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nd how to build a real marketing team at DC, how to create an internal licensing division…

the heart of the job was being the inside guy who made the place run for the next several decades.

If there had not been a direct market, my guess is that the industry as we then knew it would have disappeared by 1984 or 1985.

They will probably buy based on that, in part. So credits on the covers, marketing things based on the name of the talent, will matter. Printing it better so people can actually see the artwork - you have to remember how dreadful the printing on most comics was in the early 1980s.

DC and Warner Bros. were sister companies when I came on board, but the turning point administratively was in 1989, when Time and Warner merged. Prior to that, DC was part of Warner Publishing, which was a unit of Warner Communications that had a book company, MAD Magazine, DC, a newsstand distribution company, and some other minor interests.

As they were juggling out and putting together Time Warner, we were moved over to being part of Warner Bros., the movie company. We were a functional unit of that and our bosses were suddenly in Burbank, and we had to adapt to their systems in some ways.

There was very little impact in the early years of Warner Bros. Warner Publishing had been a very benevolent corporate overlord toward us; Warner Bros. equally so when we moved over there.

There were more resources available in theory and sometimes in practice. We were able to invest more in building some parts of our business, able to pay some people better, which was nice.

But generally speaking, the movie companies didn't view comics as a particularly relevant part of their world. They wanted us as part of them because we have Superman and Batman - particularly in 1989, Batman was going to be a key asset of Warner Bros. for quite a number of years (in their perception - rightfully so).

We had good bosses over there, had good relationships with them, and it meant I was on planes to Burbank more often in my life. But there weren't dramatic day-to-day changes because of it.

ou mentioned that because of you were marketing to an older customer, you had to build up the names of the talent to sell to them. That had ramifications in the early '90s with the formation of Image and other studios.

We had been expecting something on the model of Image for seven or eight years, maybe more, before it happened. It was United Artists. The model had existed historically in the movie business. It was very clear that that could happen in the comic book business.

ome of it clearly was not going to be sustainable because so many of the copies weren't being sold for anybody to read, but they were being sold in carton loads for "investment." That was clearly not going to be sustainable.

Well, we were in a v

ery lucky position because we had the most stable parents in town. We could always go live with mommy and daddy. There was no situation where we were in danger unless the whole business evaporated

Most of it was what was going on because of Marvel's owners.

t was the same thing that pushed Marvel into bankruptcy. The operating business of Marvel was a very healthy business. But financier Ronald O. Perelman's manipulation of the financing at Marvel pushed them into bankruptcy. And that made it an enormously challenging time for the people who were running the company, and an enormously challenging time for the industry as a whole.

Everyone at TKO loves comics and believes what we put out have to stand up on their own, they can’t just be a quick way to create and sell IP. We want to build a real foundation for the medium, creators, retailers, and readers. From the start of TKO, we wanted to make sure that the comics come first and foremost.