All language subtitles for Slugfest.S06.WEBRip.x264-ION10

- NARRATOR: In
the late 1970s,

Marvel and DC's battle
for newsstand domination

led to an unprecedented
creative explosion.

Unfortunately, this also
coincided with a huge industry
slump.

Sales were lagging.

So over at DC,

they called on a talented,
new voice in publishing to save
the day.

And she was ready
to shake things up.

[triumphant music playing]

- REED: Through the history
of the comic book industry,

it has kind of
gone in waves,

where there have
been boom times

and then there have
been down times.

So, in the late 1970s, and it
was one of those down times,

especially for DC Comics.

And in 1972, Marvel passed DC
in overall comic book sales.

- MICHAEL: Marvel was
flooding the newsstands with
titles.

And the only way to
compete with that was to flood
them back with titles.

And now a new, young person, a
female, was being brought into
the fold.

- REED: They hired this
young executive named Jenette
Kahn,

who had come from
children's publishing.

- I have known her when
she was publishing magazines for
Scholastic.

- REED: She was a complete
outsider to the industry.

But perhaps by
being an outsider,

she could see things that
people who had been in the
industry for a while

could not see.

- The idea that an
outsider was coming in,

that I was 28 and younger
than almost everybody on staff,

and that I was a woman
sent shock waves through DC.

- It was a seismic shift
at that moment in time.

- JENETTE: It's said
that Joe Orlando, when he heard
the news,

he was throwing up in
men's room. [laughs]

When I got to DC, it was
seriously non-profitable
business.

We were very lucky to
be part of Warner Bros.

But comics just didn't
have the same value in corporate
eyes

as movies or
television.

So we were really left almost
entirely to our own
devices.

- The tasked Jenette
with saving the company.

And obviously
when you're down in the dumps,

what you wanna do is build.

So, she did that.

- JENETTE: I felt that
we had to compete with
Marvel.

I don't know that that
was the right notion,

but I felt that perhaps we
had to compete in numbers.

And so, we created what is
known as the DC Explosion.

[explosion]

- DAN: We're gonna get big,
more pages, more stories, more
characters,

more everything,
new ideas, new this.

And they sold that to you

over and over again, in
every book, And me, like
everyone else,

got really excited
about that.

- But one of the strategies
behind the DC Explosion was,

let's put out
a lot of titles

and hope to push the other
company off the newsstand.

You know, the more titles we
put out, the more space on the
newsstand we have,

and then, you know, Marvel
Comics maybe would occupy this
small space over here.

Part of this DC Explosion
was also putting more diverse
titles on.

You'd have African-American
characters,

female characters, all
leading their own books.

- It's important that we
have stories being told

from a multitude
of experiences,

and I think she
stepped in and said,

"Hey, you know,
from a personal standpoint,

it would be amazing if we could
tell stories from more
experiences.

And frankly, from a business
standpoint, you can sell to so
many more people

if you can tell stories that
resonate with more people."

- This was actually gonna be
Jenette Kahn's vision.

- We were thinking in bulk and
we weren't thinking in quality.

- And so came the
great implosion.

- DAVID: Winter
of 1977, '78,

there was horrible
snowstorms all over America.

- REPORTER: Our roads
are still chock-full of
automobiles and
semi-trailers,

and we just can't utilize all
of our snow-fighting
equipment.

- REED: Trucks couldn't get
out to deliver the comics to te
newsstands,

and so sales really suffered
just because of these
snowstorms.

- DAVID: The sell-throughs
on the newsstand plummeted.

They were
hemorrhaging money.

- I understand. I will
do my best. Thank you.

- JENETTE: There's nothing
like failure to teach you.

You learn so much more from
failure than from success.

So, early on, I
was learning a lot.

- When the sales numbers started
coming in, we knew we were in
trouble.

It was far worse
than we expected.

Three months after the
Explosion, Warner wanted us to
cut 40% of our books.

[phones ringing]

Sixty-five
cancellations overnight.

For every book that's published,

there's a writer, an artist, a
colorist, a letterer, an editor.

We have a whole production
of people on staff.

People were getting laid off.

There was bad blood.
It was terrible.

[dramatic music playing]

- REED: When the DC bosses
got the sales figures, they
panicked.

And so they made the decision to
chop 40% of the line almost
overnight.

- MIKE: We had a
lot of material,

and of course we had a very
large depressed group

of staffers and
freelancers.

So I thought it would be
kind of a clever idea

to protect the material in terms
of the trademarks and
copyrights.

So, I suggested that we
gather as much of this as we
could,

and we create a
photocopied comic book.

It was two volumes, black and
white. They printed up
about,

we're not exactly
sure, about 40 copies.

It was called Cancelled
Comic Cavalcade,

because DC had a title on the
1940s called Comic
Cavalcade.

- ALEX: The first cover has a
bunch of dead superheroes on te
ground.

- All the dead bodies
laying around... [laughs]

...of all the
characters whose books
were canceled.

There was Steel in the
foreground. A large portion of
the company was laid off.

Glad to see somebody kept
their sense of humor.

- It was a bloodbath.

It was probably one of the
lowest morale days in... in the
history of DC.

- And that actually led to far
less DC Comics being produced,

and a lot more artists losing
work and actually going over to
Marvel.

- The implosion had
happened so fast

that there were comics
that were in production

that were basically almost ready
to print that never came out.

It's hard to explain to
somebody now how much of comics
fandom

in the late '70s and early '80s
was whispers and rumors.

Things that weren't
commercially released were
impossible mysteries.

Who's seen it?
Who has it?

Were there 30 copies of it?
Were there 50 copies of it?

Who knows? I just
know it exists.

I just know that these
stories had an ending

or had a next chapter, and
I'm never gonna see it.

That's so unfair.

- Here it is. It's the
Holy Grail of collected items
here at DC.

The thing I first looked
for on my very first day here.

We have... the Cancelled
Comic Cavalcade.

It's like a moment frozen
in time for DC Comics.

There are very few
things that really are

artifacts of a particular event
or incident,

and the great DC Explosion
and later DC Implosion

really can all be put down
to this one little, uh, object,

this one set of books.

As a historical artifact,
there's almost nothing quite
like this.

- Back then, to be a
woman in the industry

and have that kind of pressure
on you already

for breaking the glass ceiling,
as, you know, as they say,

and then to have had
a really tough time,

um, with one
particular sort of push

that didn't work out the way
she thought it would,

uh, and then to be given
that second chance that said

that doesn't mean you weren't
valuable and that your idea
wasn't good,

it's just that
there's so many...

We all know in this industry how
difficult it is to get anything
made.

- The Implosion for me
was a turning point.

We came out with a
serious number of comics,

but this was a
wrong-headed idea.

It helped me understand
what my core values were

for the company from a
creative point of view

and to figure out
how we could really do something

that had never been done
in American comics before.

We are gonna put out comics
that are substantive and
meaningful

with great story-lines so
readers will want them,

and that's really
what we did.

- DAN: It forced DC
to remove the shackles,

stop playing it safe.
It turned the page in
comics history.

All of a sudden,
something's happening,

and there's a new
coolness to DC

that completely wipes
out any memory of any
implosion.

- NARRATOR: The DC Implosion
showed the whole industry

how quickly the
landscape could change.

While it provided DC
the rare opportunity

to begin a cutting-edge
chapter and paved the way for
more adult themes,

one thing was certain:
nothing would never be the
same.