[soft dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Throughout history,
there have been universal characters
that we told stories about
as a way of demonstrating morals
or challenges that you face.
There were religious characters,
mythic characters, kings and queens.
Superheroes are what they are now,
and it's why I believe in them as much as I do.
[dramatic music]
- Heroism is just very simple.
♪ ♪
Anytime somebody uses courage
when they're afraid
in the name of something good.
- In the movies,
superheroes are icons of virtue,
symbols of our highest ideals.
- I got really obsessed with the comics,
obviously, once I started doing the research.
And I love them.
- Oh, I still play with action figures, man,
all the time.
- There isn't a day that goes by
when you don't walk past someone in a Batman T-shirt.
- But the leap from page to screen
took decades and a lot of persuasion.
- A huge part of why
there were so few comic book adaptations
in the '80s and '90s is you had a lot
of people in Hollywood that didn't believe
in the source material.
- Studio execs, they looked down their nose
at the creators and said comic book characters
didn't have much value.
- As Hollywood learned to make superheroes fly,
passionate creators
transformed comics from child's play
to sophisticated entertainment for grown-ups.
- People who are too precious about the characters
are never going to stretch the boundaries.
- There was something about the writing and the art.
It was just so smart and daring.
- That rebellious spirit
plus the devotion of lifelong fans,
pushed superheroes to the center
of popular culture
and our collective imagination.
- What would it be like if I could be a hero,
if I could change the world?
That's at the core of the superhero stories.
There's something in our moral compass
that tells us it's OK to want to fight for what's right.
That's really the power. That's really being super.
♪ ♪
- The first superhero to get a screen adaptation
was not the one you might think.
Captain Marvel had all of Superman's powers
and outsold him in the 1940s.
The comic told the story of a boy
who could turn into a superhero
with a single word.
- Shazam!
- And in 1941, Captain Marvel starred in his own
12-part movie serial
that transfixed young audiences
at Saturday matinees.
But it would take 78 years, a name change, and a short run
at TV before Captain Marvel made it to the multiplex
in 2019 as "Shazam."
The film revived the timeless tale
of a powerless child who becomes
a superpowered adult.
- Shazam!
♪ ♪
- In everyone's life at some point,
we had dreams of becoming something like a superhero.
Stronger or faster or more heroic in the world.
- All hands on deck.
[together] Shazam!
- This movie's touching base with that inner child
in all of us.
♪ ♪
- Roll, please! Rolling!
[indistinct chatter]
- All right, fam-jam, you know what time it is.
Let's jump in. Let's jump in.
So going into the second movie,
this was one of my favorite sets I've ever been on,
of any project I've ever worked on.
- Mary, why do you even have a job?
You think Wonder Woman has a job?
- Stop. - No, no, seriously.
Do you think she wears a ponytail
and glasses and, like, nobody recognizes her
and she's, like, an accountant or something?
- Just stop.
- It's a really fun role to play because
I just get to keep being a kid.
[all screaming] - Who are you people?
- I said don't freak out! Look at me.
And video games kind of keeps me
in that childish play mode, and I think
that when your job is to play as a child,
then you want to kind of stay in that playful place.
[laughter]
This shouldn't feel like work.
We're playing dress up and make believe,
and we're getting paid for it.
That was one of the greatest things
about the first movie was hearing people
walk out of the theater
and they just felt better about life.
They just felt lighter.
There's so much that is wrong
with this world right now, and we have opportunities
as artists and as creators and as entertainers
to help lift that burden
just a little bit, man, just a little bit.
We need to 'cause it's dark out right now.
♪ ♪
- 50 years before Shazam made it to the big screen,
the world stood at a different precipice.
♪ ♪
[crowd chanting]
- As a young person, it just felt like
there was no answer anywhere.
What do you do in the world
when there is a prevailing culture
where the enemy is sometimes faceless?
How do you fight that fight?
- And that's when I was beginning to feel like
I was outgrowing my comic books.
And just at that time,
the Marvel age really truly erupted.
- As Marvel launched its first Black superhero
and took on pressing social problems,
the campy shenanigans of Adam West's "Batman"
felt out of step and painfully square.
- At that moment in time in the mid '60s,
except to the few of us who were real comic book readers,
the world perception of what Batman was was this show.
And that was what was so disturbing
to me about it,
and I made a vow, somehow, someday,
some way I am going to show
the world the true Batman.
- Young fans like Uslan, driven by their deep love
of the characters and devotion to the medium,
would start a new age in American comics.
- Every generation deserves to have characters
that fit within their generation.
So being kids of the '60s, we had wanted very much
to do some important stories.
- It wasn't like we were the future
Young Turks plotting a revolution,
but on the other hand, we were the Young Turks
plotting the revolution.
We were looking to what
the future of the field could be.
- Writer Denny O'Neil and artist Neal Adams
set out to change the comics landscape
by putting the real world in their panels.
- They took two superheroes who were really failing.
[rock music]
Green Arrow representing a liberal outlook,
and Green Lantern with a conservative outlook
get in a pickup truck and hit the road
to try to discover America.
- Over 14 installments, Green Lantern and Green Arrow
come face to face with big national issues,
like overpopulation, discrimination,
pollution, and drug addiction.
- We both grew up at the time that we grew up,
and we were very angry at society.
That was a time of change, remember the '60s,
big changes in America, and that was right there
in that comic book. Bam, right in your face.
- That was a turning point for DC Comics
that began to be reflected
in other comics and other heroes
and being daring and being bold.
- Legendary Marvel artist Jack Kirby
came to DC in 1970
to write his spiritual saga "New Gods."
[dramatic music]
- It was basically his epic, his retelling of the Bible.
This is how everything began.
This is how it's all going to end.
This is what good is. This is what evil is.
Every page has 1,000 concepts
that could launch 1,000 story ships.
It's the most inspiring piece of art ever.
- In 1972, Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson
grafted the soul of a hero to the body of a monster,
with "Swamp Thing."
- Wrightson's art was just emotional
and weird and beautiful all at the same time.
And Len's writing had what I call a pulp poetry to it.
It's a classic that, for me, still stands
as one of the very best things that's come
out of DC in all these years.
- But in a shortsighted attempt to modernize
a member of the DC pantheon, male editors
stripped Wonder Woman of her superpowers
and trained her in Kung Fu.
- They had made her give up her costume,
and she was gonna be Groovy Diana Prince.
She's like a spy. She's modern.
She's groovy.
And I was like, "I don't want to read this comic book."
- What do you want? - ERA!
- When do you want it? - Now!
- DC's blunder caught the attention
of a rising leader in the feminist movement,
Gloria Steinem.
- Wonder Woman was very feminist and ruled
with strength and justice and love
and was meant to be an antidote to the violence
in male-dominated comics.
And we decided it would be interesting
to run her for president.
So it says "Peace and justice in '72."
- Since you brought it up, wave it in that camera.
- The debut issue of "Ms." Magazine
featured an essay about Wonder Woman
as a model of strength and self-sufficiency.
DC got the memo.
Wonder Woman got her mojo back,
and a few years later, ABC started looking
for the perfect actress to bring the mythic figure
to life on TV.
- I really got to create my character.
There was nothing before me.
And I had no idea what I was doing.
So there was a certain naivete.
I did a lot of exploration on the mythology
and what I could bring to this character.
And it wasn't really on the page.
It was people like Betty Friedan,
Gloria Steinem, and the suffragists.
I am woman, hear me roar kind of feminism,
that was Wonder Woman.
[explosion]
[upbeat music]
- ♪ Wonder Woman ♪
- In the fall of 1975, Carter's iconic "Wonder Woman"
blazed onto TV screens, setting young hearts
across the nation on fire.
- There had not been a role model
that you could emulate.
And I was right at the age where
pretending to be someone on the playground yard
was a huge deal.
All of the kids would run out, and they would be Superman
or they'd be He-Man
or they'd be something like that.
And when "Wonder Woman" came out,
it was such a revelation.
♪ ♪
[gunshots]
That suddenly, you were desperate to be
the one that claimed that you were Wonder Woman.
I got a chance to experience
exactly what the boys were experiencing,
not in a boy-like way.
I was having my own absolute wish fulfillment.
- You can all be what you truly want to be.
You're all very special.
And you're all different.
- Lynda was like the every woman
that you wished you could be.
- I never played Wonder Woman.
I only played Diana.
The key to Wonder Woman
is that she, as Diana, was relatable.
[phone ringing]
- Lynda Carter is famous for inventing
the spin where she turned from Diana Prince
to Wonder Woman on the TV show.
With the explosion of light and the transformation
from one sort of neat character
to this powerful superhero,
I was reminded of the power
to become something bigger than yourself.
And I think even at a young age,
it was something that spoke to me.
It was something that resonated with me.
[soft dramatic music]
- It isn't just putting a woman
in a superhero costume.
It's about somehow convincing the world
that there is a better way.
- You really do believe that people can learn
to change for the better?
- Yes.
Where I was raised, we were taught
that good must triumph over evil
and that women and men can learn.
♪ ♪
- "Wonder Woman's" message of equality
reverberated around the world.
While back at home, another popular show
fielded a whole squad of superheroes
whose adventures taught the value of teamwork.
- In the Great Hall of the Justice League,
there are assembled
the world's four greatest heroes.
- "Super Friends" was TV's first team up
of all of these characters.
It was the first time that I'm not just
going to get a Superman story, and I'm not just
going to get a Wonder Woman story,
and I'm not just going to get a Batman story.
I'm gonna get all of these characters together.
It's kind of obvious that, right,
that we would all grow up and want to do
comic book shows and movies.
- But to many comics readers, the fourth member
of this superhero dream team still felt like a fifth wheel.
- If my aquatic telepathy
works on these strange Exxorian fish,
I should be able to stop Darkon's men.
- Aquaman was considered a joke of a character,
and I remember when I started writing the "Aquaman" book,
and people told me,
"Why are you wasting your time on Aquaman?"
But as a writer, it's just much more fun to me
to take an obscure character and crack them open
and look at them and really get inside them
because it hadn't been done.
If I look at Aquaman and say if his world and his stories
are as rich and deep as Batman and Superman
and everyone else, what are they?
- Geoff Johns' 2011 retelling of the Aquaman story
filled in the under-loved hero's world
on land and beneath the sea.
John's book would become the blueprint
for a 2018 screen adaptation
with a star who bore little resemblance
to the title character, at least on the surface.
- And I'm like, "Who? You want me to play what?"
All I can just think is "White, white
blonde hair, shaved. Not me."
And they tell me the whole pitch.
And I was like, "Wow, hell yeah."
- His father is a lighthouse keeper,
and his mother is the queen of Atlantis.
And there's a lot of tension between these two worlds.
- I mean, that resonated with me instantly,
being born in Hawaii and raised in Iowa,
being split between my parents.
- On the land, he feels like an outsider,
but in Atlantis, he's the heir to the throne.
- And the only one that can walk between those two
is myself, and it's the guy that doesn't want to do it.
- How many times do I have to tell you?
I don't want to be king.
- And he's gotta learn to become
the bridge between these two worlds
to save the world from going to war with Atlantis.
♪ ♪
- Aquaman needed to get a little bit of a boost,
and so I played it completely different.
- Here we go. And action.
[dramatic music]
- Bang. I hope we can get it all.
- [grunts]
He's a brawler.
He's someone that just headbutts
and gets in bar fights.
He's blue collar. They're drinkers, you know?
Not one to talk about their emotions.
And I resonated with that.
- Your mother always knew you'd be the one
to unite our two worlds. - Just stop.
- But also that weakness, his humanity
is what's going to make him a king.
- A king fights only for his nation.
You fight for everyone.
[cheers and applause]
- "Aquaman," directed by James Wan,
became the highest-grossing film in DC's history,
netting over a billion dollars at the box office worldwide.
The victory of this once-belittled superhero
showed hit comic book movies
start with the source material.
And strong stories were the priority for a new leader
who came to DC in 1976.
28-year-old Jenette Kahn had no comic book experience
when Warner hired her to replace Carmine Infantino
as publisher.
- There was a lot of fear and loathing
that I had been hired.
How did she come here?
And she's not a comic book person,
and she's young, and she's a woman.
- This was a company that was completely inbred and insular.
It had never had an outsider in a management position.
It had never had a woman in a management position.
Except for the fact that she was smart and Jewish,
she had pretty much nothing
in common with all of the people
she was inheriting as her team.
- In fact, DC corporate hired Kahn because
of her successful track record with children's magazines,
a clear indicator of who they thought
their product was for.
- Comics were considered a disposable,
ephemeral medium, simply for kids.
And there was a real sense of shame about working
in the comic book industry.
But I came to DC with a very important feeling
that comics were an art form.
We're in the business of telling stories
in pictures and words,
and if we think of comics that way,
we can tell any kind of story.
- One untold story was long overdue.
To script its first ever series
featuring an African-American superhero in the title role,
DC hired writer Tony Isabella.
- I wanted to do, basically, my ultimate Black superhero.
I wanted someone who would be a role model,
someone kids could relate to.
He was an Olympic athlete
who gave the Black Power salute
at the Olympics.
Those guys had their athletic careers ruined.
So he became a schoolteacher,
fighting crime in the inner city.
That was Jefferson Pierce, Black Lightning.
- "Black Lightning" struck the stands in 1977.
- I remember opening that bag,
and inside was the first issue of "Black Lightning."
And I felt something that I had never felt before.
I think, for the first time, I felt invested.
I could relate to almost everything
that was on the page.
This was a very human story,
and it was a very immediate story.
It was very sociopolitical.
It was all of those things.
- DC had caught up, but not even a new superhero
could turn the failing comics market around.
♪ ♪
- The newsstands of America were drying up
as a place to sell magazines.
Comic book sales were plummeting.
- Americans were moving to the suburbs
where chain stores refused to give floor space
to spinner racks.
Comics were returned unsold
and DC's investments wasted.
Fighting to regain market share,
Khan doubled down.
The company churned out new comics in a campaign
they dubbed The DC Explosion.
- Let's really try to co-opt as much newsstand space
as we can by putting out as many comics as we can.
We trumpeted quantity over quality.
- In the winter of 1978, a blizzard
of historic proportions knocked out deliveries,
while skyrocketing inflation drove DC's staggering sales
into the ground.
Overnight, the DC Explosion became the DC implosion.
The company laid off much of its staff
and abruptly canceled 17 comic book series,
including "Black Lightning."
- Nobody who was working at DC in the mid '70s
thought the industry was going to be around very long.
Something had to be done. Answers had to be found.
- With DC's future hanging in the balance,
Warner gambled big on a movie about the superhero
who started it all.
- Nobody thought that this would make
a very good picture.
Everybody, I guess, had the memory
of the "Batman" television series,
and they thought "It's just gonna be campy,
and we can't have two and a half hours of camp."
- Even with famed "Godfather" writer Mario Puzo attached,
the movie had trouble getting off the ground.
Untested flying technology
and a director change midstream
pushed the schedule behind and the budget into the red.
When the new director Richard Donner came on,
he began to course correct, starting with
the tone of the script.
- They had a different approach
to Superman than I did.
Their approach was kind of a parody on a parody.
I said, "This is Superman. This is apple pie.
This is Americana."
It was a part of American history,
and to me, it had its own sense of reality.
The mission was to keep it straight.
- With the screenplay in surgery,
an intensive search began for the actor
who would embody the Man of Steel.
- Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and every major American star.
My problem was, I would have
a very difficult time seeing them fly.
If you didn't believe Superman could fly,
then you didn't believe Superman was real,
and I felt we should go for an unknown.
- Thank you very much for finding the time
for this interview.
I realize there must be many questions
about me the world would like to know the answers to.
- Christopher Reeve was known mainly for his work on stage
and in soap operas, but his earnest take
on Superman aligned perfectly with Donner's grounded vision.
- What sets Superman apart is that he's
got the kind of maturity
or he's got the innocence, really,
to look at the world very, very simply.
When he says, "I'm here to fight for truth..."
"For justice, and the American way."
- Everybody goes... [chuckles]
You know? But he's not kidding.
- The way to make this movie
was to treat it like it was important,
like it was an important piece of American mythology.
- By the way, real doesn't mean grim and gritty.
Real just means emotionally real.
And with "Superman," it's normal people reacting
to something extraordinary.
- [screaming]
- Look up there!
- What the hell is that?
- Easy, miss. I've got you.
- You've got me? Who's got you?
[triumphant music]
♪ ♪
- "Superman" swept up $300 million in ticket sales,
won an Academy Award for special effects,
and launched a chain of blockbuster sequels.
- On January 26, 1979,
I went to see "Superman," the movie.
And I went in aimless and not knowing
what the future is and being afraid of the future.
When I was a kid, I didn't have any friends
because I was changing schools all the time.
I went into that movie theater
just feeling like no one cared about me, no one saw me,
no one heard me. Superman cares about everybody.
[tender music]
He doesn't care whether you're rich or poor
or where you come from.
And I came out of that movie convinced that
whatever I was going to do with the rest of my life,
it was going to have to have something to do with Superman.
- If the Chris Reeve, Dick Donner movie
hadn't succeeded that year,
DC might have ended up
with a very, very minimal publishing schedule,
and the company that you think of might not have survived.
- Riding high on "Superman's" success,
DC embraced a new way to reach readers.
[rock music]
♪ ♪
The comic shop started in the 1970s
as a spot for teenage fans to buy, trade, and argue
about old back issues.
By the early 1980s,
driven by demand from older readers,
new shops were opening across the country.
- That really became the whole new face
of comic book distribution.
It's really what saved comics from oblivion.
- Comics were hot.
But for many, DC's tangled continuity
was a barrier to entry.
- The problem was a lot of the Marvel fans
did not understand what DC was about
because they didn't understand why they had so many
multiple characters that were all the same.
We were dealing with things like the multiverse.
Words that are very common today,
but back then were not.
And it suddenly hits me, we need to change this.
Let's begin the universe fresh today.
It had to be revolutionary.
It had to be something that everyone would go,
"Oh, my God, they're serious?
They're going to do that? That's impossible."
- In the most cataclysmic crossover of DC's history,
Marv Wolfman and artist George Perez
ended the DC multiverse
with a 12-issue standalone event
that killed off characters and worlds
until a single Earth was left.
- They took the unprecedented step
of deciding we're gonna wipe all of the baggage away.
We're gonna restart and unify them
into a DC Universe for the first time.
- "Crisis on Infinite Earths" happened,
and the Flash died at the end of it.
[dramatic music]
And that was the first time I ever cried in a comic book.
And I remember realizing at that time,
like, I'm so connected to this character.
And now I have to go back and learn everything about them.
And in a way, his end was my beginning
- Wolfman's decision to burn down the multiverse
gave other creators a clean slate
to breathe new life and new depth
into classic DC characters.
- So coming out of "Crisis on Infinite Earths,"
we have a brand new Earth.
Well, let's reintroduce the characters
as if they had not existed before.
So DC brought John Byrne over from Marvel.
He was the biggest talent in comics at the time.
Let's give him "Superman." Do it completely from scratch.
And think about what is your life
really like if those are your abilities,
if those have your powers,
if that's how you perceive the world
with your superpowers.
Same with "Wonder Woman,"
let's give her to George Perez.
- George Perez's "Wonder Woman"
was my everything.
His run on "Wonder Woman" is ultimately what drove me
to apply to art school.
To this day, I can't get over the amount of information
he put on a page.
I'd never seen comic pages
that were so dense with panels.
But what really struck me about the George Perez stuff
is he was a really good actor.
By that I mean, his characters who are different sizes
and shapes, look differently, and they stood
and they dressed and they acted
and they behaved and they fought in ways
that were unique to them.
And to me, that was the magic of George Perez.
It was a way of thinking.
It was a sensibility where each character was unique.
And he was gonna bring out that uniqueness with the art.
- One of the most important decisions
I think I made at DC was to commission
the people who turned comics into a sophisticated art form,
and that began with bringing Frank Miller over to DC.
[soft dramatic music]
- Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns"
is a sharply modern take on the Batman legend,
set against the harsh reality of the Reagan regime
and filled with the fury of the times.
- Most of the basic assumptions of comics,
up until the past two years, were all
pretty much set in the '40s.
And everything had to happen in a very benevolent world
where you can always trust the cops,
you can always trust your elected officials,
you can always trust your parents.
It's unfortunate that for so many years,
the basic idea of superheroes
was made impossible by putting it in a world
where it didn't need any.
- Miller reinvents Batman as a middle-aged loner,
angry at corrupt officials and willing to use
any means necessary to expose them.
- I felt that there was no way to really do Batman
without addressing the fact that, at least at the start
of the story, he's an anachronism.
There's something very antiquated
about the whole notion,
and the effort of "Dark Knight"
was to revive it, to make the idea work
in a modern context.
- When Batman's war on gangs becomes an embarrassment
to Washington, he finds himself
up against an unlikely foe, Superman,
drawn as an enforcer
for the Reagan government police state.
- It's a book that defied all the conventions
of what we had done previously.
It was political, social commentary driven.
It was further off any model sheet
for what Batman had been, the look of the character.
Each individual decision there was pretty courageous.
And there's no question, Jenette and I
spent lots of years debating back and forth
on individual choices,
I would have been more careful, and she was more daring.
- It was the generation of creators coming in
who had grown up reading comic books,
and now they were able to do their expressions of it.
These are kind of political works
that had a point of view that were not in step
with what was going on at the time.
- "Watchmen" was a disruptive look
at superheroes themselves
by a young English writer named Alan Moore.
- What we want to do is to actually examine
the implications of the superhero,
if these absurd characters were real,
just what they'd do to the world.
If you've got a character of Superman's level and power
working for the Americans,
what would American foreign policy be like?
Perhaps be a little bit more adventurous,
and I should imagine that Russian foreign policy
would be a little less adventurous.
- Moore sets the story in an alternate 1985,
under the looming threat of nuclear war.
The only super being and America's protector,
Dr. Manhattan, has abandoned Earth
to a handful of costumed vigilantes,
one of whom annihilates the city
of New York in the name of uniting the world.
- "Watchmen" is not written by someone
who loves superhero comics. [chuckles]
Watchmen is written by someone who knows superhero comics
deeply and respects them,
but it's from someone who can look at them at a distance
and say here are the great noble themes
that you've actually been looking at.
- To me, Alan Moore's "Watchmen" is up there
with any other work of literature.
Like, I love it. I've read it 100 times.
The deconstruction of the superhero
is something that was very influenced
by what he did.
- In 2005, Time Magazine ranked "Watchmen"
one of the best 100 novels of the 20th century.
It has never been out of print.
Moore's book would ignite a literary explosion at DC
under the leadership of Karen Berger.
- I was sort of carving a path a little bit under the radar.
I had started scouting out writers
in England, particularly.
- The British comic industry was a step ahead
of us in mature comics.
Karen saw that and was like,
"Why don't we just turn that into an entire brand?"
And so it was a British invasion.
She brought in that generation of British writers,
and they created adult comics.
- By the time DC started looking,
there was a whole generation of us
who were just ready to go
and had been reading comics all our lives.
To have the hand of Superman reach down from the clouds
and to know that DC Comics was on the phone,
it just felt like winning a billion dollars.
- One of the writers Berger met
in her search for new talent
was a persistent young man by the name of Neil Gaiman.
Gaiman pitched a story based on an obscure character
from the company's archives, the Sandman,
ruler of the realm of dreams.
- OK, you've got this character
who was gonna be Lord of Dreams.
Then why haven't we ever seen him
all through the DC Universe?
Because at that point, everything you were doing
was in the DC universe.
So I thought, "Well, we'd never seen him."
I thought, "Well, maybe he's been locked up somewhere."
And suddenly I had the shape of a beginning of something.
I had the idea of this sort of naked man
in a glass box just prepared to wait
until all the people who kept him prisoner
were long dead and forgotten.
♪ ♪
And of course, I started "Sandman" in a state
of absolute delirious terror
because I'd never had to do was write one story a month.
The reason why the first storyline,
"Preludes and Nocturnes," was eight issues long
was I was convinced I would get the phone call from Karen
saying, you know, "It's really not selling,
we're gonna stop it at number 12."
Only when we got to number eight,
we were selling more than anything comparable
had ever sold, and suddenly, I thought,
"OK, I can actually let myself now believe,
"Let myself dream that I'm gonna
get to the end of the story."
- Finally free, the Sandman takes revenge on his captors
and discovers he must answer for his own sins too.
- There was nothing like "Sandman"
when "Sandman" came out.
It was emotional, but fantastic.
Cerebral, but dark.
It drew female readers
who didn't realize that there were comics
that they would enjoy.
- Neal was playing against type
for a character named Death
and making her a young, attractive woman,
a Goth, which was also very much in sync
with the times.
- When you were in high school,
you could give a copy of "Sandman"
and look cool still, you know?
You could still wear your jacket
and smoke your cigarettes and read "Sandman."
Like, that was legitimate. Comics were cool again.
They were rebellious. They were dangerous.
They weren't childlike.
They were a sign that you were on the edge of art,
rather than in the middle of it.
- The series ran for 75 issues
and sold over 7 million copies,
but it was only one of a growing list
of titles edited by Karen Berger
that veered further off page of traditional comics.
- My goal was to really do stories
that just kind of shook things up,
that broke with the status quo,
that challenged people's perceptions
of what a comic story could be.
- One of the things that Karen brought to comics
was the fact that she wasn't a hardcore comic book fan.
She had her unique perspective on story
that wasn't bound by anybody's tradition.
- And Jenette was a real role model for me.
She set the tone and set the stage
and was fearless and brave, in terms of the risk taking.
- And it was at that moment I said, "You should really
be editor of your own line."
- And I'm like, in a heartbeat, I said yes.
- And that's when Vertigo was born.
[dramatic music]
- I liked the feeling that you get from that word.
You're uncomfortable.
It's associated with fear of heights.
And the whole thing about Vertigo
is overcoming those fears, going into those dark places,
and taking chances and taking creative risks.
- There was a feeling in the air
that it was a special place
where you got to stretch yourself creatively
and push boundaries.
- It was a great way of working.
I think just giving people the opportunity
to tell that one story.
What is the thing you've always--what's the thing
that's most expressive of you?
- "The Invisibles" changed history in comics.
I mean, it created the first drag queen superhero.
To have this sort of character,
this kind of visibility in the mid '90s,
that's really extraordinary.
- I think if there's any thread
that fits through what a Vertigo title is,
what a Vertigo comic is,
they all deal with...
humanity
in all its facets.
And genre is really used as a backdrop
to tell stories about the uncomfortable side
of life, disturbing parts of life,
about people on the fringes.
You know, stories about all of us.
- You really have to hand it to Karen.
It's her editorial vision for comics
to be taken as seriously as a storytelling medium
as any other.
That comics can do anything and have to be allowed
to do anything, to go into whatever territory
any writer or artist deems appropriate.
- Vertigo's boundary-breaking stories
claim new cultural cachet and market potential
and needed a format to match.
- We said to each other, "Why should we
"just let a comic book come out and then disappear?
"How can comic books stay on a shelf?
How can comic books actually even go on a shelf?"
- To get comics into bookstores,
the company seized on a brand new genre--
the graphic novel.
With longer stories published in one volume,
it was a move that would pay dividends for years to come.
- Between the trade paperbacks and the graphic novels,
we turned publishing around to be a profit center.
We made comics permanent.
- By the mid '90s, comic books had grown up,
but comic book movies were stalled in the past.
One young fan made it his personal mission
to change that.
- Now, if I tell you today that as a kid in my 20s,
I waltzed in, and I bought the rights
to Batman from DC Comics, you're gonna go,
"Well, that's impossible."
And they're right. Today, could never happen.
But at that moment in time, nobody else understood
the value of these characters.
- In 1979, Uslan had teamed up with experienced producer
Ben Melniker and bought the film rights
to the caped crusader from DC.
It would take nearly a decade for cameras to roll.
- I was turned down by every single studio in Hollywood.
They said, "You're out of your mind.
"You can't do serious comic book movies.
You can't do dark superheroes."
- But then Frank Miller comes along and does
"The Dark Knight Returns."
And that reset Batman in people's imaginations
from Adam West to the modern, dark, complex
avenger that we know this day.
- The whole key was Tim Burton.
- Director Tim Burton was known for off-kilter hits
like "Pee-wee's Big Adventure,"
not action movies,
but his empathetic take on Batman sold Uslan.
- It was Tim who said, "If we're gonna make
"a serious Batman movie,
this movie cannot be about Batman."
This movie must be about Bruce Wayne.
- We were interested in not exploring,
you know, the cliched aspects of a comic book,
but trying to get a little bit more out of it.
What we were interested in doing
was showing a hero who has problems.
It does make it more human.
- But when Burton cast Michael Keaton
in the title role, Uslan's confidence wobbled.
- I said "That's great." That's a great joke.
I said I could see the poster now, "Mr. Mom" is "Batman."
There's a dark and serious Batman.
And Tim had the explanation.
I've worked with Michael Keaton on Beetlejuice.
We can create a portrayal of Bruce Wayne
so driven, so obsessed to the point of being psychotic...
- Now what do you think? You think I'm qualified?
- That audiences will go, "Yes, that guy would work.
That guy would do that."
- 67, take one. - Action.
- Burton and his design team conjured a brooding,
broken Gotham, swirling with menace.
- "Batman" '89 was really a master class
from mood to darkness.
The first time you see Batman in that film,
what are you seeing?
You're seeing the silhouette of a bat come down
on two guys that just robbed someone.
And those two should be very, very fearful.
♪ ♪
- What are you? - I'm Batman.
- They took Batman to his dark comic book roots.
The story of a very damaged man.
If you're going to dress up as a bat at night
and put fear into the hearts of criminals,
what type of person is that? What makes him be that way?
- Bruce Wayne, his tendency to be
a rather internal guy
who just kind of flips occasionally,
you know, the lid kind of comes off every once in a while.
- Now you want to get nuts? Come on!
Let's get nuts.
Until he's Batman, in which case,
it weirdly becomes controlled.
- Excuse me.
Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?
- It was an incredible, incredible moment in time.
For a comic book fan who had grown up ridiculed,
seeing this being elevated
to global blockbuster status.
- The crowd started gathering over the weekend
in anticipation of a movie premiere
so big it had to be held in two theaters.
- And I said, "I think what I've learned here
"is if you don't believe them when they tell you how bad
"you are, just believe in yourself and your work,
you'll do great."
- I think Michael Keaton far surpassed what you expect.
He's gonna be the new Batman,
the new wave Batman of the '90s.
- "Batman" in 1989 is not only just
the most successful movie of that year,
but that bat symbol is everywhere.
You can't buy blank T-shirts to print on
because every black blank T-shirt has already
been committed somewhere.
- Fans of Philadelphia can line up for Batman dos.
- A whole catalog of Batman memorabilia.
In fact, there is even a 1-800-BATMAN number in here
to get your merchandise to you faster.
- The adventures of the caped crusader
are fueling a $400 million industry that's growing
by 25% each year.
[electronic music]
- Bat mania catapulted comics into the new decade,
where it found a whole new kind of fan.
- '90s was a very bloated time in comic book history,
a period of interest solely from collectors.
And how much is this comic book going to be worth?
Do you have the issue with the special bag
and the card inside?
- And at the 27th annual international comic convention
in San Diego, a comic book sold for $180,000.
- It doesn't really matter about the comic.
It matters of how much money it costs
and how much money it's worth.
- They buy them for investment. The fun is out of it.
- Feeding the frenzy,
publishers hype their top artists
and pumped out collectible one-offs.
- Oh, I have such a soft spot for '90s comics.
It seemed really exciting at the time
because the artists seemed to be the rock star.
A lot of them, I never even read,
I just pored over the artwork.
- Jim Lee was one of Marvel's superstar artists.
His "X-Men" number one sold 8 million copies,
a Guinness World Record.
- Because the artists were so hot, some of the artists
felt like we don't need writers.
Why are we sharing our profits with writers
when we could come up with these same kind of stories?
- Early in 1992, Lee and Marvel's other top artists
quit and joined forces to form Image Comics.
- We were six, seven artists, depending on which version
you go with, a bunch of headstrong kids,
really, in our mid-twenties.
And we were just going around telling these corporations,
"Screw you guys, we're not going to work for you."
- In its first four months of operation,
the upstart company pushed DC into third place
for the first time.
With its reputation on the line,
America's oldest comics outfit needed
to grab back the spotlight.
- We had an emergency meeting where we got everybody in.
All the writers, all the artists
on four titles of Superman,
all working towards a common goal.
It's not about you.
It's about Superman and what we think
is best for Superman.
Every meeting that we ever had when we would get stuck,
Jerry Ordway would holler out, "Let's just kill him."
Well, he said it that day.
And I said, "OK, wise guys, if we kill him,
what happens then?"
[ominous music]
♪ ♪
- Teasers began to appear across all the Superman titles
in the summer of 1992.
Someone or something was coming
for the Man of Steel.
- Has the Man of Steel met his match?
An editor at DC Comics says Superman will die November 18.
Mike Carlin says the November comic book will show
the demise of the costumed crime fighter
during a fight to save Metropolis.
- Oh, good. I'm an anti-Superman fan.
I don't like him.
He's like a boy scout compared to other superheroes.
- This from a guy who wears a tattoo
of a bad guy, the Joker.
Teenagers these days
prefer more violent characters,
ones like the Punisher,
Wolverine, the Infinity War.
- With everybody out there being antiheroes,
and Superman being the boy scout
and the cornball,
we basically said,
"Let's show the world what it would be like
if we took him away."
- Leaving a trail of destruction
and mangled Justice League characters in its wake,
Superman's nemesis bore down on Metropolis
for the final contest.
- Every week a new Superman comic book hits the stores.
For the last five weeks, the story of Doomsday
has been building.
- By far the bestselling book right now.
- It sold out in just a couple hours.
- Newspapers wrote editorials. Fans wrote letters.
- They were all saying, "How can you kill Superman?
How can you kill Superman?"
And I said, "When was the last time
you bought a Superman comic?"
"Oh, it's been 20, 30 years."
I said, "You killed Superman."
If you're not gonna water the flower, it's gonna die.
- Well, today is the day that Superman meets
an unsuper fate, as DC Comics releases 3 million copies
of the Doomsday issue.
- It's definitely surprising.
I would never guess they would kill him.
- I think it's long overdue, actually.
Because he's not in touch with the real world.
[soft dramatic music]
- I'm gonna cry.
I'm sad. I don't want the guy to go.
- The Man of Steel has proven to be as vulnerable
as the mere mortals who looked up to him
for more than half a century.
Superman died Wednesday.
- DC sold over 6 million copies of issue number 75,
including a poly-wrapped platinum collector's edition
and several deluxe variants.
For the next four months,
all four Superman titles went dark.
- Not soon after that, they say,
"Hey, what can we do with Batman?
"Let's break his back.
"Let's bring Bane in, soup him up with venom."
Just kind of like, LeBron James, just boom.
- As the collector's market boiled hotter,
DC, Marvel, and Image ramped up the sex
and violence in a fevered competition
for eyeballs and dollars.
- There wasn't a whole lot of good versus evil.
It was more like every comic was a wrestling match,
and how can we make each issue more outrageous
than the previous one?
This didn't sit great with me, personally,
nor did it with Alex Ross.
- Artist Alex Ross and writer Mark Waid
came to DC with complementary talents
and a shared belief in what superheroes stood for.
♪ ♪
- From about the age of four or five
is when I first became introduced to superheroes.
I liked the embodiment
of what Superman was supposed to be--
all things good and all things strong
in equal measure.
Every other character
was less powerful than this guy
who could effectively make his will action.
- Alex and I were not interested
in cynical characters and cynical, dark comics.
I was interested in these characters
as hopeful.
I was interested in these characters as positive.
I was interested in these characters
as something you could look up to.
And let's take a new look and a fresh look
at what these characters bring to the table.
[dramatic music]
- In the summer of 1996, Ross and Wade
released the first issue of "Kingdom Come,"
a resetting of the Superman myth
in which the Man of Steel never died,
but went into voluntary exile,
leaving America in the care of a younger,
more violent breed of superhero.
When their infighting brings chaos,
Superman must return to restore order.
- And at that moment,
all the comic industry collapsed.
I got a note saying every single contact
I have at Marvel is fired.
Marvel has declared bankruptcy.
- People realized they couldn't keep flipping these books
to nonexistent customers,
and the industry really collapsed,
and a lot of smaller companies went away.
- When the bottom dropped out of the collector's market,
Vertigo was still standing
because people were not collecting them.
They were actually reading them.
- With the industry reeling,
Ross and Wade worked to finish a tale that drew inspiration
from their own lives.
- Honestly, the first intent of "Kingdom Come"
is I wanted to paint a comic series
with the DC characters hanging out with my father.
- Norman McCay, who is the narrator of our story,
that's Alex's dad. - My father was a minister.
And there's kind of a humanitarian aspect
to that job that I wanted to incorporate.
- Ross's father serves as a stand-in
for ordinary people and a moral compass
to the superhumans.
When Superman's plan to contain
the rogue superheroes fails,
the US Army launches a nuclear strike
to eliminate them.
[explosion]
♪ ♪
Furious, Superman retaliates.
♪ ♪
But McCay stops him with a rebuke.
Ordinary humans need a say in their own lives
and will distrust superpower unless it is matched
with equal restraint and wisdom.
♪ ♪
McCay's words touch Superman, and he makes a promise.
"The problems we face still exist.
"We're not going to solve them for you.
We're going to solve them with you."
- That's what makes Superman Superman.
Superman's greatest superpower is not that he can fly
or that he can lift a car.
It's that with the ability to do anything,
take anything, have anything he wants,
he's selfless beyond reason.
He will never ever put himself and his needs
and his wants before anyone else's.
♪ ♪
That is an amazing superpower.
- Through all the flaws of human beings,
we've actually created characters
who are without flaws.
It kind of makes humans better than God.
God could only make a fallen humanity.
We made beings better than us.
That's kind of cool.
That shows an imaginative facility
that we should be relying on a little bit more
and trying to be more like that.
We have the capacity. We built Superman.
We made Superman.
Superman can solve any problem, however, we apply that.
- As the comics business struggled
to rise from the ashes again,
salvation would come from a chorus of unheard voices.
- When the characters have been around
for 80-some-odd years,
you can go two ways.
One is to be very traditional in your approach
or you could chart a different path,
which is to really try
to revolutionize the universe.
To change things, bring in different voices
behind the scenes to create stories,
you have to constantly pump new life into these characters.
Because like I keep saying, it ain't the characters,
it's the creators.
- So we can reflect back on those early stories
and breathe a different kind of life into them.
And because of that, it gives me hope.
It gives me hope that the story can change.
- Comic books are the dreams and aspirations
of human beings.
That's why we love comic books.
We think maybe if the conditions
present themselves,
we will be the hero of the moment.