DC Comics, Inc. is an American comic book
publisher. It is the publishing unit of DC
Entertainment, a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment,
which itself is owned by Time Warner. DC Comics
is one of the largest and most successful
companies operating in American comic books,
and produces material featuring many well-known
characters, including Superman, Batman, Wonder
Woman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Aquaman,
Hawkman, and Green Arrow. The fictional DC
universe also features superhero teams such
as the Justice League, the Watchmen, and the
Teen Titans, as well as antagonists such as
the Joker, Lex Luthor and Catwoman.
The initials "DC" came from the company's
popular series Detective Comics, which featured
Batman's debut and subsequently became part
of the company's name. Originally in Manhattan
at 432 Fourth Avenue, the DC Comics offices
have been located at 480 and later 575 Lexington
Avenue; 909 Third Avenue; 75 Rockefeller Plaza;
666 Fifth Avenue; and 1325 Avenue of the Americas.
DC has its headquarters at 1700 Broadway,
Midtown Manhattan, New York City, but it was
announced in October 2013 that DC Entertainment
would relocate its headquarters from New York
to Burbank, California in 2015.
Random House distributes DC Comics' books
to the bookstore market, while Diamond Comic
Distributors supplies the comics shop specialty
market. DC Comics and its major, longtime
competitor Marvel Comics together shared over
80% of the American comic book market in 2008.
History
Origins
Entrepreneur Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's
National Allied Publications debuted with
the tabloid-sized New Fun: The Big Comic Magazine
#1 with a cover date of February 1935. The
company's second title, New Comics #1, appeared
in a size close to what would become comic
books' standard during the period fans and
historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books,
with slightly larger dimensions than today's.
That title evolved into Adventure Comics,
which continued through issue #503 in 1983,
becoming one of the longest-running comic-book
series. In 2009 DC revived it with its original
numbering.
Wheeler-Nicholson's third and final title,
Detective Comics, advertised with a cover
illustration dated December 1936, eventually
premiered three months late with a March 1937
cover date. The themed anthology series would
become a sensation with the introduction of
Batman in issue #27. By then, however, Wheeler-Nicholson
had gone. In 1937, in debt to printing-plant
owner and magazine distributor Harry Donenfeld
— who also published pulp magazines and
operated as a principal in the magazine distributorship
Independent News — Wheeler-Nicholson had
to take Donenfeld on as a partner in order
to publish Detective Comics #1. Detective
Comics, Inc. was formed, with Wheeler-Nicholson
and Jack S. Liebowitz, Donenfeld's accountant,
listed as owners. Major Wheeler-Nicholson
remained for a year, but cash-flow problems
continued, and he was forced out. Shortly
afterward, Detective Comics Inc. purchased
the remains of National Allied, also known
as Nicholson Publishing, at a bankruptcy auction.
Detective Comics Inc. soon launched a fourth
title, Action Comics, the premiere of which
introduced Superman. Action Comics #1, the
first comic book to feature the new character
archetype — soon known as "superheroes"
— proved a sales hit. The company quickly
introduced such other popular characters as
the Sandman and Batman.
On February 22, 2010, a copy of Action Comics
#1 sold at an auction from an anonymous seller
to an anonymous buyer for $1 million dollars,
besting the $317,000 record for a comic book
set by a different copy, in lesser condition,
the previous year.
The Golden Age
National Allied Publications soon merged with
Detective Comics Inc. to form National Comics,
which in 1944 absorbed an affiliated concern,
Max Gaines' and Liebowitz' All-American Publications.
That year, Gaines let Liebowitz buy him out,
and kept only Picture Stories from the Bible
as the foundation of his own new company,
EC Comics. At that point, "Liebowitz promptly
orchestrated the merger of All-American and
Detective Comics into National Comics... Next
he took charge of organizing National Comics,
[the self-distributorship] Independent News,
and their affiliated firms into a single corporate
entity, National Periodical Publications".
National Periodical Publications became publicly
traded on the stock market in 1961.
Despite the official names "National Comics"
and "National Periodical Publications", the
company began branding itself as "Superman-DC"
as early as 1940, and the company became known
colloquially as DC Comics for years before
the official adoption of that name in 1977.
The company began to move aggressively against
what it saw as copyright-violating imitations
from other companies, such as Fox Comics'
Wonder Man, which Fox started as a copy of
Superman. This extended to DC suing Fawcett
Comics over Captain Marvel, at the time comics'
top-selling character. Despite the fact that
parallels between Captain Marvel and Superman
seemed more tenuous, the courts ruled that
substantial and deliberate copying of copyrighted
material had occurred. Faced with declining
sales and the prospect of bankruptcy if it
lost, Fawcett capitulated in 1955 and ceased
comics publication. Years later, Fawcett ironically
sold the rights for Captain Marvel to DC — which
in 1974 revived Captain Marvel in the new
title Shazam! featuring artwork by his creator,
C. C. Beck. In the meantime, the abandoned
trademark had been seized by Marvel Comics
in 1967, with the creation of their Captain
Marvel, disallowing the DC comic itself to
be called that. While Captain Marvel did not
recapture his old popularity, he later appeared
in a Saturday morning live action TV adaptation
and gained a prominent place in the mainstream
continuity DC calls the DC Universe.
When the popularity of superheroes faded in
the late 1940s, the company focused on such
genres as science fiction, Westerns, humor,
and romance. DC also published crime and horror
titles, but relatively tame ones, and thus
avoided the mid-1950s backlash against such
comics. A handful of the most popular superhero-titles,
including Action Comics and Detective Comics,
the medium's two longest-running titles as
of 2013, continued publication.
The Silver Age
In the mid-1950s, editorial director Irwin
Donenfeld and publisher Liebowitz directed
editor Julius Schwartz to produce a one-shot
Flash story in the try-out title Showcase.
Instead of reviving the old character, Schwartz
had writers Robert Kanigher and John Broome,
penciler Carmine Infantino, and inker Joe
Kubert create an entirely new super-speedster,
updating and modernizing the Flash's civilian
identity, costume, and origin with a science-fiction
bent. The Flash's reimagining in Showcase
#4 proved sufficiently popular that it soon
led to a similar revamping of the Green Lantern
character, the introduction of the modern
all-star team Justice League of America, and
many more superheroes, heralding what historians
and fans call the Silver Age of comic books.
National did not reimagine its continuing
characters, but radically overhauled them.
The Superman family of titles, under editor
Mort Weisinger, introduced such enduring characters
as Supergirl, Bizarro, and Brainiac. The Batman
titles, under editor Jack Schiff, introduced
the successful Batwoman, Bat-Girl, Ace the
Bat-Hound, and Bat-Mite in an attempt to modernize
the strip with non-science-fiction elements.
Schwartz, together with artist Infantino,
then revitalized Batman in what the company
promoted as the "New Look", re-emphasizing
Batman as a detective. Meanwhile, editor Kanigher
successfully introduced a whole family of
Wonder Woman characters having fantastic adventures
in a mythological context.
DC's introduction of the reimagined superheroes
did not go unnoticed by other comics companies.
In 1961, with DC's JLA as the specific spur,
Marvel Comics writer-editor Stan Lee and legendary
creator Jack Kirby ushered in the sub-Silver
Age "Marvel Age" of comics with the debut
issue of The Fantastic Four.
Since the 1940s, when Superman, Batman, and
many of the company's other heroes began appearing
in stories together, DC's characters inhabited
a shared continuity that, decades later, was
dubbed the "DC Universe" by fans. With the
story "Flash of Two Worlds", in Flash #123,
editor Schwartz introduced a concept that
allowed slotting the 1930s and 1940s Golden
Age heroes into this continuity via the explanation
that they lived on an other-dimensional "Earth
2", as opposed to the modern heroes' "Earth
1" — in the process creating the foundation
for what would later be called the DC Multiverse.
A 1966 Batman TV show on the ABC network sparked
a temporary spike in comic book sales, and
a brief fad for superheroes in Saturday morning
animation and other media. DC significantly
lightened the tone of many DC comics — particularly
Batman and Detective Comics — to better
complement the "camp" tone of the TV series.
This tone coincided with the famous "Go-Go
Checks" checkerboard cover-dress which featured
a black-and-white checkerboard strip at the
top of each comic, a misguided attempt by
then-managing editor Irwin Donenfeld to make
DC's output "stand out on the newsracks."
In 1967, Batman artist Infantino rose from
art director to become DC's editorial director.
With the growing popularity of upstart rival
Marvel Comics threatening to topple DC from
its longtime number-one position in the comics
industry, he attempted to infuse the company
with new titles and characters, also recruiting
major talents such as ex-Marvel artist and
Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko and promising
newcomer Neal Adams. He also replaced some
existing DC editors with artist-editors, including
Joe Kubert and Dick Giordano, to give DC's
output a more artistic critical eye.
These new editors recruited youthful new creators,
in part in an effort to capture a market which
had grown from being dominated by children,
to include older teens and even college students.
Some new talent, such as Dennis O'Neil, who
had worked for both Marvel and Charlton, gained
critical and popular acclaim on titles including
Batman and Green Lantern. Nevertheless, the
period was plagued by short-lived series that
started out strong but petered out rapidly.
Kinney National subsidiary
In 1967, National Periodical Publications
was purchased by Kinney National Company,
which later purchased Warner Bros.-Seven Arts
and became Warner Communications.
In 1970, Jack Kirby moved from Marvel Comics
to DC, at the end of the Silver Age of Comics,
in which Kirby's contributions to Marvel played
a large, integral role. Given carte blanche
to write and illustrate his own stories, he
created a handful of thematically linked series
he called collectively The Fourth World. In
the existing series Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen
and in his own, newly launched series New
Gods, Mister Miracle, and The Forever People,
Kirby introduced such enduring characters
and concepts as archvillain Darkseid and the
otherdimensional realm Apokolips. While sales
were respectable, they did not meet DC management's
initially high expectations, and also suffered
from a lack of comprehension and internal
support from Infantino. By 1973 the "Fourth
World" was all cancelled, although Kirby's
conceptions would soon become integral to
the broadening of the DC Universe. Kirby went
on to create other series for DC, including
Kamandi, about a teenaged boy in a post-apocalyptic
world of anthropomorphic talking animals.
The Bronze Age
Following the science-fiction innovations
of the Silver Age, the comics of the 1970s
and 1980s would become known as the Bronze
Age, as fantasy gave way to more naturalistic
and sometimes darker themes. Illegal drug
use, banned by the Comics Code Authority,
explicitly appeared in comics for the first
time in Marvel Comics' The Amazing Spider-Man
in early 1971, and after the Code's updating
in response, DC offered a drug-fueled storyline
in writer Dennis O'Neil and artist Neal Adams'
Green Lantern, beginning with the story "Snowbirds
Don't Fly" in the retitled Green Lantern / Green
Arrow #85, which depicted Speedy, the teen
sidekick of superhero archer Green Arrow,
as having become a heroin addict.
Jenette Kahn, a former children's magazine
publisher, replaced Infantino as editorial
director in January 1976. DC had attempted
to compete with the now-surging Marvel by
dramatically increasing its output and attempting
to win the market by flooding it. This included
launching series featuring such new characters
as Firestorm and Shade, the Changing Man,
as well as an increasing array of non-superhero
titles, in an attempt to recapture the pre-Wertham
days of post-War comicdom. In June 1978, five
months before the release of the first Superman
movie, Kahn expanded the line further, increasing
the number of titles and story pages, and
raising the price from 35 cents to 50 cents.
Most series received eight-page back-up features
while some had full-length twenty-five page
stories. This was a move the company called
the "DC Explosion". The move was not successful,
however, and corporate partner Warner dramatically
cut back on these largely unsuccessful titles,
firing many staffers in what industry watchers
dubbed "the DC Implosion." In September 1978,
the line was dramatically reduced and standard-size
books returned to 17 story pages but for a
still-increased 40 cents. By 1980, the books
returned to 50 cents with a 25-page story
count but the story pages replaced house ads
in the books.
Seeking new ways to boost market share, the
new team of publisher Kahn, vice-president
Paul Levitz, and managing editor Giordano
addressed the issue of talent instability.
To that end — and following the example
of Atlas/Seaboard Comics and such independent
companies as Eclipse Comics — DC began to
offer royalties in place of the industry-standard
work-for-hire agreement in which creators
worked for a flat fee and signed away all
rights, giving talent a financial incentive
tied to the success of their work. In addition,
emulating the era's new television form, the
miniseries while addressing the matter of
an excessive number of ongoing titles fizzling
out within a few issues of their start, DC
created the industry concept of the comic
book limited series. This publishing format
allowed for the deliberate creation of finite
storylines within a more flexible publishing
format that could showcase creations without
forcing the talent into unsustainable openended
commitments.
These changes in policy shaped the future
of the medium as a whole, and in the short
term allowed DC to entice creators away from
rival Marvel, and encourage stability on individual
titles. In November 1980 DC launched the ongoing
series The New Teen Titans, by writer Marv
Wolfman and artist George Pérez, two popular
talents with a history of success. Their superhero-team
comic, superficially similar to Marvel's ensemble
series X-Men, but rooted in DC history, earned
significant sales in part due to the stability
of the creative team, who both continued with
the title for six full years. In addition,
Wolfman and Pérez took advantage of the limited-series
option to create a spin-off title, Tales of
the New Teen Titans, to present origin stories
of their original characters without having
to break the narrative flow of the main series
or oblige them to double their work load with
another ongoing title.
Modern Age
This successful revitalization of the Silver
Age Teen Titans led DC's editors to seek the
same for the wider DC Universe. The result,
the Wolfman/Pérez 12-issue limited series
Crisis on Infinite Earths, gave the company
an opportunity to realign and jettison some
of the characters' complicated backstory and
continuity discrepancies. A companion publication,
two volumes entitled The History of the DC
Universe, set out the revised history of the
major DC characters. Crisis featured many
key deaths that would shape the DC Universe
for the following decades, and separate the
timeline of DC publications into pre- and
post-"Crisis".
Meanwhile, a parallel update had started in
the non-superhero and horror titles. Since
early 1984, the work of British writer Alan
Moore had revitalized the horror series The
Saga of the Swamp Thing, and soon numerous
British writers, including Neil Gaiman and
Grant Morrison, began freelancing for the
company. The resulting influx of sophisticated
horror-fantasy material led to DC in 1993
establishing the Vertigo mature-readers imprint,
which did not subscribe to the Comics Code
Authority.
Two DC limited series, Batman: The Dark Knight
Returns by Frank Miller and Watchmen by Moore
and artist Dave Gibbons, drew attention in
the mainstream press for their dark psychological
complexity and promotion of the antihero.
These titles helped pave the way for comics
to be more widely accepted in literary-criticism
circles and to make inroads into the book
industry, with collected editions of these
series as commercially successful trade paperbacks.
The mid-1980s also saw the end of many long-running
DC war comics, including series that had been
in print since the 1960s. These titles, all
with over 100 issues, included Sgt. Rock,
G.I. Combat, The Unknown Soldier, and Weird
War Tales.
Time Warner unit
In March 1989, Warner Communications merged
with Time Inc., making DC Comics a subsidiary
of Time Warner. In June, the first Tim Burton
directed Batman movie was released, and DC
began publishing its hardcover series of DC
Archive Editions, collections of many of their
early, key comics series, featuring rare and
expensive stories unseen by many modern fans.
Restoration for many of the Archive Editions
was handled by Rick Keene with color restoration
by DC's long-time resident colorist, Bob LeRose.
These collections attempted to retroactively
credit many of the writers and artists who
had worked without much recognition for DC
during the early period of comics, when individual
credits were few and far between.
The comics industry experienced a brief boom
in the early 1990s, thanks to a combination
of speculative purchasing and several storylines
which gained attention from the mainstream
media. DC's extended storylines in which Superman
was killed, Batman was crippled, and superhero
Green Lantern turned into the supervillain
Parallax resulted in dramatically increased
sales, but the increases were as temporary
as the hero's replacements. Sales dropped
off as the industry went into a major slump,
while manufactured "collectibles" numbering
in the millions replaced quality with quantity
until fans and speculators alike deserted
the medium in droves.
DC's Piranha Press and other imprints were
introduced to facilitate compartmentalized
diversification and allow for specialized
marketing of individual product lines. They
increased the use of non-traditional contractual
arrangements, including the dramatic rise
of creator-owned projects, leading to a significant
increase in critically lauded work and the
licensing of material from other companies.
DC also increased publication of book-store
friendly formats, including trade paperback
collections of individual serial comics, as
well as original graphic novels.
One of the other imprints was Impact Comics
from 1991 to 1992 in which the Archie Comics
superheroes were licensed and revamped. The
stories in the line were part of its own shared
universe.
DC entered into a publishing agreement with
Milestone Media that gave DC a line of comics
featuring a culturally and racially diverse
range of superhero characters. Although the
Milestone line ceased publication after a
few years, it yielded the popular animated
series Static Shock. DC established Paradox
Press to publish material such as the large-format
Big Book of... series of multi-artist interpretations
on individual themes, and such crime fiction
as the graphic novel Road to Perdition. In
1998, DC purchased Wildstorm Comics, Jim Lee's
imprint under the Image Comics banner, continuing
it for many years as a wholly separate imprint
- and fictional universe - with its own style
and audience. As part of this purchase, DC
also began to publish titles under the fledgling
WildStorm sub-imprint America's Best Comics,
a series of titles created by Alan Moore,
including The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,
Tom Strong, and Promethea. Moore strongly
contested this situation, and DC eventually
stopped publishing ABC.
2000s
In March 2003 DC acquired publishing and merchandising
rights to the long-running fantasy series
Elfquest, previously self-published by creators
Wendy and Richard Pini under their WaRP Graphics
publication banner. This series then followed
another non-DC title, Tower Comics' series
T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, in collection into
DC Archive Editions. In 2004 DC temporarily
acquired the North American publishing rights
to graphic novels from European publishers
2000 AD and Humanoids. It also rebranded its
younger-audience titles with the mascot Johnny
DC, and established the CMX imprint to reprint
translated manga. In 2006, CMX took over from
Dark Horse Comics publication of the webcomic
Megatokyo in print form. DC also took advantage
of the demise of Kitchen Sink Press and acquired
the rights to much of the work of Will Eisner,
such as his The Spirit series and his graphic
novels.
In 2004, DC began laying the groundwork for
a full continuity-reshuffling sequel to Crisis
on Infinite Earths, promising substantial
changes to the DC Universe. In 2005, the critically
lauded Batman Begins film was released; also,
the company published several limited series
establishing increasingly escalated conflicts
among DC's heroes, with events climaxing in
the Infinite Crisis limited series. Immediately
after this event, DC's ongoing series jumped
forward a full year in their in-story continuity,
as DC launched a weekly series, 52, to gradually
fill in the missing time. Concurrently, DC
lost the copyright to "Superboy" when the
heirs of Jerry Siegel used a provision of
the 1976 revision to the copyright law to
regain ownership.
In 2005, DC launched its "All-Star" line,
designed to feature some of the company's
best-known characters in stories that eschewed
the long and convoluted continuity of the
DC Universe. The line began with All-Star
Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder and All-Star
Superman, with All Star Wonder Woman and All
Star Batgirl announced in 2006 but neither
being released nor scheduled as of the end
of 2009.
DC licensed characters from the Archie Comics
imprint Red Circle Comics by 2007. They appeared
in the Red Circle line, based in the DC Universe,
with a series of one-shots followed by a miniseries
that lead into two ongoing titles, each lasting
10 issues.
DC Entertainment
In September 2009, Warner Bros. announced
that DC Comics would become a subsidiary of
DC Entertainment, Inc., with Diane Nelson,
President of Warner Premiere, becoming president
of the newly formed company and DC Comics
President and Publisher Paul Levitz moving
to the position of Contributing Editor and
Overall Consultant there.
On February 18, 2010, DC Entertainment named
Jim Lee and Dan DiDio as Co-Publishers of
DC Comics, Geoff Johns as Chief Creative Officer,
John Rood as EVP of Sales, Marketing and Business
Development, and Patrick Caldon as EVP of
Finance and Administration.
DC licensed pulp characters including Doc
Savage and the Spirit which it then used,
along with some DC heroes, as part the First
Wave comics line launched in 2010 and lasting
through fall 2011.
In May 2011, DC announced it would begin releasing
digital versions of their comics on the same
day as paper versions.
On June 1, 2011, DC announced that it would
end all ongoing series set in the DC Universe
in August and relaunch its comic line with
52 issue #1s, starting with Justice League
on August 31, with the rest to follow later
on in September.
On June 4, 2013, DC unveiled two new digital
comic innovations to enhance interactivity:
DC2 and DC2 Multiverse. DC2 layers dynamic
artwork onto digital comic panels, adding
a new level of dimension to digital storytelling,
while DC2 Multiverse allows readers to determine
a specific story outcome by selecting individual
characters, storylines and plot developments
while reading the comic, meaning one digital
comic has multiple outcomes. DC2 will first
appear in the upcoming digital-first title,
Batman '66, based on the 1960s television
series and DC2 Multiverse will first appear
in Batman: Arkham Origins, a digital-first
title based on the video game of the same
name.
In October 2013, DC Entertainment announced
that the DC Comics offices would be moved
from New York City to Warner Bros. Burbank,
California, headquarters in 2015 joining the
other DCE units, animation, movie, TV and
portfolio planning, that moved there in 2010.
Logo
DC's first logo appeared on the April 1940
issues of its titles. The letters "DC" stood
for Detective Comics, the name of Batman's
flagship title. The small logo, with no background,
read simply, "A DC Publication."
The November 1941 DC titles introduced an
updated logo. This version was almost twice
the size of the previous one, and was the
first version with a white background. The
name "Superman" was added to "A DC Publication,"
effectively acknowledging both Superman and
Batman. This logo was the first to occupy
the top-left corner of the cover, where the
logo has usually resided since. The company
now referred to itself in its advertising
as "Superman-DC."
In November 1949, the logo was modified to
incorporate the company's formal name, National
Comics Publications. This logo would also
serve as the round body of Johnny DC, DC's
mascot in the 1960s.
In October 1970, DC briefly retired the circular
logo in favor of a simple "DC" in a rectangle
with the name of the title, or the star of
the book; the logo on many issues of Action
Comics, for example, read "DC Superman." An
image of the lead character either appeared
above or below the rectangle. For books that
did not have a single star, such as anthologies
like House of Mystery or team series such
as Justice League of America, the title and
"DC" appeared in a stylized logo, such as
a bat for "House of Mystery." This use of
characters as logos helped to establish the
likenesses as trademarks, and was similar
to Marvel's contemporaneous use of characters
as part of its cover branding.
DC's "100 Page Super-Spectacular" titles and
later 100-page and "Giant" issues published
from 1972 to 1974 featured a logo exclusive
to these editions: the letters "DC" in a simple
sans-serif typeface within a circle. A variant
had the letters in a square.
The July 1972 DC titles featured a new circular
logo. The letters "DC" were rendered in a
block-like typeface that would remain through
later logo revisions until 2005. The title
of the book usually appeared inside the circle,
either above or below the letters.
In December 1973, this logo was modified with
the addition of the words "The Line of DC
Super-Stars" and the star motif that would
continue in later logos. This logo was placed
in the top center of the cover from August
1975 to October 1976.
When Jenette Kahn became DC's publisher in
late 1976, she commissioned graphic designer
Milton Glaser to design a new logo. Popularly
referred to as the "DC bullet", this logo
premiered on the February 1977 titles. Although
it varied in size and color and was at times
cropped by the edges of the cover, or briefly
rotated 4 degrees, it remained essentially
unchanged for nearly three decades. Despite
logo changes since 2005, the old "DC bullet"
continues to be used only on the DC Archive
Editions series.
In July 1987, DC released variant editions
of Justice League #3 and The Fury of Firestorm
#61 with a new DC logo. It featured a picture
of Superman in a circle surrounded by the
words "SUPERMAN COMICS". The company released
these variants to newsstands in certain markets
as a marketing test.
On May 8, 2005, a new logo was unveiled, debuting
on DC titles in June 2005 with DC Special:
The Return of Donna Troy #1 and the rest of
the titles the following week. In addition
to comics, it was designed for DC properties
in other media, which was used for movies
since Batman Begins, with Superman Returns
showing the logo's normal variant, and the
TV series Smallville, the animated series
Justice League Unlimited and others, as well
as for collectibles and other merchandise.
The logo was designed by Josh Beatman of Brainchild
Studios and DC executive Richard Bruning.
In January 2012, a new logo was unveiled,
that was deployed in March 2012. The Dark
Knight Rises was the first film to use the
new logo, while the TV series Arrow is the
first series to feature the new logo.
Imprints
Active as of 2014
DC
DC Archive Editions
Johnny DC
Mad Books
Vertigo
Will Eisner Library
Defunct
All Star
Amalgam Comics
DC Focus
Elseworlds
First Wave
Helix
Impact Comics
Milestone Media
Minx
Paradox Press
Piranha Press
Tangent Comics
WildStorm Productions
America's Best Comics
Cliffhanger
CMX Manga
Homage Comics
WildStorm
WildStorm Signature
Zuda Comics
Licensing partnerships, acquired companies,
and studios
2000 AD
All-American Publications
Archie Comics
Bad Robot Productions
Charlton Comics
Columbia Pictures
Condé Nast Publications
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Epic Games
Fawcett Comics
Filmation
Flex Comix
Hanna-Barbera
Harmony Gold USA
Kenner
Humanoids Publishing
King Features Syndicate
Larry Harmon Pictures
Lego
Leisure Concepts
Mad Magazine
Martin Manulis Productions
Mattel
May Company
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Milestone Media
NBC
Paramount Pictures
Quality Comics
Revell
Ruby-Spears
Tatsunoko Production
Tower Comics
TSR, Inc.
Warner Bros.
WaRP Graphics
WildStorm Productions
Will Eisner Library
See also
DC Universe
List of current DC Comics publications
DC Cosmic Cards
DC Direct
List of DC Comics publications
List of DC Comics characters
List of television series based on DC Comics
List of video games based on DC Comics
List of films based on DC Comics
Major events of the DC Universe
Footnotes
References
Further reading
Goulart, Ron, Ron Goulart's Great History
of Comics Books. ISBN 0-8092-5045-4.
External links
Official website
DC Comics on Facebook
DC Comics on Google+
DC Comics on Twitter
DC Comics's channel on YouTube
DC Comics at the Grand Comics Database
DC Comics at the Big Cartoon DataBase
DC Comics at the Comic Book DB
Mike's Amazing World of DC Comics
DC Comics Database at Wikia.com
DC Comics in French : Urban Comics
