[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- What's the S stand for?
- It's not an S.
On my world, it means "hope."
- As a symbol, I can be incorruptible.
I can be everlasting.
- I'm willing to fight for those
who cannot fight for themselves.
- [laughs] I can fly!
- How is it that I can breathe underwater,
but you can still drink me under the table?
- It's my superpower. - [laughs]
- I'm a superhero!
- This town deserves a better class of criminal.
- Wait till they get a load of me.
- DC, to me, is the grand proscenium of superheroes.
They all tell very different stories
about what do you do with great power,
and how do you help mankind to become better?
- Hi, boys.
- They're all so multidimensional,
and the humanity is what people really respond to.
- It's about saving the world.
It's about convincing the world that there is a better way.
- They're larger than life.
But they're also so human and so real.
narrator: For over 85 years, DC has been home
to a universe of characters and thousands of stories.
But the real people who breathe life
into these gods, mortals, and monsters
are far less known.
Behind the scenes, these creative minds
make their presence felt through words and pictures.
- When you're reading a well-crafted comic,
you're reading the movements
of a human being's hand over a page.
- There is no more minute form of storytelling
than a four- or five-panel comic strip,
in which you're having to tell a beginning,
a middle, and an end.
narrator: Comic books have always reflected
the human experience.
They reveal our fantasies, tap our emotions,
and confront our demons.
- It's stories about hope.
It's stories about redemption.
It's the same themes that have been underlying our folktales
since the beginning of time.
- People can look back and say, "Well, you know,
you're talking about comic books.
Comic books are for children.
Those ideas are for children."
Are they?
narrator: Superheroes are wish fulfilment,
a generation of talent, forged icons of virtue
that embody both the dreams and fears of America.
Those ideas triggered a worldwide cultural phenomenon.
This is the story of the creators
behind the legends of DC.
♪ ♪
The origin of DC begins with a heroic figure
whose real-life adventures read like fiction.
Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson,
a cavalry officer in World War I,
fought in the Philippines,
chased bandits through Mexico,
and battled Bolsheviks in Siberia.
As a writer, the major turned his exploits into tales
for the pulp magazines.
In 1935, he formed his own company.
In three short years,
he transformed the comic industry,
not by reprinting old newspaper strips,
but by publishing new all-original stories.
That company would eventually become DC Comics.
But despite being a visionary,
the major struggled as a businessman.
- To make a long and very complicated story short,
the major was forced out,
and the company was taken over
exactly at the moment that Superman
was about to hit the stands.
'Nuff said.
[heroic music]
♪ ♪
- Who are you?
- He's someone who is always trying to do the right thing.
That's his genuine intention.
Even if he doesn't achieve what he set out to do,
he will make the best effort to make amends.
And there's so much which hasn't been told
or said about him up till now.
narrator: The origin of Superman
starts with writer Jerry Siegel
and artist Joe Shuster,
two Jewish immigrant teens
who survived the Great Depression
by dreaming of a better tomorrow.
- Both Joe Shuster and I were great science fiction fans
back in the 1930s.
I was quite meek, and I was quite mild.
And there were attractive girls around
who just didn't notice I exist.
And I thought, "Gee, wouldn't it be great
"if I was a mighty person,
"and these girls didn't know that this clod here
is really somebody special."
- All my young days as a boy, I was pushed around by--
I was very small, and I was always pushed around
by bullies and so forth.
narrator: While still in high school,
the two collaborated on samples for a newspaper strip.
After several iterations,
a champion of the oppressed emerged,
a Superman who hid behind the secret identity
of mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent.
- He was certainly the identification
for Siegel in particular
because he physically resembled him.
Kent is the Jewish intellectual,
I think, you know, he's a journalist
and he reads, a man of letters,
and Superman is the man of action.
- Joe brought the fascination with the bodybuilding,
with the circus performers, the circus strong men,
creating really the iconography
what would be the superhero costume.
They hadn't managed to sell it anywhere.
Creativity requires courage.
The great creative works in any medium lack precedent.
narrator: After six tireless years,
their courage paid off.
DC needed a story to anchor a new anthology series
called "Action Comics."
- The first time we ever see Superman,
he's lifting a car over his head.
It is impossible to think about this in this way today.
But back then, no one had ever seen anything quite like that.
- The demand for the character was high enough
that they launched multiple books
and they had to keep up with the workload
and hired other artists to keep things going.
narrator: That original idea from Siegel and Shuster
set the gold standard for superhero characters,
launched an industry,
and inspired boundless creativity
in future generations.
- All these different points of view
merge and meld together
to become this one kind of uber story.
And yet, for it to work, all those individual stories
have to reflect the individuals.
♪ ♪
- I got the call to be the writer
not just for "Superman," but of "Action Comics" also,
the legacy "Superman" series.
In my run, Superman is a father--
that's an important central tenet of the stories
that I've been telling so far.
But he's also the personification of hope,
of compassion, of humility, of justice,
and not just to Earth, not just to Metropolis,
but to the universe.
I understand how much Superman means to people
because he meant that to me as well.
Growing up, I always wanted to be a tough guy.
I grew up really, really small for my age
and got sick a lot
and kind of got smacked around a lot.
And I just had this fantasy of being this tough guy
that would protect everyone.
Seeing Superman on the page flipped this fantasy
in my mind that became really important to me.
I think Superman matters more now than he ever has before,
in part because he is the living contradiction
to the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And we have to believe that somebody can wield power
without being corrupted by it.
♪ ♪
- I think Superman fans have a very particular worldview.
They tend to be optimists.
They tend to think that power
should be used in a particular way.
- Look! Up in the sky!
It's a bird, it's a plane! It's Superman!
- It wasn't until the radio show,
which started in 1940,
where Superman as a pop culture phenomenon
really took hold in the collective unconscious.
♪ ♪
narrator: Radio introduced the power of flight to Superman.
The silver screen lifted him off the pages
and into the real world.
Live action actor Kirk Alyn became the first Man of Steel.
A series of animated shorts established his legacy
in glorious Technicolor.
- I think there's something incredibly magical
about the creators
of these characters that have taken off.
It's hitting its target so perfectly that it just goes
on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on
and just new things are built upon it
in such a fascinating way.
narrator: For Siegel and Shuster,
the American dream had come true.
Their outsider insecurities inspired
a modern marvel, whose arrival felt relevant
to a nation of immigrants.
- In the endless reaches of the universe,
there once existed a planet known as Krypton.
- His narrative is, he comes
from this strange planet Krypton.
It really is the pure immigrant story.
It's about someone who comes from another country
who essentially looks like the prevailing culture
but knows that he's an outsider.
- Where were you? - Me? Oh, I--
- I think a lot of immigrants,
they try to be the perfect citizens because
they don't want anybody to question their citizenship.
And that's my theory about Superman as well.
Superman tries to be the perfect citizen
because he doesn't want anyone to question his citizenship.
♪ ♪
- Siegel and Shuster watched Superman
dominate pop culture,
while their new bosses profited.
DC President Harry Donenfeld started his career
publishing racy magazines.
After he escaped obscenity charges from the FBI,
Harry and his accountant Jack Liebowitz
sought a more legitimate enterprise to exploit
and took control of DC at the perfect moment.
Siegel and Shuster felt they were owed more
for making DC a success.
They negotiated a better weekly rate
and became the highest-paid
comic book creators at the time,
but DC retained ownership.
- Comics in general were built on questionable agreements.
It wasn't standard practice for creators
to get the credit that was due to them,
and it certainly was not standard practice
for them to get royalties.
narrator: Eager to capitalize on the growing popularity
of superheroes, DC urged other creators to pitch ideas
for the next caped crusader.
♪ ♪
- What are you?
- I'm Batman.
- There's so much history invested in the iconography
and so many people connected on such a deep level
and for so many different reasons.
Batman's always, I think,
been quite an accessible superhero.
The fact that he's just a guy,
I think, appeals to a lot of people.
narrator: That global appeal attracts fans
of all ages and backgrounds, and in doing so,
produces its own unique celebrities.
- I got into Batman through the art.
A lot of the creators come into this business
because they were fans as kids.
I was born in South Korea.
We were the first of my sort of extended family
to move to the United States.
I didn't speak any English.
But I recognized Superman from the cartoons, you know,
that I watched in Korea.
And so I just gravitated towards comic books.
Batman resonated with me at a very early age,
like, eight or nine.
I remember checking out books from the library
and just being fascinated by those adventures.
I bought this when it was on the stands,
so probably '70, '75.
And then obviously, I read it over and over.
And then I used both masking tape
and Scotch Tape to hold it all together.
If the artist did an incredible job,
it made those worlds or those characters
feel so lifelike to me, so immersive, and so--
when you opened up a comic book,
you felt like you were in that world.
In many ways, it kind of relieved the pressure
of being this outsider in a strange new country.
Batman first appeared in "Detective Comics" issue 27.
So this is the 1000th appearance of Batman.
Bob Kane with Bill Finger introduced the world
to this masked vigilante,
kind of changed the game forever.
♪ ♪
- I was 19 when I created Batman,
and I've been with the same company ever since.
World's most leading character, Batman,
as done by the creator, me, little ol' me.
- Bob, tell us about the earliest recollection you have
with the creation of Batman.
- There are two stories.
There's a mythical story you kind of create and make up.
And then there's the truth.
And the myth and the truth become clouded after 30 years.
- If you look at the earliest Batman stories,
they all say "by Bob Kane."
The problem was,
these stories weren't necessarily by Bob Kane.
narrator: The controversial origin story of Batman
begins when Bob Kane,
a 19-year-old cartoonist from the Bronx,
saw Siegel and Shuster cash in on Superman.
He jumped at the chance to create his own superhero.
- I was a great copycat.
So I copy Leonardo.
I remember seeing a movie called "The Bat."
I also was influenced by "The Mark of Zorro."
And I saw the original version
with Doug Fairbanks Sr., that's how old I am.
I kind of got the combination of all of them
and created a Batman.
- And he comes in with a little rough sketch
and the name Batman.
And the editor says, "That's cute, Bob,
but, you know, what's his story?"
Bob said, "I don't know."
"Well, maybe you should get a writer."
narrator: Bob Kane hired a ghostwriter,
Bill Finger, to flesh out the character.
Finger wrote an origin story
born from a fear of urban crime.
He even darkened the look of Kane's design
to reflect the pulps and German cinema.
- And in short order, they create
an amazingly specific narrative and backstory,
his wants, his needs, why he fights,
what he's railing against.
Young Bruce Wayne sees the most horrible thing.
I mean, think about that,
to see your parents gunned down
in front of you, and then later,
he's kneeling over his bed and praying,
"Please, Lord, give me the tools.
I promise you, I will spend the rest of my life warring."
He uses that word, "warring," against crime.
- I always just got the impression that he's just
wants to keep recreating the night
where his parents died.
He just wants to inflict pain, inflict,
like, his kind of form of justice,
which is kind of questionable justice.
- Batman's a kind of satanic looking figure.
He has horns. He operates at night.
He relies on fear rather than trust or strength.
He relies on stealth rather than
this kind of grandstanding circus showman.
It worked so well because these are two opposing figures.
It's like finding the two poles of a potential idea.
[inquisitive music]
narrator: As Batman's popularity
increased over time,
Kane renegotiated a contract that earned him
a rare thing in the industry:
rights, royalties,
and sole creator credit.
- Bill Finger was long gone by the time
he was officially acknowledged
as co-creator of Batman, and not just Batman,
but the Joker and all of these concepts
that we've come to associate with Gotham City.
narrator: Shortly after Finger's death,
Kane made a rare public admission.
- Bill not only wrote the early stories,
but he helped me innovate and create
more than half of the villains
and all the innovative characters in the Batman.
Most of it, the credit should go to Bill Finger.
[exciting music]
narrator: Batman's solitary war on crime
broadened when the creative team
introduced a unique concept to attract young readers:
the sidekick.
- Somebody had the bright idea that, since kids read comics,
they would want a character
that they could kind of identify with
and project themselves onto.
And this was Robin.
- DC is so famous for sidekicks.
You have a superhero, and they have a sidekick.
It just was a given.
- Robin's certainly one of the first,
if not the first, starting a proud tradition
of child endangerment.
He takes this young kid on as his sidekick,
dresses him in red and green.
Who's gonna draw the gunfire?
The kid in the red and the green
or the guy in the gray black suit?
But as a kid, I loved his comics, growing up.
narrator: The duo's dynamic shifted the tone
from a gothic noir towards more of a playful romp.
The DC character roster expanded,
but it lacked a female touch.
- What's your story, lady?
- Story? - Okay.
Suppose we start with your name.
- Wonder Woman. - Sure.
That's the last name Woman, first name Wonder, right?
- Right.
[bombastic heroic music]
- The beautiful thing about Wonder Woman
is that she's so many things.
She's very righteous.
She's all about justice.
She's the greatest warrior ever.
- [yelling]
- She has this spark in her.
She's--she has this fire in her eyes.
narrator: The creator of Wonder Woman,
William Moulton Marston
was a radical figure who led many lives.
- We're are now going to test...
narrator: As a psychologist,
he paved the way for the lie detector test
through a series of bizarre experiments.
[gunshot] [people scream]
- Dr. Marston and science show
blondes are easiest to scare.
narrator: Marston was also a staunch critic
of the comic book industry.
He challenged them to confront what he called
the bloodcurdling masculinity of superheroes.
[dramatic music]
DC agreed and invited him to create a female character.
He hired editorial cartoonist H.G. Peter
to design her signature look.
- I always go back to that original drawing
of the character of Wonder Woman
where she was beautiful, approachable,
very feminine, very strong.
There was an everywoman quality to it,
which was intrinsic to why she succeeded as she did.
- She is an Amazon.
She has connections to Greek mythology.
Her people were children of Aphrodite and Athena,
of love and wisdom.
And Wonder Woman asks us to grapple with questions
about how we feel about gender,
how we feel about sex,
and how we feel about war and conflict.
What makes Wonder Woman interesting
are the politics of feminism.
narrator: Marston was an ardent feminist ally,
even if his fight for women's equality
revealed itself in subversive ways.
Wonder Woman's lasso compelled people to tell the truth.
However, the frequent images of restraint
also evoked sexual bondage.
That wasn't Marston's primary intent.
He chose imagery that reflected
the women's suffrage movement and symbolized emancipation.
- The myth of it was that William Moulton Marston was
cranking out all these stories.
The reality was that he was surrounded by women,
he was in an open relationship with his wife
and another woman, and they were all contributing
to the Wonder Woman mythos.
They're working under the radar,
they're working under pseudonyms and so forth.
But their impact is huge.
- All of them really believed in putting this out
into the world, a female who was just as strong as men
as a woman in every way.
narrator: That strength allowed Wonder Woman
to transcend time.
Storytellers continued to build upon her foundation
and populate her world with new characters,
ones that reflect a more modern audience.
- I adore Wonder Woman, and I adore Diana Prince.
But I can never aspire to be a perfect woman or a symbol
like that without any flaws.
[inquisitive music]
Wonder Woman, when she came out,
she's the first woman through the door.
She had to be perfect and good at everything.
But there's more nuance to the character
that I didn't see before.
I really wanted to create Wonder Girl
in response of discovering the world of Wonder Woman.
I wanted somebody that's more human and not as disciplined.
You rarely see female characters
that wear their flaws on their sleeve.
I'm like, "Come on, I can barely get through a day.
I want to see somebody struggle too."
These are some really early concepts,
playing with, like, hairstyle, body type,
random old ladies I see on TV
'cause I have very busy hands. [laughs]
The female characters that I've always responded to
or wanted to be like when I was young
owned their sexuality in a way that empowered them
as opposed to took power away from them.
So like with Wonder Girl, I got called out a few times
for her not having pants.
First of all, I love the silhouette.
So I'm not changing it.
But Beyoncé doesn't have to wear pants.
There's something about Yara that speaks
to women's history that's moved a little
further down the road.
She gets to be more herself.
That strikes me as a little bit more
of a modern struggle than what Diana had to deal with.
narrator: During World War II, Wonder Woman symbolized
a cultural wave of tough, assertive women
in the workforce.
A call for truth, justice, and the American way
rallied the masses.
The industry enlisted superheroes
to support the war effort and spread propaganda
but often laced with racism.
- The heroes had to become patriots.
The need for the characters to stand up
for American values rather than oppose them
changed them completely, but also,
I think, made them even more popular.
- Comic books were being prepared for sailors
who not only needed to be taught how to read
but taught how to do their job.
narrator: During the early '40s,
comic book sales shot up to an industry high
of 25 million copies per month.
An explosion of new heroes heralded a golden age.
DC brought the fan favorites together
and formed the first team-up:
the Justice Society of America.
But by war's end, with no Axis villains left to fight,
a period of postwar blues hit DC.
Superhero popularity faded further
as a shiny new object invaded living rooms.
- My babysitter as a kid,
along with most of my generation,
was television.
We had the "Mickey Mouse Club."
We had "Howdy Doody."
But we also had the "Adventures of Superman."
- Faster than a speeding bullet,
more powerful than a locomotive,
able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
- Look, up in the sky!
It's a bird! - It's a plane!
- It's Superman!
narrator: DC responded to the threat of television
by embracing it.
For six seasons, B-movie star George Reeves
donned the cape and became the face of Superman
for a generation.
- Every day you go to school,
we were all talking about the same shows
that we saw and could discuss them.
And what that provided us with
was a commonality of experience.
- My friend and I were watching a show,
then at the end, it said,
"Superman is based on the copyrighted character
appearing in 'Action Comics' and 'Superman.'"
And the two of us got up, walked to the corner,
and bought our first comics and never stopped.
- You asked for it, now here it is,
the new official Superman T-shirt
with the official Superman insignia.
narrator: As kids sought out Superman at the newsstand,
the lurid covers and gory art of horror comics
also drew their eye and the concern of parents.
[dramatic music]
[siren wailing]
- '50s America was afraid of the Russians, number one,
but it was also afraid of the Martians,
it was afraid of giant ants and jellyfish. [laughs]
It was afraid of gay people
and subterranean sailors writing beat poetry.
There's hardly anything you can name that Americans
weren't afraid of in the '50s.
- "Confidential File."
One of the nation's distinguished news reporters
brings you a factual report on America today.
- This comic book describes a sexual aberration so shocking
that I couldn't mention even the scientific term
on television.
I think there ought to be a law against them.
- There was a growing undercurrent that was
on the precipice of becoming a tsunami,
and that was that comic books were morally depraved,
the root cause of the post-World War II rise
of juvenile delinquency in America.
- Most comics are killers:
they kill time, they kill imagination,
they make the rule of violence the only rule.
narrator: Parental discord reached a fevered pitch
with the publication of "Seduction of the Innocent"
by Dr. Fredric Wertham.
He preached the depravity of comics
and the threat they posed to American youth.
- Wertham was trying so hard.
He would find an image of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson
and somehow map a ton of homosexual overtones to that.
- Dr. Wertham decided there is no reason why two young men
should be living together and working out together
and dressing up in tight costumes
unless there was something going on between them.
- "Seduction of the Innocent" claimed that
comic books like "Batman" and "Wonder Woman"
would encourage their readers to be gay.
In the case of "Wonder Woman," maybe not entirely untrue.
- There were comic book burnings across America.
Siblings were ratting out siblings
to their parents who were then uncovering stashes
of hidden comic books under the bed
or hidden away in the garage or attic.
- There were about 400...
narrator: Fears of a federal investigation
and government regulation drove DC
and other publishers to act.
In 1954, they formed the Comics Code Authority
in an effort to self-censor and preserve their livelihood.
- You couldn't publish any comics
with the word horror or terror in the title or even crime.
They had to make sure that, you know,
good always triumphed over evil.
- Like, you couldn't talk about divorce,
you couldn't present law enforcement
in a negative light.
- Women should not be featured in comic books
in prominent roles.
No zombies, no ghosts.
It was a creative stranglehold.
narrator: The strict censorship
lobotomized the superhero genre.
Many publishers folded as a generation of creators
scrambled for work.
- What the code and what the persecution of comics did
was to make the people who were producing
the comics feel oppressed.
Was not a very happy time in comics.
- They didn't wear their job on their sleeve.
I mean, it was not a respected profession.
So these men in their suits
who could pass for insurance agents
would go in and secretly do comics
for eight hours a day and then get on the train
and come home.
- It's a very lonely business.
You work all alone for hours on end,
and you get strange machinations in your head
because you think about the world outside.
And you're really not a part of it, you know?
And your world is that fantasy world
you're creating on paper.
- And we were kind of concerned,
where is the comic book business going to go?
So we used to hold meetings
to plot what our next move would be.
We had to come up with new ideas.
narrator: While the imagination of artists
and writers knew no bounds,
the editors shouldered the burden
of shepherding creativity from concept to profit.
- I was an editor and a freelance writer for them.
But it was all male.
It was difficult to be friendly with these men
because they looked at me like, "What is she doing here?"
They were very, very hard on artists
because they wanted good stories,
they wanted good artwork,
and they could yell
if they weren't getting what they wanted.
- An editor's like the general of an army.
He lays out a plan for the army
being victorious over the enemy.
In my case, I had to lay out a plan
for me being victorious over the public out there.
I had to get them to spend 10 cents to buy that magazine.
narrator: Desperate for success,
Julius Schwartz decided to revitalize
a long-forgotten superhero, the Flash,
a character who moved at lightning speed.
♪ ♪
- My name is Barry Allen.
I am the fastest man alive.
[exhales]
[electric crackling] - Whoa!
[heroic music]
♪ ♪
- Julie said, "We're gonna be doing superheroes again."
I'm like, "Oh, my God."
And I wasn't thrilled about the idea.
I didn't like the superheroes.
That was a hell of a thing to admit,
but I didn't like doing them.
I don't know.
They were a little flamboyant for me, you know?
narrator: Despite his resistance,
Carmine Infantino's sleek artwork
and sense of scale clicked
with the science fiction approach.
It proved irresistible to a generation
raised on chemistry sets.
- Julie brought a science angle to these characters
in what was, you know, the Jet Age, the Space Age.
He tapped into the kids who wanted
to be astronauts, the kids who wanted to be scientists.
- "The Flash" and "Flash Facts" were because of Julie Schwartz
and him caring about
the science part of science fiction.
It worked for me.
I would rather learn my science from a comic book
than from going to school.
[dramatic music]
narrator: The Flash's alter ego,
police scientist Barry Allen, was more down-to-earth,
unlike the mythic stature of DC's Trinity.
- Superman was Superman.
He was an alien from another planet.
You couldn't be Superman.
Batman had stuff, but he was a really rich guy,
you know, who had stuff.
But the Flash was sort of like us, you know?
He was just an average guy who just happened
to get struck by lightning, and I remember
thinking as a little kid, like,
"I could get struck by lightning.
"That could happen.
I could actually become a superhero that way."
- When I read "The Flash," it wasn't just about
a guy ran fast, it was about a man who could travel
through time and go through different dimensions
and parallel worlds.
So the Flash's canvas was, like, all of space and time.
narrator: 1961 marked a big bang of creativity.
Julius Schwartz introduced a groundbreaking idea
to comics--the existence of parallel worlds.
The theory allowed different versions
of the same characters to meet one another.
From that concept grew a multiverse
that defined superhero stories for years to come.
- Now everybody talks about parallel universes.
Not a lot of people were talking about that.
And certainly for a kid coming across concepts like that,
that was incredible.
It was like someone stuck a stick of dynamite in your ear
and lit it and blew up your head.
[inquisitive music]
- It's this idea that we're not alone.
Yes, we live in this reality,
but there are infinite multiple realities
that basically sit side-by-side one another.
And in those alternate realities,
we have our iconic versions of our characters,
but on other Earths, they might be villains
or they might be married with kids.
It really expands our ability to tell different kinds
of stories but still keep our core nucleus
of iconic characters.
narrator: DC plunged into a catalogue
of unused characters
in what became a rapid procession of reinvention.
This renaissance marked a silver age for the industry,
an era defined by mind-bending artwork
and eye-catching covers.
Many were crafted by artist Joe Kubert,
a Polish immigrant who pushed the envelope
of visual storytelling.
- Storytelling sounds very easy to do, but let me tell you,
it is really hard. [laughs]
It's really, really difficult.
My father could draw with a stick,
and you could still tell what was going on.
He was the type of person, when you're growing up,
that wouldn't put up with a lot of stuff.
You know, he was kinda like growing up with Sgt. Rock.
♪ ♪
narrator: Joe Kubert's dirty, scratchy artwork
brought vitality and emotion to DC war comics,
a genre for those that preferred grounded reality
over superhero fantasy.
Set against the backdrops of the World Wars,
their popularity grew with the introduction of Sergeant Rock,
a stoic John Wayne figure that represented
the moral side of war and the internal conflict
that soldiers face.
- Eventually, every single war comic ended with a title
that said, "Make war no more."
And they became not war stories about the glorification of war,
but they became war stories about the tragedies of war.
- My father's style was very impressionistic.
I mean, he would get the emotions in the characters,
their feelings, what they were emoting, down.
- You've got to kind of feel the drawing that you're doing.
And that's not an easy thing to do.
And I try to invest myself completely
and totally into the story.
And I learned early on that that's what
this whole business is about.
It's not a matter of doing pretty pictures.
It's great if you could do that.
But the whole call for our business is telling a story.
We're communicators. We're storytellers.
- Comic is a medium like no other.
There is an intimacy there that is not present
in movies and TV or whatever.
With comics, you get to decide the pace
at which you absorb the story.
There's something about the comics that allows you
to really be an intimate part of that.
- It could explain why fans are so ravenous, like, you know,
and they take it so personal because it is personal to them.
They've had a personal interaction
with these stories.
You can see why people love it so much.
[upbeat music]
narrator: In the 1950s and '60s,
love and desire brought young girls in droves
to a genre in full bloom: romance.
- They were drawn beautifully,
and the stories were relatable.
Who hasn't gone through heartbreak?
Who hasn't loved someone and not
had somebody return that love?
Tony Abruzzo, who was a wonderful artist,
I wanted him just to work for me
because he did such beautiful, sensitive characters.
narrator: In 1962, DC artist Tony Abruzzo
drew a girl drowning in issue 83 of "Secret Hearts."
One year later, a New York City based pop artist
named Roy Lichtenstein turned that same drawing
into one of his most famous works.
- I go through comic books looking for material which
seems to hold possibilities for a painting
both in its visual impact and in the impact
of its written message, which I rarely make up.
I don't think I'd be capable of making them up.
I know that my work has been accused of looking
like the things that I copy, and it certainly does look
like the things that I copy.
- "The Drowning Woman" was straight out of that book,
"Secret Hearts."
First you feel flattered, and then you feel used.
Since nobody interpreted it as a stolen thing,
it was his artwork.
- 35 million, 36 million, with Mark still at $36 million,
37 million, 38 million.
At $38 million.
- You've taken these panels that these guys have drawn,
we're making, like, 15 bucks a page,
and you're basically just blowing up their work.
That was a tough nut to swallow for a lot of those artists.
narrator: Whether highbrow or lowbrow,
Americans chased one artistic trend after another
with a speed greater than ever.
♪ ♪
Throughout the '60s, counterculture pushed
pop culture to reflect the times.
And in so doing proved DC was out of touch.
A growing competitor tapped into that reality, Marvel.
Editor-in-chief Stan Lee made sure his heroes
looked current on the sales racks,
which set the stage for a lifelong rivalry.
- Years ago, the readers were just interested
in regular fantasy, and our villains
were just some mad men who wanted to rule the world.
But today, our readers,
they're interested in real problems,
and we find that our villains today are the kind of people
who might be causing race riots or fermenting trouble
between different classes.
- Marvel was coming into its own.
This was a time of change.
And their superheroes had quirks.
And they were a little nutty.
- They were weird.
They weren't even particularly heroic at first.
They fought with each other, They bickered.
They were petty.
You know, they caught colds.
They were jealous of each other.
These characters are characters that could be you.
Marvel was very much focused on being,
you know, the world outside your window.
All their stories take place in New York City.
- DC established all of the conventions
of the superhero genre,
and Marvel made a name for themselves
by breaking those conventions.
They couldn't have done that had DC not first said,
"This is what a superhero looks like.
This is what a superhero does."
- DC looked at Marvel like,
"Ah, it's a passing fad, they'll come and go."
They would look at the comics and go, "Well, this art's bad.
I mean, I guess that's what selling comics is--bad art."
- I don't think DC, as a group, got it.
I don't think they had any real understanding
of what Marvel was doing well that they weren't doing.
It was a company that had been the dominant player.
But the Marvel stuff was gaining strength
and the DC stuff was not.
- Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman
during this era were especially bland.
The heroes became more like jolly authority figures,
you know, they became paternal.
narrator: Originally conceived as a vigilante
that struck fear into the hearts of criminals,
the Batman of the '50s and '60s
played in a colorful, juvenile world of fantasy.
Interest and sales plummeted.
As its cancellation neared, a lifeline was cast
when DC licensed the rights to a live-action TV show.
["Batman" theme playing]
- ♪ Batman! ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Batman! ♪
- When the "Batman" TV show came on
on that cold winter night in January of 1966,
I was 14 1/2 years old.
I was an ardent comic book fan.
Nobody was more excited about the "Batman" show
coming on TV than I was.
- ♪ Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na ♪
♪ Batman! ♪
- Remember, Robin, always look both ways.
- There was nothing that creative on television,
and that show showed up fully blown.
It had its look figured out. It had its tone figured out.
The acting was exactly what that show was supposed to be.
- Push yourself away, Robin.
- I took that as a very serious show.
I didn't realize it was funny at all.
There was no comedy in it for me, I thought.
And so it was a great introduction
into the world of Batman.
- Holy human pearls, Batman.
- Correction, Robin-- pearls come from oysters.
You came out of that clam.
- About 20 minutes in, it hits me.
Pow.
Zap.
Whamm.
Oh, my God.
This is a comedy.
They are making a joke out of Batman.
The whole world is laughing at Batman.
And that killed me.
[funky music]
- William Dozier, you know, who's the executive producer
of "Batman," had never read a "Batman" comic
when he got that job.
[uplifting music]
- Well, the fairly obvious idea
was to make it so square
and so serious and so cliché-ridden
and so overdone and yet do it with a certain elegance
and style that it would be funny,
that it would be so corny and so bad
that it would be funny.
- Holy jack in the box!
- For a lot of folks, the bright, happy,
TV Batman was a distraction,
and that's a good distraction.
We all need distractions at some times
from what's going on outside in the real world.
[funky music]
- Here was this completely ludicrous show,
they made it colorful, they made it larger than life,
and they made it a little bit subversive.
- The flower children think we're cool, man.
Like, we turn them on, you know?
- Although it may not be understood
by more literal minds,
in their own way, they're doing what they can
to correct the world's woes with love and flowers.
narrator: While the high adventure and Bat-Gadgets
appealed to kids, adults got their kicks
from the humor and sexual innuendo.
- Would you like to come in
for a glass of milk and cookies?
- Man cannot live by crimefighting alone.
[suggestive fanfare]
[upbeat surf rock music]
narrator: Even though "Batman" caused a flurry
of short-lived excitement,
the TV show became a parody of itself,
and viewers tuned out.
The network cancelled the pun-filled madness
after only three seasons.
No one recognized the show's true creative discovery
until decades later-- that each rendition of Batman
could have a different tone.
- If you look at Batman,
the Batman that was created in 1966
is not the same Batman that exists today.
There were always moments where the creatives
wanted to do something different.
[soft dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Yeah. Look at that. That is great.
I wanted to do a story where
the character Batman had an arc.
I wanted to do an imperfect Batman.
[indistinct chatter]
And I wanted to set him into a mode
that hadn't been quite done,
which was to lean hard into the noir side
of the story and make him the world's greatest detective.
The first days of shooting, they were really
about figuring out how Batman sounded,
how the other characters related to him.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Police section.
- How does a masked man with a cape
walk into a crime scene,
and how do you make that feel real?
And shooting this scene was really, really challenging
and, ultimately, sort of set the tone of the whole movie.
[dark dramatic music]
- Don't make me hurt you.
- You better watch it. [laughs]
You know my reputation.
- There's certain things you get
to do on a Batman movie.
You kind of have to pinch yourself 'cause you're, like,
going, "Oh, well, we're gonna need our version
of the Batmobile."
As a kid, I loved "Batman" '66. I loved Adam West.
And that Futura Batmobile, that concept car,
I thought that was the coolest car ever
with the fire that came out of the back.
And I knew what I wanted to do was a muscle car.
I wanted you to feel it was totally real.
♪ ♪
- The strength of this film is that it delivers
in all of these big moments,
but it really all feels grounded.
He's really dedicated to it feeling real
and being motivated by emotion.
- The story is a very psychological one.
He's basically coping with things
that happened to him as a child.
And he's driven to try and make sense of his life.
And for me, that's what moviemaking is, right?
You go and you try to tell stories because, in doing so,
you're kind of making order and sense of the world.
♪ ♪
narrator: The America of 1968 fell into turmoil.
In a society plagued by the Vietnam War,
civil rights unrest and social injustice,
the DC characters seemed tone-deaf.
They faced their own real danger:
becoming a relic.
[apprehensive music]
- The money is being made from licensing,
the money is being made off toys.
The money is not in the comics.
It's a loss leader for the merchandising.
narrator: DC cashed in $75 million worth
of Batmania merchandising,
a whopping amount for the time,
and a number that business savvy president
Jack Liebowitz seized upon.
In 1969, a corporate takeover targeted DC
for its licensing potential, not its comics.
- It was a whole other ballgame that was coming,
and people were afraid, they really were.
They didn't know what their jobs were going
to be as a result of that.
narrator: Liebowitz forced out a number of DC legends,
including Batman co-creator Bill Finger,
who died destitute in 1974.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
no longer worked at the company.
Several acrimonious lawsuits over rights and credit
for Superman soured the relationship.
The family atmosphere surrendered
to corporate structure.
The power once held by the superheroes
shifted to the new executives in charge,
Warner Communications.
- The reason they bought DC Comics was very simple:
they wanted the rights to Superman.
They felt that was the only comic book character
capable of sustaining a blockbuster movie
and the merchandising that would go along with it.
Only if you look at it through the lens of the times
can anything possibly make sense.
Nobody understood the value of these characters
or thought they had any worth.
They looked down their nose at the creators,
generally speaking, and saw no value, saw no value.
narrator: The days of DC Comics were numbered,
and the fate of its universe hung in the balance.
If America could land a man on the moon,
how hard could it be to make superheroes relevant again?
This looked like a job for...
Fans.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪