DC Comics is one of the largest companies in comic book and related
media publishing. DC is responsible for such famous characters as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and their
teammates in the Justice League. For decades, DC Comics has been one of
the two largest American comic book companies (the other being Marvel
Comics). For many years, its headquarters were located at 666 Fifth
Avenue in New York City; in the 1990s, they moved to 1700 Broadway.
History
The company was originally three companies, National Allied Publications, Detective Comics, and All-American Publications. The
first two companies merged in the 1930s to become National Comics (later National
Periodical Publications) and the third shared offices until it was bought by the merged company in 1945. At this time "DC", an abbreviation for Detective
Comics, was simply an informal logo regularly used on the cover.
Golden Age (1930s and 1940s)
This company was the first to publish original stories in comic book form in 1937, and
then was the first to feature superheroes beginning with Action Comics in 1938. It was the
foremost exploiter of the new genre in the Golden Age
of Comic Books, introducing such popular characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the first superhero team, the
Justice Society of America.
When the superhero genre faded in the late 1940s, the company focused more on other
genres, such as science fiction, westerns, humour and romance. They largely avoided the
crime and horror trends of the time, and thus avoided taking the brunt of the backlash against crime and horror comics
in the 1950s. A handful of the most popular superhero titles (most importantly
Action Comics and Detective Comics, the two longest-running titles in comics history) continued publication.
Silver Age (1950s and 1960s)
Under the editorship of Julius Schwartz in the late 1950s, the company was responsible for kickstarting the Silver Age of comic books, with the revival of The Flash in a modernized form. The company quickly followed with revamps of Green Lantern, Hawkman, The Atom, all with a more science-fiction angle to them. The superhero team concept was revived and updated as the
Justice League of America. Interest in comics picked up, and DC enjoyed
being at a prominent position in the industry.
In the early 1960s, Marvel
Comics - previously a relatively minor publisher - was beginning to rise quickly in the market, due largely to the creative
contributions of Stan Lee, Jack
Kirby, and Steve Ditko. DC was slow to react to Marvel's successful focus
on more complex characters and tighter continuity, and the publisher began to develop a reputation in the market for simplistic
and "old-fashioned" storytelling. It was mainly with defectors from Marvel like Ditko, or newer talents like Neal Adams that this new approach to storytelling took hold at DC.
Late 1960s and early 1970s
A major change happened in the late 1960s when many veteran creators petitioned DC management for health plans, pensions and
similar considerations. DC responded by curtly firing most of the offending staff and replacing them with young people... who had
largely grown up with the Marvel influence in comics. This proved to be a mixed blessing: for while the new employees strove for
sophisticated storytelling and characters, but they had little experience in the industry and the relative lack of
professionalism in their work hampered the product of the company. There were, however, bright lights, like Dennis O'Neil, who worked on Green Lantern and Batman. The period was plagued by
short-lived series that started out strong, but quickly petered out when the creators, not having strong financial reasons to
stay, abandoned their creations.
Late 1970s and 1980s
The company was acquired by Warner Communications (now Time Warner) in
1976. In the early 1980s, the new management of
publisher Jenette Kahn,
vice-president Paul Levitz, and managing editor Dick Giordano decided to offer more concrete financial rewards to their talents, such as royalties to encourage long term commitments to the company. This immediately paid off
with the success of Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, a superhero comic that
earned significant sales with its artistic quality and the stability of the talent who kept with the title for years.
This successful revitalization of a minor title lead the editorship to look at doing the same to their entire line comics. The
result was the limited series Crisis on Infinite Earths, which gave the company an opportunity to dismiss some of the
"baggage" of its history, and revise major characters such as Superman and Wonder Woman. Acclaimed limited series such as
The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller and Alan Moore's Watchmen, also drew attention to changes at DC. This new creative freedom and the attendant publicity allowed
DC to seriously challenge the dominance of Marvel.
Meanwhile, British writer Alan
Moore had re-energized the minor horror series Saga of the Swamp Thing, and his highly acclaimed work sparked a comic book equivalent of
rock's British Invasion, in which numerous British talents,
including Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, came to work for the company. The resulting influx of sophisticated horror and dark fantasy
material led not only to DC abandoning the Comics Code
for particular titles by those talents, but also to the later establishment in 1993 of the Vertigo imprint for mature readers.
1990s
The comics industry experienced a brief boom in the early 1990s, thanks to a combination of speculative purchasing of the
books as collectibles and several storylines which gained attention from the mainstream media. DC's extended storylines in which
Superman and Batman were killed/crippled and replaced, resulted in dramatically increased sales, but the increases were as
temporary as the substitutes, and sales dropped off as industry sales went into a major slump.
DC established several imprints in the 1990s to facilitate diversification and specialized marketing of its product line. They
increased the use of nontraditional contractual arrangements, including creator-owned work and licensing material from other
companies. They also increased publication of trade paperbacks,
including both collections of serial comics and original graphic
novels.
The Vertigo line was aimed at an older and more literary audience, largely free of the "kid stuff" stigma its main superhero
line still held. DC entered into a publishing agreement with Milestone
Media, which gave the company a line of comics featuring a more culturally and racially diverse range of superhero
characters; although the Milestone line ceased publication, it yielded the popular animated series Static Shock. Paradox Press was established to publish material that would be considered "mainstream" in the
book trade - including the large-format Big Book of... series, and crime fiction such as Road to Perdition - but paradoxically remained a niche in the comics
industry. DC purchased Wildstorm Comics from Jim Lee and maintained it as a separate imprint with its own style and audience. Likewise they added the Wildstorm
imprint America's Best Comics, created by Alan Moore,
including the titles Tom Strong and Promethea.
2000s
Comics sales stopped declining but remained weak in the early 2000s, as DC continued diversifying its publishing activities to
reach new markets. In March 2003 DC comics acquired publishing and
merchandising rights to the long-running fantasy series Elfquest, which had
previously been self-published by its creators Wendy and Richard
Pini under the Warp Graphics banner. In 2004 it established the
CMX line to reprint translated manga volumes (an already-booming market at the time), and acquired the North American publishing rights to graphic
novels from European publishers 2000 A.D. and Humanoids. It also rebranded its titles for younger children with
the mascot Johnny DC.
See also list of DC comics, list of DC Comics characters, list of DC Cosmic Entities.
Noteworthy creators
Imprints
External links
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