The Universes Collide at Last

“And if you think that’s gonna be a battle, wait’ll you see Marvel and DC when we start figuring out the royalties!”

—Stan Lee plugging the groundbreaking Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man

Almost from the very beginning, comic books demanded participation. They encouraged a culture of interactivity that borrowed from the robust sci-fi fandom that existed in the early twentieth century. Action Comics #1, released in 1938, contained a story printed in black and white that readers were invited to color with crayons. A subsequent issue held a survey asking fans to weigh in on which of the stories was their favorite.

DC launched the Junior Justice Society, a fan club for its first super team, as well as another in the early 1940s devoted to Superman.

Readers gradually made their voices heard. They published crude fanzines. They mailed letters in the thousands to the publishers, offering story and character ideas and points of criticism. Legions of Super-Heroes die-hards were invited to vote for the team’s next leader in the 1960s (a gimmick revived in 2010). They were the founding fathers and mothers of the grassroots nerd culture that has become one of the most powerful forces in modern-day entertainment.

“After a while, I began to feel I wasn’t even an editor,” Stan Lee wrote in 1974. “I was just following orders—orders which came in the mail.”

Fan culture began to coalesce in the 1960s. Previously it had been disorganized and disparate, providing no easy way for the Superman zealot living in his mom’s basement in Illinois to meet the Superman zealot living in his mom’s basement in California.

Conventions began sprouting up in the early 1960s, first as informal, DIY gatherings, sometimes at private houses and later as larger, more organized affairs. They provided fans a nonjudgmental space to mingle with other superhero lovers and fill holes in their back-issue collection. Some took the communion with the comics to a new level by dressing as their favorite superhero.

Fans flocked to official office tours—or, in some cases, just showed up at Marvel and DC. An editorial printed in a 1964 New York comic con program urged pros to begin attending conventions in hopes of diminishing the number of out-of-town comic junkies who “disrupt the schedules of the publishing companies with their visits.”

Fans got older. They began sticking with the hobby longer. Continuity became more important. They began to recognize and follow specific artists and writers. They became more serious about brand loyalty. And especially after Marvel’s superheroes burst onto the scene in 1961, fandom was cleaved into two camps. It became tribal. Increasingly you were either a Marvel or a DC reader, and much like today’s political campaigns, the two sides frequently found themselves at odds with one another. Arguments broke out on playgrounds and in lunch rooms. Each side championed its own team.

“In the seventies I was a DC guy, and I hung with a lot of Marvel guys,” says Jonathan Hoyle, a longtime comic book fan who lives in Pittsburgh. “It’s like sports fans. You’re going to pick on each other.”

The Marvel fans dissed DC for its squeaky-clean image and its conservative mindset. They knocked the company for being tired.

“We [DC fans] got picked on because even our house ads were kind of silly,” Hoyle says.

The DC camp couldn’t understand how anyone liked Marvel. It was all melodrama and overwrought emotion. And why the hell are these supposed heroes always fighting each other again?

With the increasingly balkanized nature of comics fandom, the debate would inevitably turn to the superiority of each company’s characters.

“The big thing we always argued about was who was stronger: Hulk or Superman?” says John Cimino, a Massachusetts collectibles dealer and Hulk superfan. “I used to bring comic books to the playground at recess time, and I remember someone making fun of me when the [villain] Abomination beat up the Hulk. ‘How do you think the Hulk can beat up Superman when he can’t even beat up this guy?’ I remember being devastated, like, how do I get out of this?”

“No competition. Marvel winds [sic] hands down.”

—The “Marvel Is Better Than DC” Facebook page

“They can argue all they like, we’ve got Batman.”

—The “DC Is Better Than Marvel” Facebook page

Who would win in a fight between characters? These questions bedeviled comics readers, from the small children who were just discovering superheroes, to the stoned college students sitting around a dorm room. Now the fans were beginning to demand answers.

The 1970 Comic Art Convention, an annual fan gathering at Manhattan’s Statler Hilton Hotel, featured a panel with editors from both Marvel and DC. During the panel a kid in the audience stood up and asked the question that was probably on the top of so many comic book readers’ minds: “Hey, why don’t you guys do a comic where Superman meets Spider-Man?” the youngster asked.

The professionals laughed, responding dismissively that such a meeting would never happen—copyrights, bureaucracy, profit division, and so forth.

“It was one of those, ‘Oh, you stupid fans. Don’t you understand how the business works?’” says Mark Evanier, who attended the panel. “This poor kid was humiliated, basically treated like he’d asked the stupidest question in the world.”

Not hardly. A few years later the ongoing cold war between the two companies would thaw long enough for them to join forces to tell that exact story the kid had asked about. It would be a groundbreaking publication as well as a massive tip of the hat to fan service in an industry disproportionately devoted to it. But getting to that historic milestone would take several baby steps.

The idea of DC and Marvel’s characters crossing over wasn’t just one readers contemplated. It was one that excited the young fans-turned-pros who began entering the industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unlike the industry’s founding fathers—some of whom were gruff jobbers who worked in shirtsleeves and chomped cigars, waiting for the day when they could do something more dignified—this new wave of talent viewed life inside the industry as a dream come true. Working in it was about so much more than just a living; it was an extension of a hobby, an obsession, a way to directly shape the universe they’d been reading about since they were children.

As the 1970s dawned, the kinds of questions preoccupying many in the biz began to shift from, “When is this check gonna clear?” to “Wouldn’t it be cool if the brain waves from that character we last saw back in 1964 were implanted into this new android?”

Mike Friedrich posed one of those “what if” questions. While attending a party at Roy Thomas’s Upper East Side apartment in 1969, Friedrich was chatting with Thomas, then writing Marvel’s Avengers, and Denny O’Neil, the writer for DC’s Justice League of America, when Friedrich got an idea.

“Why don’t you do some kind of crossover,” Friedrich asked.

The three loved the idea. Even more so after a few more drinks. But they knew it would have to be done under the table, feeling—perhaps rightly so—that the heads of their respective companies were unlikely to tolerate their fanboy idea. Seeing as how an official, editorially sanctioned crossover wasn’t possible, the writers agreed to introduce a superteam in their own comic that resembled the superteam from the other company.

Thomas’s effort appeared first in Avengers #69 (October 1969). There he introduced a new band of villains called the Squadron Sinister, created by a cosmic game-lover to battle the Avengers. The members were based on the Justice League, with the caped Hyperion an analog to Superman, dark avenger Nighthawk to Batman, speedster the Whizzer to the Flash, and the gem-wielding Doctor Spectrum to Green Lantern.

O’Neil ultimately bagged on introducing a DC team in the vein of the Avengers, and his Marvel homage turned out far more subtle, perhaps because he was working under controlling editor Julie Schwartz. His story, appearing in Justice League of America #75 (November 1969), found the Justice League being forced to battle evil versions of themselves. References to the Avengers are sprinkled throughout, but you probably had to have been in on the joke back then to spot them. In one panel Batman tosses a trash can lid in the style of Captain America’s shield. In another Superman’s evil twin proclaims he won’t be defeated because he’s “as powerful as Thor.”

A few readers picked up on the JLA/Squadron Sinister connection, but it’s unclear if anyone figured out the reciprocal nods in O’Neil’s Justice League of America. The under-the-table crossover flew over heads of the editors. Thomas never told Stan Lee what he was doing because Lee was wary of antagonizing DC.

“While it got fairly well known, it never came up in any conversation [with Lee],” Thomas says. “I had, of course, feared that I might be in trouble for doing that. Luckily DC never sent an angry lawyer’s letter or anything, as they did in one or two other cases.”

O’Neil’s boss, Julie Schwartz, remained oblivious as well.

“Nobody noticed, and nobody cared,” O’Neil says. “As long as we didn’t violate copyright, it didn’t make any difference to them. Nothing was ever said to me about it.”

The illicit team-up was continued two years later after Friedrich took over writing duties on Justice League of America. He and Thomas ginned up another rogue crossover. Friedrich concocted a new team called the Champions of Angor, who showed up in Justice League of America #87 (February 1971) and were meant to stand in for the Avengers.

Thomas responded by introducing in Avengers #85 (February 1971) the Squadron Supreme, a team of good guys whose origin is related to the Squadron Sinister, with the same similarities to the Justice League of America.

In the years since the secret 1969 crossover, however, JLA editor Julie Schwartz had evidently become more savvy. He confronted Friedrich about the illicit crossover, brandishing a copy of the Avengers #85, and demanded, “I suppose you think this is funny?”

“Yeah,” Friedrich answered.

“Don’t do it again,” Schwartz said.

“I wasn’t penalized or yelled at,” Friedrich recalls. “DC people weren’t reading Marvel comics at the time, so who gave Julie that Marvel comic? I’ll never know.”

(Marvel would bring back Squadron Supreme in a 1985 miniseries, suggesting in an ad that it would be the Justice League done right. The move prompted angry phone calls from DC.)

The successful meta-crossover soon emboldened the younger crop of writers to try something even more radical. They’d attempt to snake a single story through several Marvel and DC titles.

In 1965 Roy Thomas had met a fan named Tom Fagan at a New York comic convention. Fagan lived in Rutland, Vermont, a town of fewer than twenty thousand people that hosted a lively Halloween parade down its main street each year. The event took a superhero bent when Fagan suggested making Batman the grand marshal in 1960. Thomas attended in 1965 (dressed as Plastic Man), and the news about Rutland quickly spread within the comic book community. Soon writers and artists were trekking north every October to dress as superheroes and party in Fagan’s twenty-three-room Victorian house.

Thomas set a 1970 Avengers story at the parade. Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams followed suit in Batman a year later. And the real crossover would kick off in 1973, orchestrated by DC’s Len Wein and Marvel’s Gerry Conway and Steve Englehart. Englehart was then relatively new to the business. He’d begun working with Neal Adams on weekends after he graduated college in 1970, hoping to be an artist. He soon switched vocations to writer.

“Len, Gerry, and I were friends, and we were sitting around, and we thought, ‘Why can’t we do something together?’” Englehart says. “And the answer was, because we worked for different companies. Then we said, ‘Well, we can solve that problem.’”

The writers, absent of any clearance from their respective bosses, cooked up a storyline set in Rutland and involving Englehart’s car getting stolen. The first installment of the multipart tale ran in Englehart’s Amazing Adventures #16 (January 1973), the second in Wein’s Justice League of America #103 (December 1972), and the final in Conway’s Thor #207 (January 1973). Each story stood on its own, but when all were read together, they provided a fuller narrative.

“It was just about, ‘Can we pull this off without either one of the companies getting pissed off about it?’” Englehart says. “It was known in whatever fandom existed at that time, but we didn’t flaunt it or say, ‘Oh, we stuck it to Marvel or DC.’ Neither company was upset about it.”

Writer Steve Englehart would later pull off a different type of under-the-table crossover when one of his creations would follow him to DC when he went to work there. Mantis was a green-skinned martial arts expert who debuted in Avengers #112 (June 1973) and eventually became a member of the Marvel team. (She had a prominent role in 2017’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.) But after Englehart moved to DC to write the Justice League of America, a fan at a convention asked him if that meant the end for Mantis. He thought about it and decided it shouldn’t be.

“We’d done the Rutland thing already, so I thought I could put her in the Justice League just as long as no one got sued,” Englehart says. “Of course she has a distinct skin color and a distinct pattern of speaking, as long as I call her something else—that seems to be the legal standard—I can make his happen. I don’t recall any adverse reaction from either company.”

These early wink-wink crossovers paved the way for the first official crossover in 1975. But the eventual cooperation would require management changes at Marvel to lessen the tension between the two rivals. Martin Goodman, who had been bought out in 1968 by Perfect Film but was kept on as the publisher, retired in 1972. His son Chip—an amateurish businessman who’d once optioned the media rights to all of Marvel’s characters for a few thousand dollars—was soon forced out. Both father and son had no love for DC and were known to harbor grudges and act vindictively.

“[In the early 1970s] the companies were so antagonistic toward each other at the management level that you could have never gotten these people to sit down and talk,” says Gerry Conway, then a top Marvel writer.

Which is not to say that Marvel and DC weren’t communicating at all during that period. Lee and Infantino remained friendly, though their relationship had been strained when DC poached Kirby.

“Carmine Infantino was a friend of mine,” Lee says. “I’d meet him every couple of weeks, and he’d bring a few guys from DC. I’d come with a few guys from Marvel, we’d have a few drinks and kid around.”

Infantino had been promoted to publisher in 1972, and it’s pretty clear that he and Lee would come together occasionally to discuss business issues—and not always with the most positive of outcomes. The two met for lunch one day in the summer of 1974, and their discussion would have dire consequences for Marvel.

A freelance artist named Frank Robbins, who’d been drawing Batman, was seeking work at Marvel, and when Marvel asked how much his page rate was, he exaggerated what DC had been paying him. Lee found out about the white lie and blew his top. He discussed the issue with Infantino over lunch, and the two executives agreed to share rates in the future.

When Lee returned to the Marvel offices he told editor-in-chief Roy Thomas what had happened at lunch, and Thomas was appalled. He dashed off a memo to Lee, calling the collusion “immoral, unethical and probably illegal.” Lee asked him if he was resigning, and Thomas said yes.

“Neither [Lee nor Infantino] was thinking they were breaking the law,” Thomas says. “They’d always gotten along doing whatever they wanted to do. It was no big deal.”

Thomas’s resignation may have put the issue to rest. As far as he knew, Marvel and DC did not end up checking freelancer pay with one another in the subsequent years. (Infantino later denied that he and Lee discussed page rates.)

The next year Lee and Infantino would stumble upon another unexpected problem between them. Marvel had been planning an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz when Lee learned that DC also had one in the works. Instead of risking issuing competing comics, Lee and Infantino agreed to simply coproduce the issue. MGM’s Marvelous Wizard of Oz was released in late summer 1975, becoming the very first Marvel-DC intercompany crossover.

The book was a historic first, but it never rose beyond a curiosity to the fans and collectors. After all, this was not really a team-up of Marvel and DC; it was a team-up of their legal departments. The readership was after more than just the companies joining their names on the two-point type of a magazine’s indicia; they wanted to see the rival publisher’s superheroes actually meet in the same story and God willing, start smashing in one another’s faces during a colossal smackdown the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the days of the epic poem.

They wouldn’t have to wait long.

The story would begin with David Obst, a literary agent who represented Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Watergate journalists behind All the President’s Men. Obst had been a comic book fan as a kid, and one day in the early 1970s he cold-called Stan Lee and told the Marvel guru, “I think Marvel could be so much more than comic books.”

“And, like an idiot,” Obst recalls, “instead of saying ‘movies,’ I said ‘books.’”

Obst partnered with Lee to release a series of hit hardcover books from Simon & Schuster, including 1974’s Origins of Marvel Comics and the sequel, Sons of Origins of Marvel Comics.

Around the same time Obst was out one night in New York City and got to talking with Howard Kaminsky, the head of Warner Books, a sister company to DC Comics. Obst told Kaminsky he’d been working with Lee on the Marvel books and suggested, “Why don’t we do a book together: Superman vs. Spider-Man?” Kaminsky loved the idea and pitched it to the folks at DC. They agreed, and Obst took it to Stan Lee.

Lee liked the concept but was a bit nervous about proceeding, wondering why he should lend a helping hand to DC, whose sales were deteriorating badly. Lee asked Thomas, who had stepped down as editor-in-chief but was still working for Marvel, what he thought. Thomas was all for it, estimating that the team-up would boost Marvel’s number-one character, who at that point had been around for only thirteen years.

“I told Stan, ‘It’s a wonderful deal for Marvel,’” Thomas says. “It’s parity. You have Superman, who at one time was one of the three best-known fictitious characters in the world—Superman, Sherlock Holmes, and Tarzan—so just to be on the same page is saying that Superman and Spider-Man are equal. You’re elevating Spider-Man. It’s a win-win situation.”

Obst, being an outsider, was able to serve as a neutral arbiter and bridge the divide between the two companies. Both sides eventually agreed to move ahead, but working out the details of the crossover proved difficult, as both Marvel and DC jockeyed to make sure their interests were protected.

“Ecumenical conferences from the Middle Ages were not as carefully adjudicated as this was,” Obst says.

One sticking point was money. DC initially wanted more than half the profits because they insisted Superman had a higher distribution. They also demanded that Superman’s name come first in the title, as he was the more iconic character.

“That goes back to what I consider the Carmine kind of approach, and it wasn’t just Carmine; it was all the editors and people at DC. They had a very superior attitude,” says David Anthony Kraft, then a Marvel editor. “Marvel was never that stroppy. You want to have Superman’s name first? Fine. Whatever.”

To produce the book, the contract called for dividing the labor between Marvel and DC. Marvel would provide the penciler and the colorist, DC would deliver the writer, inker, and letterer. Even that straightforward division of labor led to friction and provided opportunities for one side to tweak the other.

When it came time to choose a writer, Infantino passed over the veterans he had in house and instead turned to Gerry Conway, whom he’d not-coincidentally just poached from Marvel. The theft wasn’t nearly as high profile as that of Jack Kirby, but it had made waves in the industry.

Conway had begun writing comic books as a teen and found steady work at Marvel in the early seventies. He’d quickly risen to helm the publisher’s signature books, Fantastic Four and the Amazing Spider-Man. In the latter he’d introduced gun-wielding vigilante the Punisher and killed off Peter Parker’s girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, in one of the most shocking moments in comic book history.

Despite his prominence at the company, Conway left Marvel in 1975 after he was passed over for the editor-in-chief’s position in the wake of Roy Thomas’s resignation. The post instead went to Len Wein, who’d begun his career at DC but had become one of Marvel’s go-to writers by the mid-1970s.

Conway reached out to DC and, in 1975, jumped ship. The news did not sit well with Marvel.

“Back in the seventies you really perceived yourself as playing for a team—either Marvel or DC,” Conway says. “Going to DC, especially after Kirby’s move in 1970, it really felt to the people at Marvel that I was betraying the company.”

DC wasted no time touting its shiny new acquisition. House ads for Conway’s line of books, known as Conway’s Corner, began appearing. For Infantino the Conway acquisition was another step in taking down Marvel.

“We’re going to show those guys at Marvel,” Infantino told Conway. “We’re going to eat their lunch.”

At the first editorial meeting since Conway’s hiring, Infantino got a rude awakening. The DC boss had always been dismissive of the company’s new crop of young staffers, whom he referred to derisively as “the kids,” and at this particular gathering he was touting Conway and how the new hire was going to help DC give its books more of a Marvel feel.

Suddenly Carl Gafford, a young production assistant, looked at Carmine and said, “You do realize Gerry is younger than all of us?”

“Carmine’s jaw dropped,” says Bob Rozakis, then a young assistant. “It was like someone had sold him the Brooklyn Bridge. He’d been convinced that he was stealing this expert editor away from Marvel. Gerry was, like, twenty-one or twenty-two at the time.”

Young or not, when it came to choosing the writer for Superman vs. Spider-Man, Infantino tapped Conway because he’d written both characters. But the choice was also a way to rub Marvel’s nose in DC’s acquisition of Conway.

“Carmine was a competitive guy, and he offered me the book because he knew it would piss off Marvel,” Conway says. “He wanted to put a finger in their eye.”

For the artist, Conway suggested Ross Andru, the longtime penciler on The Amazing Spider-Man. Conway had teamed with him previously at Marvel, and like Conway, Andru was one of the few in the business who’d handled both Spider-Man and Superman. The choice had an added advantage to Infantino and DC: drawing the crossover book would require Andru to take a break from The Amazing Spider-Man for a couple of months. The book was then Marvel’s top seller, and losing its artist might hurt sales.

“You’ve got this guy who’s recently left your top-selling book to go work for the other company, and now he’s writing this big book, and he’s taking the artist on your top-selling book,” Conway says. “So there’s a bit of a screw you there too.”

Although Len Wein was then in charge of Marvel’s superhero comics, it was Marvel president Al Landau who agreed to DC’s request for Andru’s services. When Wein complained to Landau about temporarily losing the artist on The Amazing Spider-Man—a comic he also happened to be writing—Landau told him the details of the Superman vs. Spider-Man assignment were none of his “fucking business.” Wein threw himself at the executive, determined to “rip out his throat” and had to be restrained by Marv Wolfman.

For the crossover’s inker DC selected Dick Giordano. Giordano had been among the wave of new editors who arrived at DC in 1968 in an attempt to modernize the stodgy company. But after clashing with Infantino, Giordano left and formed his own art studio with Neal Adams, Continuity Associates, in 1971. He still freelanced extensively for DC and embodied the publisher’s house style.

With the art team in place, work shifted to the story. In theory telling a one-off tale of two guys in long underwear should be simple, but in practice it proved thorny. One of the challenges was that Marvel and DC’s heroes are cut from different cloths. They’re philosophically different and don’t fit easily into the same story. DC’s characters are clean, well-mannered boy scouts, and Marvel’s heroes are flawed and more human. Superman’s power level is also far superior to Spider-Man’s.

“So we sit down, and we can’t get two sentences into it when both sides are already screaming at each other,” Obst says. “The one quote I remember someone saying is, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?! If Superman ever hit Spider-Man, he’d knock him past Jupiter.’”

“They squabbled like two old ladies,” Denny O’Neil says.

Another challenge was crafting an interesting “vs.” story in which the opposing sides are both good guys. Neither company, for obvious reasons, wanted its character to look at all like a villain.

“You have this problem. Comic book [heroes] live in this world of black and white,” Obst says. “You can’t have them be black, ever. It messes with the brand. How do you have white versus white and keep it interesting? You can’t.”

Conway took the challenges to heart.

“From a realistic point of view, a Superman versus Spider-Man fight would last about two seconds,” he says. “I always tried to see the humor in these characters and these situations, so to me, the idea of having Spider-Man fight Superman, there are ways to fix that so that it can happen, but you can have so much fun with the absurdity of it too.”

Because bad blood lingered between Conway and Marvel editors Wein and Wolfman over Conway’s departure, neither side wanted to have much to do with one another. The compromise was for Marvel’s Roy Thomas to serve as a “consulting editor.”

Conway eventually worked up a story pitting Superman and Spider-Man against DC’s Lex Luthor and Marvel’s Doctor Octopus. But before the heroes took down the villains, Supes and Spidey meet and, in a now-clichéd plot device that Marvel pioneered in the 1960s, start fighting due to a misunderstanding. Spider-Man gets in one good lick. The Man of Steel then returns fire, generously deciding to pull his punch but still sends Spidey flying hundreds of feet. It was the moment fans had been anticipating for years.

The fight, of course, ended in a draw, and balance in all aspects of the special issue was critical. Superman and Spider-Man had to get equal screen time, including the same number of large, full-page images. The cover, which Infantino laid out, featured the two heroes squaring off atop the Empire State Building. It had to be revised several times to give both Superman and Spider-Man equal prominence.

Neither company’s universe got a boost either. Instead of having one hero zapped into the other’s realm, the decision was made to set the crossover in a world that was home to both Superman’s Metropolis and Spider-Man’s New York City and one in which the heroes are aware of each other’s existence but have never met. The choice meant valuable story pages wouldn’t have to be devoted to explaining what credulity-straining MacGuffin would serve to teleport Superman into the Marvel universe or vice versa.

As work on the issue progressed and artwork began to trickle in, industry insiders began to get excited.

“I remember the spread coming in—the first time that Superman and Spider-Man were on the same page together,” says Joe Rubinstein, who was working as an assistant to Giordano at the time and helped fill in black areas on the issue. “It’s pretty humdrum now, but back then, it was really exciting. ‘Oh, my God! It’s Clark and Peter together!’ And that was great.”

Because of the back-and-forth and all the approvals needed from the two companies, the issue took seven months to complete. Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man was released the first week of January 1976 and cost a whopping $2—eight times the price of a regular Marvel comic book. The opening page held two (equally sized, of course) messages from Stan Lee and Carmine Infantino, commenting on the historic nature of the publication.

“Comics, which usually reflect history, may in this one momentous undertaking prove détente can be more than theory,” Infantino wrote.

The book sold half a million copies, according to Infantino, in spite of its awkward size. The large, tabloid format meant Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man wouldn’t fit in the standard comic book racks, and stores might have been confused about how and where to display it.

“They didn’t make as much money as they should have,” Roy Thomas says.

The project, even with its accompanying bureaucratic tensions, lessened hostilities between Marvel and DC and served as a heartening reminder of the progress that had been made in relations. Just a decade prior, freelancers had to use pen names to work for both companies, and DC’s haughty editors hadn’t even deigned to acknowledge Marvel. Now the two were partnering on a single high-profile comic book. The companies would collaborate more a few years later—sometimes successfully, but in one case so disastrously that the failure would kick off a new cold war that would last another decade.

Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man may have ushered in an era of cooperation between the two comic book titans, but it marked the end of Infantino’s reign at DC. Fresh off a January 1976 promotional tour for the Marvel/DC collaboration, Infantino was in the middle of an editorial meeting when the brass summoned him upstairs. The execs were unhappy with DC’s losses, which had been driven by the industry’s declining sales and Infantino’s decision to try to equal Marvel’s voluminous output.

“You lost a million dollars last year,” Jay Emmett, the powerful founder of DC’s lucrative licensing arm, Licensing Corporation of America, told Infantino.

“Right,” Infantino countered. “And Marvel lost two million.”

The bosses weren’t buying the argument, and Infantino was fired on the spot. His demise might have been down to more than just profit and losses. In addition to his lack of business acumen, Infantino was not universally liked. He admitted to drinking in the morning to deal with stress. He could be prickly and vindictive, bad-mouthing people as soon as they left the room.

“Carmine was a prick,” says inker Joe Rubinstein. “Once I was at [Neal Adams’s studio] Continuity Associates, and I picked up the phone. It was [DC editor] Joe Orlando, who was such a sweet, sweet guy. He asked, ‘Is Neal there?’ I said, ‘No, he’s not.’ He proceeded to lay into me: ‘Tell that motherfucking cocksucker, blah, blah, blah.’ And then silence. And then he said, ‘Sorry, I had to do that because Carmine was in the room.’”

Infantino had enemies, including inker Vinnie Colletta, whom he’d removed from Jack Kirby’s heralded Fourth World books. Whispers around DC in 1976 were that Colletta had pulled strings with some of the shadier elements rumored to be connected to Warner Bros. to get Infantino ousted. The day the axe fell, Gerry Conway ran into his now ex-boss heading to the elevators. Infantino looked shaken.

“What’s up? Are you okay?” Conway asked.

“There are going to be some changes around here. I can’t really talk about it,” Infantino replied. “Don’t worry about it. I got your back, kid.”

With that, Infantino walked into the elevator and was gone. Seconds later, almost on cue, the doors on the adjacent elevator opened, and out walked Colletta. He saw Conway standing there and said triumphantly, “I finally got rid of the bastard!”

“Vinnie knew about it apparently before anyone else, which gave rise to the suspicion that he had it in for Carmine,” Conway says.

Infantino would again freelance for the company in the years after he was fired, but legend has it that he was so bitter about his treatment that he never set foot in the DC offices again.

His dismissal cleared way for yet another major management shake-up at DC, as the company continued to try to keep pace with the now market leader, Marvel, and stem its losses in the eroding periodicals market. Before things would turn around, DC would be hit with a major catastrophe that would threaten to end the company once and for all.