DC Reboots to Take On Marvel

“I got DC comics sent to me, and I’d show them to Stan [Lee], and we’d sit there laughing at the stilted dialogue and all the stupid stuff they did. Look at Superman coming in for a landing with his toe pointed and his leg tucked. Nobody does that.”

—Former Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter

Working at DC in the mid seventies, artist Barry Windsor-Smith once lamented, was “a little like quitting comics.”

Kirby’s ambitious Fourth World had fizzled, and he’d moved on to titles that did little more than fulfill his contractual obligations. DC’s line was an uninspired mix of leftover mystery and war titles alongside DOA new offerings like The Stalker and Richard Dragon, Kung-Fu Fighter. The latter title, introduced in 1975, had been an attempt to capitalize on the early seventies martial arts craze, as Marvel had successfully done with Master of Kung Fu two years earlier.

Young writer Denny O’Neil was a fan of chop-socky films and, like those at Marvel, had recognized their potential to translate into comic books early on. He’d pitched a martial arts series to DC in 1973 but was turned down.

“I went to one of DC’s big dogs and made my case, and I will never forget what he said, because this was one of the most corporate things I’ve ever heard,” O’Neil recalls. “He said, ‘I don’t like the numbers, chum.’”

Two years later, when DC came to its senses and finally green-lit Richard Dragon, the genre’s popularity had cooled, leading to the standing joke at DC that by the time the company got around to following a trend, you could be sure the trend was over.

Sales were dropping on DC’s marquee titles as well. Circulation of Superman had fallen below 300,000 in 1975, some 150,000 fewer than five years prior.

“I have next to nothing favorable to say about Dull Comics,” former DC and then-Marvel-writer David Anthony Kraft told the Comics Journal in 1977. “There’s some kind of curse that hangs over that place, an uncanny certainty that no matter what you do or how hard you work at it, it’ll still somehow manage to come out looking just like every other shitty book they publish.… They don’t publish comics, they publish ass-wipe.”

A new direction was clearly needed. And new leadership. Carmine Infantino had “relinquished his post” in January, as DC’s official fanzine charitably put it, and when it came to picking his replacement, the Warner executives appeared determined to go for an even bolder pick than they had made with Infantino, because they chose someone with three qualities nobody in the business was expecting.

First, the new hire had no comic book industry experience. Second, the pick was a youthful twenty-eight. And third and perhaps most surprising of all, he was not a he at all. A venerable company in a field historically populated almost exclusively by men was now going to be led by a woman. Legend has it that when DC editor Joe Orlando heard the news, he immediately went to the bathroom and puked.

Jenette Kahn had grown up in Pennsylvania, the daughter of a rabbi. She’d read comics as a child after her brother turned her on to them. She earned an art history degree at Radcliffe College but fell into publishing at age twenty-two when she and a friend raised money to publish Kids, a children’s magazine. She later launched Dynamite, another publication for young people.

Her experience in children’s publishing clearly made her attractive to the suits at Warner Bros. (It also suggested how they viewed comic books—as strictly kids’ stuff.) Bill Sarnoff, the head of Warner Publishing, invited Kahn to lunch in 1975. As they ate and chatted, Sarnoff revealed that he thought DC should no longer publish new comics and should instead focus solely on the lucrative licensing. Kahn disagreed, explaining that she saw DC as an important ideas lab, and without new stories, the value of the characters would soon diminish.

Sarnoff must have liked what he heard. The next day he offered her the job of publisher, a choice that stunned the industry.

“When Jenette came in, it was such a relief. It wasn’t another old white guy,” says former DC writer Paul Kupperberg.

“We didn’t know Jenette Kahn, and we worried that she did not know comics,” says Irene Vartanoff, who worked in editorial, production, and the rights department at Marvel and DC in the seventies and eighties. “Did any of us think about what in her background led her to be chosen to run a very important comic book company? Not really. We simply wanted whoever it was to understand comics.”

Kahn started work at DC on February 2, 1976, and soon established herself as a fresh and energetic—if somewhat eccentric—presence.

“Jenette was unbelievably creative,” says Dan Raspler, a DC editor in the eighties and nineties. “She was spacey but sort of like a shark. She was oddball, a striking woman in a flamboyant dress. If you imagine a Batman villain, that’s what she often looked like. Crazy outfits and a crazy office with bizarre furniture.”

Kahn had two items on her to-do list straight out of the gate: make the comics better and, in an industry notorious for abusing its talent, start treating the writers and artists better. Easier said than done.

Kahn set out to learn the business of comic books, often sitting with Schwartz in his office as the editor worked up a story with a writer. She also attempted to smash the editorial fiefdoms that still existed and tighten the company continuity in what she called “centralization.”

She altered the way new series were developed. DC would no longer, say, churn out five half-ass sword and sorcery imitations because Conan was hot. New series would be forced to climb a ladder, with approvals on every rung, beginning with a pitch, then moving on to a script and art sketches, and finally concluding with a finished comic book.

An age problem still beset DC. Its editors were, as Kahn put it, “of another generation.” Batman and Superman editor Julius Schwartz was in his sixties, as was Murray Boltinoff, who handled some horror and war titles. Joe Orlando was closing in on fifty. One of the few young people they did have on staff, Gerry Conway, left a few weeks after Kahn’s arrival to become editor-in-chief at Marvel, succeeding Marv Wolfman.

Kahn set out to recruit new talent and began reading Marvel comics to see who might be worth bringing over.

“She wanted to get a younger vibe to the whole thing,” says Bob Rozakis, then a DC assistant editor. “She recognized that the Marvel characters had more appeal to the audience than ours did, and she wanted to get the same vibe at DC.”

In the end Kahn targeted two names to poach. One was John Buscema, the penciler of Conan and Fantastic Four whose style was so representative of Marvel that he would coauthor a book on how to draw comics the Marvel way in 1978. Kahn recruited the artist and thought she’d hashed out a deal for him to defect. But Stan Lee caught wind of the change and swooped in to make Buscema an offer he couldn’t refuse, and the DC deal was squashed.

The other Marvel name Kahn set her sights on was Steve Englehart. Soon after Kahn arrived at DC Englehart quit Marvel after a disagreement with newly installed editor Gerry Conway. Two days later he got a call from Kahn inviting him to lunch.

“We got together in Manhattan, and she said, ‘I want you to do for the Justice League what you did for the Avengers,’” Englehart says. “‘Our characters need to be rejuvenated. You had a good thing going with the Avengers, and we want that same thing for the Justice League.’”

Englehart, eager to pay back Marvel for letting him walk, agreed under the conditions that he’d work for only a year (he planned to travel around Europe) and that he would be allowed to write Batman. Kahn assented.

Englehart’s stint began with trying to revamp the Justice League of America in early 1977, establishing a tone and feel to serve as a template for DC’s other books.

“They were trying to make their books more like Marvel. That’s why I was there,” Englehart says. “What Marvel was doing was still mysterious to DC. Jenette told me, ‘Our sales are trending downward because we’re not keeping up with Marvel, and no one here understands what’s going on.’ DC didn’t have anybody who could do what I was doing at Marvel, so they went and got me.”

The writer also took over Detective Comics and produced a hugely influential run with penciler Marshall Rogers and inker Terry Austin that helped return Batman to his dark roots. The story, for perhaps the first time, introduced sex into the G-rated DC universe.

“The thing that’s always bothered me about DC’s books is that all their grown-up superheroes acted like little boys,” Englehart says. “If Lana Lang or Lois Lane ever made any kind of romantic overture, all these grown men become tongued-tied and bashful. Even as a kid I thought that was stupid.”

Englehart created a love interest named Silver St. Cloud for Batman’s alter-ego Bruce Wayne, and in one panel Silver is shown lounging in a negligee telling Bruce that she’s “suffering exhaustion” after their night together.

“I wanted to say Batman and Silver were having a mature, adult sexual relationship,” Englehart says. “That was not only unheard of, it was unthought of.”

Certainly at DC it was. The company’s sexual politics had always been just this side of a nunnery. Until at least 2006 DC’s official position was that Wonder Woman was a virgin, according to copublisher Dan DiDio. In the 1940s Superman editor Whit Ellsworth was tasked with “de-sexing” Lois Lane and deemphasizing Superman’s jock strap. About the only action Batman ever got was in the demented mind of 1950s critic Fredric Wertham, who claimed Batman and Robin were “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.”

Marvel, as with most things, was much looser when it came to sex. A 1968 issue of Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. by writer-artist Jim Steranko (in)famously included a wordless, ten-panel grid of provocative images, including a phone with its receiver off the hook and a close-up of a woman’s lips, suggesting an encounter between Fury and a female spy. The sticks in the mud at the Comics Code Authority objected to some of the imagery, and the last panel showing the couple locked in an embrace was hurriedly replaced with a photostat of Nick Fury’s gun shoved tightly into its holster—a picture that, in hindsight, is more wonderfully suggestive than the one it replaced.

Elsewhere, Fantastic Four couple Reed Richards and Sue Storm dated and were shown marrying in 1967. They later had children, suggesting their relationship was consummated. Daredevil shacked up with his girlfriend, the Black Widow, in 1972.

“We sort of give the idea that our characters are reasonably normal human beings who won’t turn the other way if a pretty girl comes by,” Stan Lee said in a 1970 radio interview. “We don’t attempt to play up the sex in any way. But if a story should call for somebody who is attracted to somebody of the opposite sex or whatever, we try to put it in so that it makes sense.”

To DC’s credit, they never complained about the mature themes in Englehart’s Detective Comics.

“I think they were looking to me to give them ideas that they hadn’t had,” he says.

Kahn’s arrival at DC split the company into two factions, with those embracing change on one side and those fearing it on the other. Kahn soon promoted allies, putting Joe Orlando in charge of the editorial department and elevating Paul Levitz to editorial coordinator. Levitz was a former “BNF”—big-name fan—who had published a popular fanzine as a teenager before landing part-time work at DC in the early 1970s. He attended New York University but dropped out to work in comics. He would continue to rise through the ranks in the decades ahead, ultimately ending up in the top spot.

To head the art department Kahn made an unusual choice.

“One thing that really didn’t work out too well was her hiring of Vinnie Colletta as art director,” says Jack C. Harris, a former DC editor. “Rumors said that he only got the position because he was the only comic book artist she knew at the time.”

Colletta still might not have been the greatest artist in the world, but there’s little doubt he brought an amazing amount of color to the staid DC offices.

“My office was down the hall near Julie Schwartz’s, and anybody coming up from the elevators would have to pass my door,” says DC writer Paul Kupperberg. “I could see Vinnie’s door pretty clearly. He had a bookie who would come pretty regularly, and there were a variety of young ladies who would arrive, and the door would close and not open again for a half-hour. I assume it was Vinnie doing large model sketches.”

Rumor had it that Colletta enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Bond girl from the latest flick. He also, inexplicably, had an interest in a fried chicken restaurant in midtown Manhattan. He’d often work out of its basement, propping his drawing board atop soda crates.

“We went there once, and we all asked, why does Vinnie have a chicken place? No one knew,” Kupperberg says. “Maybe it was a front for something? Who knows?”

Colletta would leave the art director post three years later.

Another of Kahn’s targets for change was DC’s name itself. Although informally known as DC, the publisher’s official name was National Periodical Publications. Kahn, rightly so, felt it was anachronistic and obscured that the company was in the comic book business. Kahn’s objective paralleled what rival Martin Goodman had done back in the 1960s, organizing the comics published by his various shell companies (Fantastic Four #1 was officially released by “Canam Publishers Sales Corporation”) under a single, zippy new umbrella name, Marvel Comics.

“National Periodical Publications didn’t sound like fun,” says Denny O’Neil. “Jenette said, ‘No, we’re comic books, and we should be proud of it. We’re an American art form.’”

National Periodical Publications soon officially became DC Comics, and the change was reflected in the books on sale in late 1976.

“We always referred to the company as ‘DC’ in the first place, so we welcomed the change,” Harris says. “Of course, someone pointed out that ‘DC’ originally stood for ‘Detective Comics,’ so the new name was actually ‘Detective Comics Comics,’ which we thought was funny.”

DC’s crosstown rivals were less impressed.

“When we decided to change our name, I came up with Marvel because it was a great word to use,” Stan Lee says. “When they changed theirs, what did they come up with? DC. I think that’s a perfect example of why we outsold them. Whoever was making the decisions there, they were just unimaginative. I’m sorry I’m saying this.”

Kahn also set out to update the company’s logo, which at the time was a white circle with a red “DC” in the middle, flanked by two red stars on either side. For the job Kahn hired Milton Glaser, the legendary designer behind the “I Heart New York” campaign.

Glaser worked for a few weeks and presented the DC brass with several new options. His favored look was a circle striped with bands of red, yellow, and blue with a blocky, sans-serif DC knock-out in the middle. The novelty was, the logo came in several slightly different variations that seemed to connate movement through space. Imagine a frisbee sailing through the air and how the object might look different depending on where you’re standing but is still recognizable as a frisbee.

“It was like a flying object,” Glaser says. “That was the first time that that’s ever been done, as far as I know, where the logo would change based on your vantage point. They approved it, and I assumed that would be their logo.”

It wasn’t. For whatever reason DC opted for another option Glaser presented—a riff on their current logo in which the circle and stars were tilted 45 degrees.

“I have no idea why they didn’t do it,” the designer says. “I guess they took the most conservative position. The one they chose is risk-free. They knew they wouldn’t suffer any misunderstanding.”

The DC bullet, as it came to be known, debuted on titles cover dated February 1977, and the change had some staffers snickering that they could have tilted a circle for much less than the $25,000 DC was rumored to have splashed out on the overhaul.

The DC offices themselves were updated in an attempt to make the atmosphere more fun. The walls were covered in loud polka-dot wallpaper, and office nameplates were created in the shape of comic book word balloons. A statue of Superman was installed in the lobby. At a time when ads were touting the upcoming Superman: The Movie, Kahn had a baseball jacket made for herself that read “Superman: The Comic Book.”

“They weren’t earth-shaking changes, but they made you happy to be doing comic books,” Denny O’Neil says. “It became more than just a way to get next week’s paycheck.”

DC’s stiff office culture began to relax somewhat. A few of the younger staffers would sneak down the emergency stairs to the building’s basement and fire up a joint. Even the company’s notoriously stringent dress code began to break down. In 1977 two writers, Cary Bates and Marty Pasko, decided to test the limits by turning up at the office in sports coats and open-collar shirts—but no ties. And they were allowed inside.

“The news swept the industry,” says Jim Shooter, then Marvel’s associate editor. “Everyone was on the phone: ‘They let them in!’ It was a big deal, like they’d chopped down the Berlin Wall or something.”

For a couple of years Marvel and DC had been locked in a war of escalation, as each company steadily ramped up its output in an effort to drown its competitor. Kahn launched an even more aggressive initiative, announcing that DC would push out still more new titles while dramatically increasing each comic’s page count—as well as its price. In June 1978 the company’s comic books were set to rise from thirty-six pages to forty-two, with an accompanying price increase from 35 cents to 50 cents.

Kahn touted the change known as the “DC Explosion” in a “publishorial” appearing in the company’s comics. She promised “an explosion of new ideas, new concepts, new characters, and new formats.”

To produce all this new material, DC was forced to adopt an editorial policy that writer Mike W. Barr termed the “warm body theory.” If a body was warm, it could write a DC title. The company also poached several artists and writers from its rival. Gerry Conway returned after a brief stint as Marvel editor-in-chief, and Amazing Spider-Man artist Ross Andru took a job as editor. Len Wein, another former Marvel EIC, left the House of Ideas after DC offered him Detective Comics and Stan Lee refused to let him work for both companies. DC’s spokesperson, Mike Gold, admitted at the time that the raid was also done in hopes of crippling Marvel so that it would no longer have enough talent to follow DC’s lead in producing thicker, higher-priced comics.

DC need not have worried. At a 1978 college speaking engagement, Stan Lee was asked about the coming DC Explosion and whether he’d follow suit. He was blunt.

“Unless they do so well and the kids buy nothing but their books and we lose a fortune, then I’ll do it, but I don’t expect that to happen,” he said. “I have a feeling that we’ll sell more books than ever, and they’re going to fall flat on their face.”

In addition to a talent for snappy dialogue and self-promotion, it seems Lee was also a gifted soothsayer. Just three months after the DC Explosion began, it was suddenly called off, leading to one of the biggest bloodbaths in comic book history.

DC’s parent company, Warner Communications, had become increasingly concerned with the comic book division’s lackluster sales, especially after a particularly brutal showing in the winter of 1977–1978. Some of the slowdown may not have been DC’s fault, however.

“Just about the time the books started rolling out, the Northeast got hit with an ice storm, a blizzard, and another ice storm,” says DC’s Rozakis. “For three weeks trucks were just not able to get out on the road and make deliveries. You had a whole load of comics that got printed, shipped to warehouses, then three weeks later, they got sent back. So the Warner people looked at the numbers and said, ‘No, this whole thing is a failure.’”

In the minds of the Warner execs drastic action was required. And that’s what DC got. Nearly half of DC’s entire line was killed off in a single day. Gone were newcomers, including Firestorm and Steel, as well as planned titles that never even saw a first issue, such as Vixen. Of the fifty titles launched by DC in the previous three years, only six were spared in 1978. In order to better compete with Marvel, the format of DC’s remaining titles was brought back in line with its competitor’s. The page count was reduced to thirty-two and the price was lowered to 40 cents. Staff was fired. The purge became known as the “DC Implosion”—a darkly humorous take-off of the DC Explosion—though the employees were careful not to utter the phrase around the office in front of executives.

“The Implosion was a huge shockwave,” says artist Steve Bissette, then a student at New Jersey’s Kubert School, where classes were taught by professionals, including some from DC. “Teachers would show up to work, and their eyes would be red from crying on the train.”

The cuts were painful, but the economics may have made sense in the long run, as the Implosion allowed DC to kill off its marginal titles and focus on its marquee heroes, who brought in the rich merchandising money. After the distributor took its cut and production costs were accounted for, a middle-tier title might have earned DC only about $400 in profit per issue—hardly even worth getting out of bed for. Once again there was genuine fear around the DC offices that the company, in its present form, might just go away. Editorial would be shut down, and production of original material scrapped in favor of reprints.

The reduction in titles threw numerous freelancers out of work. DC suddenly had many fewer pages to fill, and dibs went to the talent whose contract guaranteed them a certain amount of work each month. The day after the Implosion out-of-work freelancers lined up at the Marvel offices as early as 6:30 in the morning, hoping to land work.

DC’s troubles naturally benefited Marvel, and some staffers reacted callously to DC’s plight. “More market share for us” was the sentiment among some.

But Marvel was facing its own challenges. Stan Lee’s day-to-day involvement with publishing was diminishing each year, and he was focusing more of his efforts on landing TV and movie deals. “Comics are sort of beneath him,” an unnamed writer would complain to the New York Times in 1979. Lee’s abdication of the top spot in 1972 had given way to a tumultuous six years that saw a game of editorial musical chairs, with a procession of five different editors-in-chief.

Each of the new bosses had difficulty keeping up, as the company went from producing about twelve titles a month to forty or fifty in the mid-1970s.

Marvel’s increased production schedule sowed chaos. Mistakes were rampant. Deadlines were missed, forcing last-minute replacement with reprint material. Writers operated under little editorial oversight.

“Stan’s attitude was, you have three responsibilities,” Marvel writer Chris Claremont says. “Get the book in on time, write good stories, don’t be a pain in the ass. You can choose two, but he’d prefer all three. So basically you’d get a book and be on your own.”

“We would plot a story and do the best we could there, but we didn’t know what the issue after that was going to be,” Marvel’s David Anthony Kraft says. “That was the job for the next plot. We were making the shit up as we went along, and that’s the only way you ever get a Howard the Duck.”

Even Jack Kirby’s return didn’t provide much of a boost. After DC failed to offer Kirby a contract renewal he was happy with, the artist returned to Marvel in 1975. Although some staffers weren’t so keen to see him return after his defection.

“There are a couple people there who were telling me, ‘Well, he left. We don’t want him back,’” recalls Roy Thomas. “I thought they were idiots. He was still identified with Marvel. He was the best superhero artist. And it’s better that you have him than DC, because even though his stuff hasn’t done that well at DC, sooner or later he might hit it.”

Kirby took over his cocreation, Captain America, and soon launched new titles Devil Dinosaur and cosmic saga The Eternals.

“He came back, he got to do his Captain America, and he was feeling that the Marvel universe had gone on without him,” says previous Captain America writer Steve Englehart. “Stan was able to make it work without him. I think he was pissed off at the world, he was divorced from the Marvel universe, and he thought he’d just do his Kirby stuff because that was the Marvel universe.”

The toll of working for so long in an industry that had taken advantage of and undervalued him was evident. Kirby, nearing age sixty, seemed burnt out and disinterested.

“I was editing [Marvel newsletter] FOOM, and I was talking to Jack on the phone, trying to promote Devil Dinosaur,” says Kraft. “I said, ‘Is there anything you can give me to help me push this book?’ He paused and he said, ‘Yeah, Devil Dinosaur. He’s red.’ That’s what I got.”

Kirby’s work polarized readers, and many wrote critical letters printed in the comics’ letters columns. With his powers and his stature among fans diminished, he would leave Marvel for the last time in 1978. He later found work in animation.

“Kirby had come from really crappy treatment from Marvel on his return there, and animation was like night and day to him,” says animator Darrell McNeil. “He got to work with young guys like me who loved and revered his work, and the pay and health benefits he received were so much more to his liking, he became a much happier person.”

Back at Marvel, into the chaotic scene came yet another editor-in-chief. Jim Shooter, the man who’d gotten his start writing for DC at age thirteen, took over early in 1978 and immediately brought a harsh discipline that the freewheeling Marvel had been lacking. He imposed new rules and new protocols, and he hired new staff, including a traffic manager and a production expert, to help alleviate the strain on the overworked editors. He demanded clearer storytelling and supervised books more closely. He canceled underperforming titles.

In a way it was like DC’s more regimented system had come to Marvel.

“This was wild and crazy Marvel,” says Kraft. “People would be having water pistol fights and doing pretty much whatever we wanted. And here comes Shooter out of the DC world. He set up a system where each editor has a family of books, and they have an assistant editor. He instituted that system I really despised over there.”

Whether or not the staff liked the new order, it led to increased sales. Marvel’s slim lead in market share would soon balloon to double digits.

Much of Marvel’s rise would come on the back of one particular book, the Uncanny X-Men. The story of the mutant outcasts had ceased publishing original stories and turned to reprints in 1970. The title was revived in 1975 with a whole new set of characters, and it would soon rise to become Marvel’s best-selling title and a force in the industry. And strangely, much like Fantastic Four, it owes its existence, in part, to DC.

The idea for a revival came in the early 1970s from Marvel’s then president, who recognized the importance of overseas licensing and suggested creating a team composed of international heroes. Writer Mike Friedrich, editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, and a freelance artist named Dave Cockrum went to lunch in midtown Manhattan to hash out a concept. Thomas pictured the book as a mutant spin on DC’s Blackhawks, a team of soldiers from various countries.

Cockrum, who was then illustrating the Legion of Super-Heroes for DC, had been angling to draw something for Marvel and showed Thomas sketches for a group of characters he had developed for DC in 1972. One was a fanged killer with big hair and sideburns whom Cockrum called Wolverine. Another was a demonic blue creature with three fingers and a tail called Balshazaar. A third was called Typhoon and could control weather.

Cockrum’s DC editor at the time, Murray Boltinoff, rejected the characters because he “was very conservative and didn’t want to do anything to offend his readers.”

DC’s loss was Marvel’s gain. Many of the characters were ultimately adapted for the revamped X-Men.

The new series relaunched with 1975’s Giant-Size X-Men #1, and the team included Wolverine (now Canadian with sharp claws that popped from his hands), German teleporter Nightcrawler (adapted from Balshazaar), Colossus (a metallic, Russian strongman), and Storm (a weather-controlling African whose powers were borrowed from Cockrum’s Typhoon and her look from another of his characters called Black Cat).

It’s fun to speculate how comics history might have been different had DC accepted Cockrum’s characters for the Legion of Super-Heroes.

“Those characters probably would have disappeared,” says Mike Friedrich. “They wouldn’t have been gigantic hits. It was about the relative positions in the market, and X-Men had a bigger brand name relative to the Legion of Super-Heroes.”

The title’s new writer was Chris Claremont, a Marvel associate editor who’d landed the gig after offering story suggestions to Cockrum and editor-in-chief Len Wein. Claremont, a part-time actor, brought a knack for drama to the title.

“Chris had this operatic thing that Jack Kirby might have done the best, plus a level of soap opera, plus having strong female characters, plus this basic idea of misfits hanging together, hounded and hunted by the rest of the world,” says Ann Nocenti, the Uncanny X-Men editor in the 1980s. “It was a combination of things that worked beautifully.”

John Byrne, a Canadian fan-turned-artist, began drawing the book in 1977 after Cockrum’s departure, and X-Men soon exploded, unleashing many now-classic stories.

“When comics went up to 35 cents in 1976, that’s when the readership really dropped off. We had hundreds of readers who just stopped reading comics,” says California dealer Robert Beerbohm. “What brought them back was the John Byrne X-Men. I started ordering more heavily. By [1978’s] #114, I was up to ten thousand an issue.”

The X-Men creative team would soon become superstars (Marvel sent them on a European tour in the eighties), and the franchise’s success would help reinvigorate the comic biz and become Marvel’s prime driver for years to come as the publisher continued to outpace DC.

The June 1979 sales chart published in the Comic Reader showed Marvel completely dominating. The first DC book, fantasy series Warlord, came in at number twenty-one.

“[Circulation director] Ed Shukin and I were talking one time,” says Jim Shooter, “and he said, ‘DC has better production than we do. They outspend us on advertising twenty to one. Everything about their books is better, except we beat them between the covers.’”

Even in the 1980s DC continued to struggle to understand what made Marvel’s books sell and to launch a Marvel-style hit of its own. That would soon change. And it would take grabbing some talent from Marvel to do it.

DC’s task would become easier after Jim Shooter was put in charge of Marvel in 1978. Shooter’s new order and blunt manner rubbed some veteran staffers the wrong way and sent a few scurrying over to DC.

“I remember somebody at DC saying Jim Shooter’s the best recruiter we’ve got,” says Denny O’Neil. “There were only two companies. If you couldn’t stand Marvel anymore, DC was where you could go. And DC got some good talent that way. I remember Jenette mentioning that.”

One of the main points of contention was Marvel’s allowance to let some writers serve as their own editors, a system partially driven by the huge amount of titles the company was releasing. Shooter set out to end the practice.

One of the aggrieved was Roy Thomas. DC had been making overtures to the writer-editor since the mid seventies, but Thomas had always resisted, not eager to write DC’s superhero titles. But following a bitter contract dispute with Marvel in 1980, he finally bolted for the competition. His fifteen years at Marvel were over, and someone who was perhaps second only to Stan Lee in being so closely associated with Marvel was going to DC.

“There’s only two or three people up at Marvel that I’d even care to be in the same county with,” an angry Thomas said at the time.

One of the reasons DC coveted Thomas was because of his success writing Conan the Barbarian, the licensed, swords-and-sandals title launched by Marvel in 1970 that had become a phenomenon and spawned a slew of imitators. DC asked Thomas to create something similar, and he responded in 1981 with Arak, Son of Thunder.

Gene Colan, a penciler on Marvel’s hit Tomb of Dracula, bolted Marvel in 1981 after he became frustrated with Shooter forcing him to make corrections. Shooter says Colan was “hacking” and his work had gotten lazy. Colan was soon put on the prestigious Batman.

“If Gene Colan is being positioned as having been rejected from Marvel Comics, we can only say we dearly hope Marvel will continue to reject all their talents of comparable stature,” DC’s Paul Levitz told The Comics Journal at the time.

Arguably the most significant defection was Marv Wolfman, Marvel’s former editor-in-chief who’d been writing Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man, among others. Wolfman became disgruntled when he was no longer allowed to be a writer-editor and after his long-running art team on his well-received Tomb of Dracula was broken up against his will. He phoned DC’s Paul Levitz and soon hammered out a contract that began on the first day of 1980.

“I don’t really begrudge DC Marv,” Shooter told the press at the time. “I think they really need some top quality people there, and it’s healthy for us if they do have some top-quality people.”

Marvel didn’t appear particularly worried about the talent drain. The company believed not only in the strength of its remaining talent but in the inherent superiority of its characters and storytelling technique—that mystical formula that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee had conjured back in the 1960s. It wouldn’t matter who its competitor stole, they believed. Marvel would always have the edge, no matter what DC did.

Shooter once got some troubling news when an in-house tattletale informed him that one of Marvel’s staff colorists had been on the phone with recent DC defectors Len Wein and Marv Wolfman “letting everyone at DC know what we’re doing.”

“You know what?” Shooter responded. “Let’s invite [the DC people] over. Let them come to our meetings. They can listen to every damn word I say. I don’t give a damn what they know. We can do it, they can’t. We are better than them, and we will win.”

But in 1980 DC would produce a bona fide Marvel-esque book—arguably its first since Doom Patrol in 1963.

When Wolfman had committed to DC, one of his requests was that he wouldn’t be put on team books. He didn’t like them. That prohibition soon went out the window, and thank God for DC that it did. The writer had been developing ideas for a new book with Len Wein, a DC editor and Wolfman’s good friend. The two began batting around a modern spin on the Teen Titans, a book about teenage heroes that had debuted in 1966 and had sputtered along before being canned in 1978.

Wein and Wolfman assembled a team of new and preexisting characters and pitched the idea to Jenette Kahn. DC’s publisher wasn’t wild on the idea, having loathed the previous incarnation of Teen Titans—one of the only books in the company’s history that was canceled not because it was unprofitable but because it was judged embarrassingly bad by those in house.

Kahn became more open to the idea after Wolfman recruited artist George Perez. Perez was a Bronx-born comic book fan who, in his early years, had worked as bank teller across the street from DC’s offices. There he would geek out when the various DC editors would come in to make deposits, and Perez would dream about one day drawing superheroes professionally. In the mid-1970s he got a job as an artist’s assistant and soon began landing regular work from Marvel. That eventually led to a star-making run on the Avengers.

DC was so enthusiastic about the New Teen Titans that a sixteen-page preview was inserted free of charge in DC Comics Presents #26, costing the company a considerable amount. That sneak peek was followed by issue #1, released August 1980, and from the first few issues it was clear that the adventure of these college-age heroes were to be more sophisticated than previous incarnations. (The creative team had hoped to drop the “Teen” from the title but couldn’t due to copyright concerns.) The New Teen Titans was a similar mix of superhero action, soap-opera characterization, and dangling subplots that had made Marvel’s X-Men so successful.

“George and I always called it DC’s first Marvel book,” Wolfman says. No surprise considering that the three responsible for the Titans were “three refugees from Shooter-land,” as one magazine put it.

“That was basically our version of the X-Men,” says former production manager Bob Rozakis. “It was definitely about trying to do the same kinds of things that was making X-Men sell.”

Almost immediately fandom began referring to the book as “DC’s X-Men,” although the truth was that Wolfman had actually been attempting to do a riff on the Fantastic Four—a family book. The Titans weren’t related, but they shared rooms in a tower and had a dynamic similar to a family, with all the joy, angst, strain, and camaraderie. Robin, the leader, was like the responsible, stern father; Wonder Girl, a young Amazonian, was the mother; Starfire, a skimpily attired alien princess, was the hormone-fueled daughter; Kid Flash was the studious older brother; and shapeshifter Changeling was the mischievous little brother. Half-man-half-machine Cyborg was the angry teen sulking in a corner. And Raven, a mysterious witch from another dimension, was like the weird cousin that ruins Thanksgiving.

New Teen Titans quickly earned buzz and became a major success for DC, surprising many. Perez visited a local comics shop after the first issue was released, only to find the store hadn’t ordered many copies, convinced the book would soon be canceled—after all, DC hadn’t had a hit in years.

The fact that the New Teen Titans was well written and beautifully illustrated didn’t hurt. It may have even been one of the first DC books to crack the Marvel Zombies—those fans who slavishly bought everything Marvel put out. And only Marvel.

“As Marvel expanded, that Marvel Zombie collector was facing a tough financial decision where they couldn’t collect them all anymore,” says Bill Schanes, who, with his brother, founded distributor Pacific Comics in 1971. “By the time the eighties rolled around, a lot of those collectors became more title specific. Prices were going up, and the competition had more compelling items, such as New Teen Titans.”

“It was a fun book,” X-Men writer Chris Claremont says. “I enjoyed reading it because Marv is a really good writer and George is a kick-ass artist, but I thought, honestly, the X-Men characters were better. If you look at Teen Titans—Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl—they were all derivative of other characters [Batman, Flash, and Wonder Woman]. Cyborg and Changeling were the only nonderivative characters.”

“After the Titans became a hit, Marvel did try to lure me back to them,” Wolfman says. “But I was really happy with the freedom I had at DC to do the kinds of comics I loved.”

New Teen Titans may have been a massive sales success, but in the early 1980s it remained one of the lone bright spots in DC’s lineup. The comic book publisher continued to sputter, and Marvel widened its lead, doubling its rival’s circulation by June 1984.

“We were concerned about DC’s sales numbers, to be honest,” says writer Peter David, then working in Marvel’s sales department. “Whether there’s rivalry or not, let’s face it, the comic book industry can’t really survive if DC goes away. We always felt our mutual survival depended on each other.”

DC had introduced a new marketing slogan in 1983 proclaiming, “There’s no stopping us now!” Someone pinned up one of the ads in Marvel’s office, and Claremont once walked by and cracked, “Yeah, there’s no stopping us now because we’re heading straight downhill.”

The widening sales gap rekindled the rivalry between the companies.

“There was no enmity for a long time between Marvel and DC until after the Implosion and when we really started taking over,” Shooter says. “That changed the landscape a bit. We kept winning and winning and winning. They started getting pissed off.”

After a New York City comic shop owner told a newspaper that Marvel’s lead came down to Shooter’s willingness to “play hardball,” the Marvel editor-in-chief promptly had a plaque made with the phrase to proudly hang on his door.

Another factor adding to the rising hostility was Marvel’s 1982 move to new offices some thirty blocks south. Before the move DC and Marvel’s offices had been within walking distance of one another and also close to Central Park, so employees from both companies would regularly meet there to hang out and play volleyball.

“Now, we were too far downtown,” Shooter says. “We didn’t play volleyball together anymore. They didn’t come over and hang out anymore. It started being them and us, and they just really seemed to hate us.”

(Wolfman told a British fanzine at the time that Shooter “systematically kept people away from a DC/Marvel friendship like we used to have.”)

Once-straightforward business matters, such as price increases, suddenly became a source of intercompany sniping. After DC announced a raise from 40 to 50 cents in 1980, Marvel scoffed, vowing not to follow its rival’s lead.

“That doesn’t really impress me. I don’t think it impresses the people upstairs either,” Shooter told the Comics Journal at the time.

Two months later, though, Marvel announced an identical price increase to take effect the same month as DC’s. Copies of previous news stories wound up pinned to DC’s communal bulletin board, with all the quotes denigrating DC’s increase gleefully highlighted.

Even the regular softball games between the two companies became heated, with the casual matches in Central Park taking on an increased significance. Shooter, who played first base, says he suspected that DC might have been bending the rules to get the coveted W. At one game Shooter noticed a particularly athletic and strapping guy on DC’s team whom he didn’t recognize, despite the industry being small at the time.

“What do you do for DC?” Shooter asked the stranger.

“Uh, I do production,” the man said.

“Oh, do you use rubber cement one coat, or how do you work?” the Marvel editor-in-chief inquired.

The man paused and said, “Uh, I do production.”

A 1979 deal for Marvel and DC to cooperate on a new batch of crossover books didn’t help relations. In fact, it made things worse. Much worse.

The one-and-only superhero team-up between Marvel and DC, 1976’s Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, had been a decent hit, and Jenette Kahn was eager to do more. She invited Shooter to lunch near DC’s Rockefeller Center offices in 1979. The two hashed out an agreement to produce at least three more crossovers in the coming years, a slate that tentatively including a meeting between Hulk and Wonder Woman and another with Batman and Captain America.

The two sides agreed to switch off production duties, potentially avoiding the political maneuvering that had bedeviled the 1976 cooperation. Each company would have approval rights, and the profits would be split right down the middle.

The first entry was to be an encore meeting between A-list characters Superman and Spider-Man, a book that alone would add some $300,000 to Marvel’s coffers. For a creative team Shooter chose Marv Wolfman to write it, John Buscema to pencil, and veteran artist Joe Sinnott as inker, but after Wolfman defected to DC, Shooter opted to write it himself, reasoning he was one of the few who had written both Superman and Spidey. He drafted a plot, using some of Wolfman’s ideas, and sent it over to DC for approval. According to Shooter, DC took four months to get back to him, putting the project dangerously behind schedule.

Buscema began drawing and made quick work of the story that pitted Superman and Spider-Man against Doctor Doom and Parasite, a DC villain that could absorb the powers of anyone he touches. Shooter had hurriedly begun to add dialogue to the finished pages when word came from DC that Warner Books was publishing a second, smaller, paperback-sized version of the comic, pushing the deadline back four months, ostensibly giving more time for the harried project.

“I thought we were saved,” Shooter says. “But the contract still had the original due date. There was no amendment. I didn’t think it needed it.”

A few days later Shooter joined in a regular Friday night poker game for comic pros at Paul Levitz’s Village apartment.

“When are we going to get this story? It’s technically overdue,” Levitz asked.

“Warner Books moved it back four months,” Shooter replied.

“Technically it’s due,” Levitz said.

The next Thursday Shooter got a call from Levitz saying if DC didn’t receive the finished book by Monday, they were canceling the project. Shooter was scheduled to fly to England for a comic convention but nonetheless headed over to DC to meet with Kahn, Levitz, and Joe Orlando, DC’s designated project editor.

“I kept explaining, ‘I have a convention. I’ll get it to you the following Monday,’” Shooter says.

While Kahn was sympathetic, Levitz insisted that, according to the contract, the story was past due and must be delivered. No exceptions, despite the four-month Warner Books reprieve.

“I was steaming. It just didn’t seem right,” Shooter says. “I was like, ‘What’s the matter with you, you little worm?’ If Paul was half my size, I would have thrown him out the window.”

Shooter skipped the convention and finished the book over the weekend. Superman and Spider-Man (the “and” as opposed to the “vs.” on the 1976 effort perhaps signaling a level of détente between the company that didn’t exist) was released in spring 1981. It was followed by Batman vs. The Incredible Hulk later that year and, in 1982, The Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans, a pairing that was supposed to feature the Legion of Super-Heroes until Titans sales took off.

Those team-ups came with some hiccups here and there but were relatively friction-free. Not so with the next proposed crossover—a project so fraught with difficulties and rancor that it killed cooperation between the companies for more than a decade.

Readers had already gotten to see characters from both companies meet and, in some cases, fight, during the three previous crossovers. The ones released so far had been like the ultimate in fan fiction, providing stories some readers never dreamed they’d see. But there was still one giant itch left to scratch. The companies’ two trademark super-teams had still never gone head to head.

The Avengers were going to have to battle the Justice League.

On paper the project made all the sense in the world and was just another in an increasingly long line of joint efforts between Marvel and DC. In execution it turned out to be an earth-scorching disaster that left both sides longing for the relative civility of Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man.

JLA/Avengers had been announced as far back as 1980 for a potential 1981 release, and a contract was finally signed in 1982. DC’s executive editor, Dick Giordano, who had returned to the company in 1980 after a decade of freelance, assigned Gerry Conway to write it. George Perez, the red-hot artist behind New Teen Titans, was set to draw it.

Conway’s plot involved time-traveling villains, Marvel’s Kang, and DC’s Lord of Time, using a powerful gem to manipulate the DC and Marvel heroes into fighting each other in various historical eras.

Shooter found the plot nonsensical and gave it to Marvel staffers to review and attempt to fix.

“There were all these plot holes,” says Tom DeFalco, then a Marvel editor. “One scene stays in my mind. At some point Hawkeye and Green Arrow are facing off, and they fire arrows at each other, and their arrows collide head first, which is really cool. The arrows hit each other, and then for some reason both arrows turn at a 95-degree angle and fly into some disc that causes time to reverse itself. Flying off at a 95-degree angle? I remember [editor] Mark [Gruenwald] and I laughing about that.”

Marvel demanded rewrites, touching off months of back-and-forth between the two companies.

“On a personal level I was really pissed that Shooter trashed me in the process of criticizing it,” Conway says. “I’m as much a professional as anyone, and I gave that book 150 percent of my attention and effort, and I think Jim is very good at a lot of things, but he is not one of the best comic book writers in the world. And to have him, especially after the work he did on his [Superman and Spider-Man] crossover, criticize my work as being unprofessional or hackwork was just really offensive, and I took great offense.”

(Shooter and Conway have since made up and are friendly.)

By late August Marvel had still not given its approval, and Perez angrily walked off the project, vowing never to work for Marvel as long as Shooter was in charge.

JLA/Avengers was quickly earning a bad reputation in the comic book press as an increasingly deflated fanbase followed the squabbling and waited for word on when the long-delayed project might actually see print.

In October 1983 DC’s Paul Levitz and Marvel’s publisher, Mike Hobson, met for lunch in a last-ditch attempt to save JLA/Avengers. They agreed to issue a joint press release (that Hobson would write) saying JLA/Avengers was back on track, but none ever came. Levitz phoned Marvel about it numerous times but never got a response. The plug was soon pulled.

“On a practical business level it was like, okay, the creative guys can’t play nice and make this happen,” Levitz says. “We like our creative guy [Giordano] and trust what he says. If he says he can’t make this work, end of story.”

The companies later fired one last volley at each other in the form of dueling editorials published in their respective comic books. The shockingly transparent essays attempted to explain what went wrong with the “dream” project and to point the finger at the other side for the demise.

“In my view,” Giordano wrote in his Meanwhile column, “the JLA/Avengers team-up book will not be published because somebody, or several somebodies, at Marvel simply doesn’t want it to be published.” A four-page postmortem published in a 1984 issue of Marvel’s official fanzine, Marvel Age, called that allegation “unfounded and foolish.”

“There was a dislike between Jenette and Paul and Shooter,” says former DC production manager Bob Rozakis. “It was more of a one-upmanship on an individual basis. I think it was more on Shooter’s side, his personality. He had to be number one. It was like, ‘I’m in charge of the number-one company, so I should have the final say on everything.’”

The bad blood generated by the failed JLA/Avengers team-up soured relations between the company even further and put an end to the intercompany crossovers for years to come. DC officially gave up on the aborted project and returned the unused artwork to Perez in 1994. He promptly sold it.

The scrapping of JLA/Avengers killed a potential million-dollar windfall, but in hindsight that would be pennies compared to a new outlet that the industry was just beginning to exploit.

Motion pictures.