Secret Origin: The Story of DC Comics

Comic books are the dreams and aspirations of human beings.

There is no better medium than comic books.

It's the medium.

You may not like comic books, you may not respect comic books...

...but they're something that people buy for themselves that they want to read.

There's a reason for that. It's because they love them.

I remember being given a box of comics when I was about 7.

And I loved it.

Still to this day, I have no idea where it came from.

My father, just before he died, I mentioned it to him.

He said, "I remember that box of comics. I'll tell you where it came from."

And I thought, "Great." And then he died.

A lot of these characters, they were special and different and unique.

And I definitely remember connecting to a lot of the superheroes in that sense.

This is a comic book from 1975.

I used masking tape, ha, ha, to actually hold it together.

I read it so much, it would literally fall apart.

I think you could have put any DC comic in my hands...

...and I still would have fallen in love.

My mom, when I was 8, made me sell all mine for 2 cents apiece...

...to Mr. West, the junkman, in the back of the Tupelo Hotel.

Once, there was a world without comic books.

Like jazz and like baseball, like so much that is distinctly American...

...the comic book was born in the country's margins.

Cheap, slight, juvenile.

An orphan child that would transform over time...

...into something vital and strong...

...but not by magic word...

...or accident of science...

...or ancient incantation...

...but by the efforts of writers and artists and entrepreneurs...

...whose ambition was simply to entertain...

...to challenge...

...to captivate...

...to enlighten.

These men and women of DC Comics...

...let their own lives and the world around them inspire their creations.

This is the story of the birth of the comic book.

This is the origin story of DC Comics.

I know I sound crazy to say it, but, ha, ha, guess what.

If you put the best artist in the world and the best writer in the world...

...they'll make the greatest piece of art in the world.

And do you know what you'll call it? You'll call it a comic book.

New York is fundamentally an immigrant and entrepreneurial city.

There's an enormous pressure that boils from the bottom of the hungry people...

...who come here looking for a thing they can do.

And that inevitably goes to either things that are new...

...or the things that the elite aren't interested in doing.

It's the early 1930s.

Two immigrant entrepreneurs, Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz...

...run a small but profitable publishing concern.

Harry was the backslapper, the glad-hander, the salesman, the con man.

Making people happy, telling dirty jokes, drinking, going out to girly shows...

...you know, that was Harry.

He had mob connections, or so went the rumors at the time.

It didn't help that he bragged about knowing Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello.

He didn't have someone who knew how to balance books and run a company.

And so that's where Jack Liebowitz entered.

Harry and Jack make their fortune putting out pulp magazines.

Not just pulps, but what we call the spicy pulps.

Lascivious pictures of half-naked women on the cover...

...and these sort of racy stories inside, or at least racy for 1935.

About as naked as the law would allow...

...and sometimes sort of pushing over that line.

People did jail time for these magazines in the '30s.

They were pornography by the standards of the '30s. Donenfeld almost went to jail.

He had to talk one of his employees into taking the rap for him...

...in exchange for a job for life.

The handwriting came on the wall about '37, '38.

He thought, "Maybe spicy pulps is not where I wanna be...

...if the law's gonna be breathing down my neck."

For a country in the midst of the Great Depression...

...newspaper comic strips were a popular and cheap amusement.

Collections of these, the very first comic books, begin to appear on newsstands.

And Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson...

...a prolific pulp-fiction writer and former cavalry officer...

...is inspired to put out his own.

January 11, 1935. You go to the newsstands in New York.

You find Fun Comics Number One, the very first DC comic.

Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson had a sense not just that this is filler...

...but that new material might find its own audience.

The major needs business partners...

...and Harry and Jack need less racy material to publish.

And in 1937, their very first collaboration, Detective Comics...

...the comic that would give DC its name, hits the stands.

Why Detective Comics? Because it's an outgrowth...

...of this whole urban culture that is fairly new to us as Americans.

And the idea of urban crime was something that, 50 years ago, didn't even exist.

Suddenly, you know, we have to worry about...

...muggers and pickpockets and street crime.

Detective Comics was clearly a response to that.

After buying out Wheeler-Nicholson...

...Harry and Jack set out to grow their new venture.

And with comic-book pioneer Max Gaines...

...they launch National Allied and All-American...

...the companies that will eventually become DC Comics.

At the same time in Cleveland...

...two teenagers, sons of Jewish immigrants...

...are escaping the pain and struggle of their everyday lives...

...into a fantasy world of their own making.

Together, they would create something revolutionary.

Jerry was the nerdy science-fiction fan.

Jerry was the one who read any kind of crappy, pulp, fantastic story out there...

...and was constantly making up his own stories.

And Joe was the artist. Joe was very poor.

It was very hard for him to get paper, to get art lessons.

He found things to draw on. He was just always scribbling.

And they were both rejects. They were both outcasts.

The kids who are coming of age in the 1930s...

...that first generation of creative talent for comics...

...have lived through an astounding moment of transition in society.

The world is changing very, very rapidly. Amazing things are happening.

It's a marvelous world in a very literal sense.

And the comics seize on a very visual dimension of it...

...which is, if you can take a human being to the next level...

...what will that next level be?

Jerry and Joe imagine a man...

...with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.

Superman, I believe, was the most personal of Jerry and Joe's creations.

In large part because Jerry had lost his father...

...when he was 17 years old in a robbery.

It clearly left a mark on Siegel.

You can see how that would make you long for a father figure who was bulletproof.

Shuster gave the vision of the character.

Shuster's the one who designed the costumes, the one who gave it the visuals.

But Siegel was completely the heart of that character.

You know, the passion of it really came from Siegel.

Jerry and Joe submit their creation to editors across the country.

And in turn, every one of them promptly rejects it.

Some more than once.

Nobody liked it. This was an anomaly.

Nobody else was doing it. Everybody was doing cowboys, detective...

...science-fiction-type things.

These two 17-year-old Jewish kids in Cleveland, Ohio, created a genre.

It's not until four years later...

...that DC finally brings Superman to Earth's newsstands.

That spring, Action Comics Number One is born.

And there he is, Superman, in his red cape and blue tights...

...signature S emblazoned on his chest.

A modern-day Hercules, sending hoodlums on the run.

A refugee from a distant planet.

A newly minted American who becomes an unapologetic social crusader.

Leaping through the night sky.

A murderess under his arms in a race to the governor's house...

...to save an innocent woman from death row.

Superman, even as he was drawn originally in his raw form...

...was one that I felt was alive.

Understanding or feeling at that time that this was possible...

...that really had a tremendous effect on me.

He's throwing guys right and left, he bursts in through walls...

...and smashes the doors, and that's how you meet Superman.

He's two-fisted. He's knocking stuff around. He takes no prisoners.

He's a giant ball of energy and force just bulldozing his way through the story.

Clark is there and is instantly recognizable...

...as the meek, mild, bespectacled alter ego.

"If you saw inside me, you'd see that there's something big...

...exciting and dynamic if you'd just look behind the glasses."

I was quite meek and I was quite mild.

And I thought, "Gee, wouldn't it be great if I was a mighty person?

And these girls didn't know that this clod here is really somebody special."

I was very small and I was always pushed around by bullies and so forth.

So that was one of my dreams.

I took courses in bodybuilding and weightlifting.

I don't know if it helped, but I made an effort.

Action Comics introduces another iconic character, Lois Lane.

She was smart, capable. She was a bulldog, passionate.

When she saw a story, she went for it.

She didn't think, "Gosh, it's gonna get me killed."

She would just do it.

I loved that. I loved her tenacity and her intelligence.

And in Superman, Lois met her match.

In that very first issue, he takes on government corruption...

...domestic violence and urban crime.

Really, Superman was the first crusader for social justice in comics.

He was sprung from, you know, two Jewish kids from Cleveland who were picked on...

...and this was their idea of empowerment.

There's an assumption that there is an absolute standard...

...of justice in the world.

It's also very true to the immigrant experience at that point...

...in their hope for justice.

We have come here, we've come to this land.

It will be okay here. It will be just here.

These are families that have come over from Europe.

And they're watching whoever they left behind disappear in a very scary fashion.

So the characters live for them.

Nazism was rising up and a lot of innocent people were being killed.

Countries were invaded, innocents slaughtered.

And I felt that the world desperately needed a crusader, if only a fictional one.

Superman was about the immigrant experience in a very, very powerful way.

It's the kid from the old country who brings the best values from the old country...

In this case, the old planet. - To America...

...adds it to the pot, and accepts the best part of America.

It's a really powerful set of ideas...

...that was really important to people in the '30s and '40s.

The newsstand dealers couldn't get enough.

Within three issues, they were up to a million copies. It was a phenomenon.

There was never anything like it. There was that Supermania...

...that hit in 1939 and in 1940.

We've not seen anything like it in American pop culture since.

Beatlemania was not that big.