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- NARRATOR: In
the late 1970s,
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Marvel and DC's battle
for newsstand domination
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led to an unprecedented
creative explosion.
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Unfortunately, this also
coincided with a huge industry slump.
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Sales were lagging.
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So over at DC,
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they called on a talented,
new voice in publishing to save the day.
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And she was ready
to shake things up.
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[triumphant music playing]
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- REED: Through the history
of the comic book industry,
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it has kind of
gone in waves,
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where there have
been boom times
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and then there have
been down times.
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So, in the late 1970s, and it
was one of those down times,
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especially for DC Comics.
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And in 1972, Marvel passed DC
in overall comic book sales.
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- MICHAEL: Marvel was
flooding the newsstands with titles.
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And the only way to
compete with that was to flood them back with titles.
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And now a new, young person, a
female, was being brought into the fold.
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- REED: They hired this
young executive named Jenette Kahn,
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who had come from
children's publishing.
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- I have known her when
she was publishing magazines for Scholastic.
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- REED: She was a complete
outsider to the industry.
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But perhaps by
being an outsider,
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she could see things that
people who had been in the industry for a while
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could not see.
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- The idea that an
outsider was coming in,
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that I was 28 and younger
than almost everybody on staff,
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and that I was a woman
sent shock waves through DC.
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- It was a seismic shift
at that moment in time.
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- JENETTE: It's said
that Joe Orlando, when he heard the news,
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he was throwing up in
men's room. [laughs]
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When I got to DC, it was
seriously non-profitable business.
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We were very lucky to
be part of Warner Bros.
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But comics just didn't
have the same value in corporate eyes
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as movies or
television.
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So we were really left almost
entirely to our own devices.
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- The tasked Jenette
with saving the company.
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And obviously
when you're down in the dumps,
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what you wanna do is build.
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So, she did that.
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- JENETTE: I felt that
we had to compete with Marvel.
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I don't know that that
was the right notion,
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but I felt that perhaps we
had to compete in numbers.
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And so, we created what is
known as the DC Explosion.
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[explosion]
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- DAN: We're gonna get big,
more pages, more stories, more characters,
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more everything,
new ideas, new this.
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And they sold that to you
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over and over again, in
every book, And me, like everyone else,
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got really excited
about that.
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- But one of the strategies
behind the DC Explosion was,
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let's put out
a lot of titles
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and hope to push the other
company off the newsstand.
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You know, the more titles we
put out, the more space on the newsstand we have,
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and then, you know, Marvel
Comics maybe would occupy this small space over here.
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Part of this DC Explosion
was also putting more diverse titles on.
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You'd have African-American
characters,
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female characters, all
leading their own books.
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- It's important that we
have stories being told
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from a multitude
of experiences,
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and I think she
stepped in and said,
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"Hey, you know,
from a personal standpoint,
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it would be amazing if we could
tell stories from more experiences.
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And frankly, from a business
standpoint, you can sell to so many more people
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if you can tell stories that
resonate with more people."
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- This was actually gonna be
Jenette Kahn's vision.
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- We were thinking in bulk and
we weren't thinking in quality.
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- And so came the
great implosion.
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- DAVID: Winter
of 1977, '78,
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there was horrible
snowstorms all over America.
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- REPORTER: Our roads
are still chock-full of automobiles and
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and we just can't utilize all
of our snow-fighting equipment.
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- REED: Trucks couldn't get
out to deliver the comics to te newsstands,
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and so sales really suffered
just because of these snowstorms.
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- DAVID: The sell-throughs
on the newsstand plummeted.
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They were
hemorrhaging money.
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- I understand. I will
do my best. Thank you.
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- JENETTE: There's nothing
like failure to teach you.
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You learn so much more from
failure than from success.
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So, early on, I
was learning a lot.
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- When the sales numbers started
coming in, we knew we were in trouble.
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It was far worse
than we expected.
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Three months after the
Explosion, Warner wanted us to cut 40% of our books.
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[phones ringing]
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Sixty-five
cancellations overnight.
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For every book that's published,
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there's a writer, an artist, a
colorist, a letterer, an editor.
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We have a whole production
of people on staff.
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People were getting laid off.
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There was bad blood.
It was terrible.
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[dramatic music playing]
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- REED: When the DC bosses
got the sales figures, they panicked.
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And so they made the decision to
chop 40% of the line almost overnight.
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- MIKE: We had a
lot of material,
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and of course we had a very
large depressed group
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of staffers and
freelancers.
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So I thought it would be
kind of a clever idea
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to protect the material in terms
of the trademarks and copyrights.
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So, I suggested that we
gather as much of this as we could,
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and we create a
photocopied comic book.
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It was two volumes, black and
white. They printed up about,
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we're not exactly
sure, about 40 copies.
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It was called Cancelled
Comic Cavalcade,
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because DC had a title on the
1940s called Comic Cavalcade.
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- ALEX: The first cover has a
bunch of dead superheroes on te ground.
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- All the dead bodies
laying around... [laughs]
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...of all the
characters whose books were canceled.
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There was Steel in the
foreground. A large portion of the company was laid off.
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Glad to see somebody kept
their sense of humor.
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- It was a bloodbath.
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It was probably one of the
lowest morale days in... in the history of DC.
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- And that actually led to far
less DC Comics being produced,
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and a lot more artists losing
work and actually going over to Marvel.
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- The implosion had
happened so fast
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that there were comics
that were in production
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that were basically almost ready
to print that never came out.
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It's hard to explain to
somebody now how much of comics fandom
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in the late '70s and early '80s
was whispers and rumors.
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Things that weren't
commercially released were impossible mysteries.
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Who's seen it?
Who has it?
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Were there 30 copies of it?
Were there 50 copies of it?
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Who knows? I just
know it exists.
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I just know that these
stories had an ending
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or had a next chapter, and
I'm never gonna see it.
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That's so unfair.
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- Here it is. It's the
Holy Grail of collected items here at DC.
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The thing I first looked
for on my very first day here.
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We have... the Cancelled
Comic Cavalcade.
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It's like a moment frozen
in time for DC Comics.
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There are very few
things that really are
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artifacts of a particular event
or incident,
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and the great DC Explosion
and later DC Implosion
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really can all be put down
to this one little, uh, object,
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this one set of books.
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As a historical artifact,
there's almost nothing quite like this.
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- Back then, to be a
woman in the industry
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and have that kind of pressure
on you already
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for breaking the glass ceiling,
as, you know, as they say,
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and then to have had
a really tough time,
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um, with one
particular sort of push
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that didn't work out the way
she thought it would,
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uh, and then to be given
that second chance that said
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that doesn't mean you weren't
valuable and that your idea wasn't good,
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it's just that
there's so many...
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We all know in this industry how
difficult it is to get anything made.
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- The Implosion for me
was a turning point.
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We came out with a
serious number of comics,
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but this was a
wrong-headed idea.
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It helped me understand
what my core values were
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for the company from a
creative point of view
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and to figure out
how we could really do something
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that had never been done
in American comics before.
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We are gonna put out comics
that are substantive and meaningful
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with great story-lines so
readers will want them,
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and that's really
what we did.
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- DAN: It forced DC
to remove the shackles,
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stop playing it safe.
It turned the page in comics history.
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All of a sudden,
something's happening,
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and there's a new
coolness to DC
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that completely wipes
out any memory of any implosion.
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- NARRATOR: The DC Implosion
showed the whole industry
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how quickly the
landscape could change.
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While it provided DC
the rare opportunity
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to begin a cutting-edge
chapter and paved the way for more adult themes,
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one thing was certain:
nothing would never be the same.
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