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When Jenette Kahn came in as DC's Publisher in 1976, remember the company was very small. There were probably only 30 of us when she got there. I ended up being one of the core group of people with her and Joe Orlando who were trying to figure out how to move the company forward.

So I got to be the primary draftsman on the first standard written contract that DC ever used for freelancers when the copyright laws changed in the mid-'70s.

One of the more important things that I did, around the tail end of 1980 to the beginning of 1981, I moved from the editorial department, as Jenette becomes the president of the company and I moved to being what in modern terms you would define as a chief operating officer of the company, the head business guy.

The move, the companies say, will strengthen their library of original comics and graphic novels and help them to leverage their characters on other media platforms, including animation and film.Other publishers are introducing direct-to-consumer sales, binge-able stories and magazine-style formats. Some are also offering greater financial stakes for creators.

These adaptations have fueled growth in the comic book industry: Sales in 2018 rose $80 million from the previous year.

The consolidated publishing effort will be run out of Portland, Ore., where Oni is based. James Lucas Jones, publisher of Oni, will be president and publisher of the new enterprise. The merger was negotiated by Edward Hamati, the president of Polarity, a media company Mr. Steward founded last year to help develop Lion Forge characters outside comics.

The changes in how comics were perceived, how comic book people were able to work in the movie industry while they were still comic book people became a wonderful shift in that period. There were people in television too. Suddenly, a comic book credit was a good thing to have on your resume, as opposed to a lead weight, for a creative person.

And they came back with, really, a very different approach to how to make it work - a team writing approach from Dan's experience in television, which was not at all a way that comics were being produced in those years, and a set of creative ideas on how they would execute. All of that was theirs.

The things that I would put on my corporate tombstone, if you will, would be devising the credit and business terms we used for the direct market, which significantly invested in the growth of the comic shops and the direct distribution system; my role in helping devise the first standard royalty plan for the business; my role in developing the graphic novel format in this country - those are some of the things that are more singly mine.

To the extent that DC matters at all in the company’s future, it’s as a source of owned IP for other media channels and as a lifestyle brand to serve as an ambassador to geek culture.

One place that AT&T does not seem to see any value is in sub-brands

In place of a robust and differentiated publishing enterprise, AT&T appears more interested in boosting DC as a consumer lifestyle brand.

We all gravitated toward old New York and some of the traditional architecture, and that’s all very much Art Deco. Tim Burton’s movie was more Gothic, but we wanted it to be a little more stylish and a little classier, so we leaned away from just horror and Gothic and we leaned more into the Deco elegance in the ’40s in New York. That birthed this timeless feel, where it felt very authentic in a ’40s setting, but it was contemporary story lines that we were telling. We could see mobsters and ’40s vehicles and dirigibles — and yet Batman had technology that was way beyond that time period. So it evolved into what we were calling “Dark Deco.”

Tze has said that part of the business model is translating the IP into other media. Did that play a role in deciding what projects to take on?

Things have become more and more easily conceivable as other media. It doesn’t feel like there’s much of a barrier to media development anymore when you look at what’s being developed. Because of the thirst for content producers are actually open to some pretty wild things.

Media development is definitely something we want to put that on the table. It’s something that a lot of creators are interested in pursuing and as such it has to be part of the discussion. But first and foremost, we’re always adamant that our books have to stand as comics.

For the first time, however, comcis represent less than half the comcis market, when digital and crowdfunding are factored in.

Reports that comics are dying are total horseshit. • These numbers are still only what Avengers: Endgame made in a week or so.

Sales in the book channel, which includes chain bookstores, mass merchants, major online retailers, and Scholastic Book Fairs, were up by double digits, with sales of kids graphic novels the biggest factor.

Beyond embracing the darker undercurrents of the DC canon, the company is also revisiting characters that they believe were ill-served by previous big screen adventures.

nternally, insiders are quick to credit Walter Hamada, the longtime New Line executive who was brought on board in 2018 as president of DC Films, with helping to plot a new, more sustainable course for the DC cinematic universe. He’s credited with having a strong sense of story and with keeping a firm eye on the bottom line, reining in budgets so productions don’t go off the rails. It also helps that he is closely allied with Warner Bros. film chief Toby Emmerich, with both men having worked together on past New Line hits such as “It” and “The Conjuring.” Insiders believe that under the former regime of top DC film executives Jon Berg and Geoff Johns and DC Entertainment head Diane Nelson, there were too many decision makers involved, leading to the lack of a clear vision. They also maintain that Warner Bros. erred by initially rushing movies in the hopes of making release dates that had been snapped up before scripts were even fully in place. Emmerich has made righting the DC ship a key priority since taking control of the studio in 2017.

However, Greg Berlanti, another major talent on the Warner lot, is partnering with Johns on a “Green Lantern” television show. There’s speculation that relationship could lead to his involvement in a feature film.

The “ages and stages” concept is something I’ve talked about for a long time here at the Beat. It’s essentially the idea that a reader moves through different versions of a character as that readers grows and matures. This stands in contrast to editorial philosophy where Batman and Spider-Man develop right along with the same readers, ad infinitum. The latter way leads to angry fanpersons endlessly complaining in message boards that it is not “their” Duo Damsel. While audience retention is important, capturing new readers is just as important, and perhaps this new idea will help with that.

I see it as a restart for the whole industry. We’ve always had an industry that was the Rodney Dangerfield of pop culture, but in recent years we had gained tremendous respect as movies paved the way to show comics to the world.

“one thing this has done is laid bare the supply chain and how things work.

roth appreciated the positive message but reiterated that retailers operated on slim margins, and a 20-30% drop in business could be a disaster. This led to a rather curious exchange from Geppi about back issues. “Don’t underestimate the retailer’s survival instinct. Many of them are subsidizing their lack of new product with back issues and stuff like that.” I guess he meant…graphic novels too, but never mentioned them. Diamond is only 40% of the product at some stores, and they are really pop culture stores

Tsujihara was considered a real champion of DC, a real supporter of the brand

Ann Sarnoff also has connections to DC.  Her father-in-law was the person that purchased DC and brought it into the Warner Publishing Group back in the day.  So there was that connection.  An internal video greeting was sent out, and she specifically called that out.  But she hasn't started yet.

Anything that has a show or anything that's going on in the media right now, we're trying to build those types of books.