

What came in the years following Kinney’s acquisition of DC was—in the words of comic book writer Grant Morrison—a series of “weak and ill at ease impressions of the narrative style that came naturally to Lee.”

“There was a period there where a lot of the writers were told that Marvel Comics were better written on some level, and what they learned was, ‘Oh, we’ll put a lot of jokes in the dialogue’ or ‘we’ll put little funny asides in the footnotes,’” Evanier says. “We’ll talk to the reader in a joking manner. There are a number of issues of The Atom late in the run when Gardner Fox was writing what looked like somebody doing a really bad Stan Lee imitation.”

“You’ve got fifty-year-old men responding to the sense that we have to hip up. Horribly misguided things start happening at DC,” says former DC editor Brian Augustyn. “It was this absurd weirdness that arrives from people under the gun to try to make things cooler.”

One of the most bizarre stories would come in Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #106 (November 1970). The tale, written by Robert Kanigher, was entitled “I Am Curious (Black)!” and involved Lane using Superman’s transformation machine to turn herself into a black woman for a day so she can investigate a story in Metropolis’s “Little Africa” neighborhood. Can you dig it? Us neither.

That story was only slightly more embarrassing than the slang that began creeping into DC books.

Batman showed up in a 1967 issue of Blackhawk and told the team of World War II soldiers, “The Blackhawks are washed-up has-beens, out-of-date antiques.… To put it bluntly, they just don’t swing!”

The most face-palming examples of retrofitted hipness was to be found in the Teen Titans. The group of heroes consisting of the younger sidekicks to DC’s marquee superheroes—Robin, Aqualad, Kid Flash, and Wonder Girl—had debuted in a 1964 try-out story and later graduated to their own ongoing title. In the DC tradition the kids were clean, agreeable, and well mannered, and they rarely seemed to experience the kind of adolescent angst that real people go through.

About the only thing that marked them as teenagers was their language. In the late sixties writer Bob Haney filled the characters’ speech bubbles with cringeworthy slang that felt like a middle-aged man’s idea of how teenagers talked. Haney claimed he picked up words and phrases from his Woodstock, New York, barber—an aging hippie—but it’s unclear if anyone on planet Earth ever talked like this.

“I like to swing, but these cats are too much,” Aqualad says in one issue.

“I love Bob Haney and I love his work, but Bob had a certain style,” former DC writer Paul Kupperberg says. “When Bob writes the Teen Titans, he’s actually writing Maynard G. Krebs [a beatnik character from 1959 TV sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis] dialogue for the teenagers and hippies of 1968. So it’s like, ‘Cool, daddy-o.’ No one said ‘daddy-o’ in 1968 except the Teen Titans.”

Wonder Woman was also dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world. Sales of the title had been in free fall throughout the 1960s, from 230,000 copies per month in 1961 to 166,365 in 1968. Beginning with issue #178 (October 1968), the heroine got a dramatic makeover courtesy of writer O’Neil and artists Sekowsky and Giordano. For starters, Wonder Woman lost her powers, which was an easy and increasingly common trick to bring DC’s godlike heroes closer to Marvel’s more street-level characters. Instead of Wonder Woman, she became plain old Diana Prince, opened a clothing boutique, and began dressing in mod fashions—hip miniskirts, groovy A-line dresses, and skin-tight jumpsuits straight out of TV’s The Avengers.

Also notable is that Prince, like Marvel’s heroes, began operating out of New York City, not one of the fictional metropolises in which DC’s stories were typically set.

“That revamp was absolutely a reaction to Marvel’s success,” says Tim Hanley, author of Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine. “She was made a normal woman in New York City with a day job and all of that, just like a Marvel character, and the book became more mature. There was more death, more anguish.”

The new direction goosed sales—for a little while, at least. Sell-through of the rebooted issues jumped “like crazy,” hitting 60 to 65 percent, according to Infantino.

“The new Wonder Woman was given a chance—(a last chance for the book)—and it worked!” Sekowsky wrote in #189, two years after the revamp. “I can honestly say that I am quite pleased to have taken a sow’s ear and turned it into a silk purse.… I personally feel that too many of DC’s stories are still being written and plotted for the year 1940 instead of 1970.”

One of the books that was still stuck in 1940 was Batman. The Caped Crusader’s sister title, Detective, had undergone a much-heralded reboot back in 1964, but, due to contractual obligations, Bob Kane and his studio were still handling Batman. When Kane got word of DC’s proposed sale to Kinney, he threatened to scotch the deal, so Liebowitz paid him to go away. Kane walked with a million bucks, paid in yearly $50,000 installments for twenty years. DC was now free to begin using artists who brought a more contemporary look to the character.

“Everybody was happy that Bob Kane was gone,” Infantino would say.

DC’s stories also began to show a little of Marvel’s patented characterization. The days when all the heroes were so homogenous that you could swap speech bubbles among them were fading. O’Neil took over the Justice League of America in the fall of 1968, and suddenly the heroes are bickering like something straight out of the Fantastic Four.

“We’re trying to conduct a meeting. Save your gab-fest for later,” an irritated Superman tells Batman, Green Arrow, and the Atom in issue #66 (November 1968). “Par-don us, Superman!” the Atom fires back sarcastically. “We didn’t mean to offend you.”

“The stories were beginning to be influenced by Stan Lee,” O’Neil says. “That characterization came from Stan. We’re not talking subtle, nineteenth-century novel characterization here. But you could tell one character from another.”

In the end Infantino’s new titles and revamps proved to be bolder in direction than in sales. Many of the recent additions to the line were quickly axed. Brother Power the Geek didn’t even geek its way to #3. The series was unceremoniously snuffed out in its infancy after uptight editor Weisinger got ahold of a copy and stormed into Liebowitz’s office.

“Don’t you know what you got here?” Weisinger said. “This is all about the drug culture, hippies, drugs and street people. We can’t publish stuff like this.”

Liebowitz capitulated, and Brother Power died after just two flower-powered issues.

The Hawk and the Dove was canceled with #6 and The Secret Six with #7. The books hadn’t been around long enough to attract an audience. Before 1968 DC had generally shown more patience, giving books a year or two to find their footing. That changed under Infantino, and now titles were being killed quickly, almost with a bloodlust.

“Carmine had no business training, he had no real sense of the changing marketplace,” former DC editor Bob Greenberger says. “Carmine was very mercurial and was approving and canceling books almost on whim. Carmine wouldn’t let books breathe. At the first hint he would cancel it, and then management would come and say, ‘You need five more percentage points on the newsstand,’ and Carmine would approve books on a whim without stopping to figure out, ‘All right, is this the right book at the right time?’”

The erratic schedule frustrated readers. Future DC writer Evanier was president of a local comic book club in the late sixties. Each week he’d stand in front of the members and deliver a news report on the industry. And every week he’d announce that another DC title had been canceled. It became a running joke.

“We had a piano in the clubhouse where we met,” Evanier says. “There was another member who played the piano really well, and I would get up and say, ‘And now it’s time for—,’ and the guy on the on the piano would play a little fanfare, and then we’d go to the DC cancellation of the week. I’d announce that they were canceling The Secret Six, and everyone would laugh and go, ‘Well, there goes that.’ That is not a healthy atmosphere for your company.”

“DC experimented, but without a direction,” Neal Adams says, “they had no overall plan. It was like shooting guns in the dark. They didn’t know what they were doing.”

One time DC’s flailing executives tried to develop a strategy by talking to focus groups of children. Adams was invited to one in the late sixties at DC’s offices.

“It was held in the fucking board room, and one of the executives says, ‘Okay, we’re here to rap about comic books,’” Adams recalls. “Ugh, really? That started it off great. Board room and guy saying let’s rap about comics.”

The kids were asked, If you could create your own superhero, what would it be? One young boy says his hero would be like Batman, only bigger and stronger. One girl says her hero would be like Wonder Woman only smarter and more beautiful. And so it went.

“We go out of the meeting, and the executives ask, ‘We don’t understand this. What did that mean?’” Adams says. “I said, ‘What it means is that they don’t want to create characters. They like the characters that we have. They just want us to do them better and to surprise them.’”

Simply doing better comics may not have been enough. One problem DC faced at the end of the 1960s was that the market for comics—and print media in general—was shrinking. Fewer outlets carried their wares, as newsstands and mom-and-pop candy stores began to disappear. The country was becoming more of a car culture, as the exodus from cities had shifted most of America’s population from the denser urban areas to the suburbs. TV also began to consume more leisure time.

A 1969 price hike didn’t help matters, dealing a crippling blow to a struggling market. Early that year DC was forced to boost its cover price from 12 cents to 15 cents. Marvel followed suit a couple of months later. The 20 percent increase clearly broke young budgets. Readers scurried for the exits, and sales of some DC titles were battered with 20 percent drops in circulation. The declines were less steep at Marvel, and for the first time the publisher was able to crack the top ten. The Amazing Spider-Man averaged a circulation of 372,352 for 1969, making it the seventh-best-selling title of the year.

The market was so dire that DC’s new corporate master nearly took drastic—and permanent—action.

“I remember Denny [O’Neil] came down the hall in 1969 and said that the Kinney board had a vote to shut down DC,” writer Mike Friedrich recalls. “And they voted not to shut it down because of the ancillary revenue, which was already enough by 1969 to make it worth keeping going a publishing entity that was in the red.”

One of the few bright spots, besides the money generated from superhero merchandise, came with Giordano’s upset victory for best editor at the 1969 Alley Award—a title Stan Lee had taken home every year since 1963. The news ignited a celebration at the DC offices.

But not all the talent was walking through the door at DC in the late 1960s. Some was walking out. Neal Adams, intrigued by how much control Marvel’s artists had over the stories and layout, went to see Stan Lee about doing some work. Adams, a fast-rising star in the business, was already familiar to Lee.

“Stan said, ‘I’ll be honest with you. The only DC book the guys at Marvel are reading is Deadman,’” Adams says.

The artist was offered any title in the Marvel stable. Literally any title. Instead of opting for Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four, Adams asked what the worst-selling title was. The answer: The X-Men.

“Lee said, ‘We’re going to cancel it,’” Adams recalls. “I said, ‘Great, I’ll take it. You won’t pay much attention to me.’”

Lee agreed, but then demanded that if Adams was going to work for Marvel, he’d have to leave DC behind. Adams said no and got up to leave. Before he hit the door Lee was chasing him. “Wait, hang on. It’s no problem.”

Adams’s first Marvel work appeared in X-Men #56 (May 1969). The title had started strong in 1963 but had long ago lost its juice, as its founding team of Lee and Kirby had moved on. Since then a succession of artists and writers (including Arnold Drake whose Doom Patrol had been so similar to X-Men) had produced it, with few sparks.

Adams, along with writer Roy Thomas, brought a little sizzle to the once-moribund title. Adams broke the page into unusual shapes and drew figures bursting from the confines of the panel borders. He peppered his stories at key moments with awe-inspiring full-page splashes that practically smacked the reader across the face with drama.

“It was electric,” says Chris Claremont, then a Marvel assistant. “Neal’s stuff would come in, and I’d look at it and say, ‘This is magnificent.’”

The most shocking thing about that debut issue didn’t come in the story pages; it came in the credit box. Following the names of Lee, Thomas, inker Tom Palmer, and letterer Herb Cooper, a line trumpeted, “And introducing the penciling wizardry of Neal Adams.” No pseudonym. No nom de plume created by combining the names of his children. Adams, one of DC’s top artists, was using his real name in a Marvel comic. And with that, the whole fake name game collapsed. Freelancers were now able to work for both companies without having to act like a spy sneaking into East Berlin.

“If people believe something is true, by believing it, they make it true,” Adams says. “By showing them it’s not true, that it’s just something some idiot made up, it falls apart.”

Adams informed Infantino that he was doing work for Marvel and assured the boss that it wouldn’t affect his DC work. Infantino was annoyed but, in the end, chose not to put up a fight.

“Carmine didn’t say anything,” Adams says. “He’d have to have shoveled an awful lot of balls into his pants that morning to say something.”

Another DC name who wandered over to Marvel was Jim Shooter. The boy wonder had been making a name for himself writing the Legion of Super-Heroes since 1966, but he was growing increasingly unhappy from the abuse his editor, Mort Weisinger, heaped on him.

“I lived in Pittsburgh, and Mort and I had a regularly scheduled phone call Thursday nights after the Batman TV show,” Shooter says. “He’d call to go over what I sent in, and all of a sudden the guy’s on the phone, ‘You fucking idiot! You moron! You fool! Can’t you spell?’ I’m fourteen, and this big important guy from New York is calling up and calling me a moron.”

Fed up, Shooter phoned Stan Lee in search of a new job.

“I’m a comic book writer, and I need a place to work,” Shooter told Lee.

“Where do you work?” Lee asked. When Shooter told him, Lee snapped, “We hate DC stuff. If you’re a DC writer, you can’t work for us.”

Shooter insisted he was different.

“My nickname at DC is ‘the Marvel writer,’” Shooter told him. And with that, a meeting was arranged. Shooter turned up at the Marvel offices, and he and Lee clicked, talking comics for some three hours. He walked out with a job offer.

When Shooter told Weisinger he was leaving for Marvel, the editor was incensed. “Now you stabbed me in the back, you weasel,” he yelled.

It was one of the last insults the cranky misanthrope would hurl while at DC. Weisinger had been threatening to retire for years, and each time Liebowitz would give him more money to stay. It was a great scheme—until it finally backfired.

In 1970 Weisinger told Infantino, once again, he was thinking about retiring, and Infantino, who’d had enough of the editor’s ploys, replied, “Well, OK. We’ll miss you. Bye.” Weisinger was shocked. Two weeks later he even returned to the office, telling Infantino he’d reconsidered and didn’t want to actually retire. He appreciated the changes that DC had been making, and he’d like to stay, thankyouverymuch. Infantino stood firm, telling the Superman editor that his career at DC was over.

After three decades Mort Weisinger, the man who once compared writers to oranges—“You squeeze them until there’s no juice left then you throw them away”—the man who most embodied DC’s conservative mindset, the man who was disliked by so many, was gone. His final issues were Action Comics #393 (October 1970) and Superman #232 (January 1971).

That same year would bring an even bigger news story. DC was set to pull off perhaps the greatest coup ever in the rivalry’s history, a brazen act of gamesmanship that could potentially shift the industry’s balance of power. In its increasingly desperate bid to compete with Marvel comics, half-measures were no longer good enough. Instead, why not go straight to the source and steal the man who was arguably most responsible for Marvel’s success?

In 1969 DC set out to do just that.