The company has published non-DC Universe-related material, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Fables, and many other titles, under the alternative imprint Vertigo and DC Black Label.

[29][30] Starting in 1939, Siegel and Shuster's Superman was the first comic-derived character to appear in other formats, later featuring in his own newspaper comic strip, which first introduced his biological parents Jor-El and Lara.

13 (June 1939) introduced the first recurring Superman enemy referred to as the Ultra-Humanite; created by Siegel and Shuster, this is commonly cited as one of the earliest supervillains in comic books.

[a] The previous year, in June 1945, Gaines had allowed Liebowitz to buy him out and had retained only Picture Stories from the Bible as the foundation of his own new company, EC Comics.

In the mid-1950s, editorial director Irwin Donenfeld and publisher Liebowitz directed editor Julius Schwartz (whose roots lay in the science-fiction book market) 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.

4 (October 1956) 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 (JLA), and many more superheroes, heralding what historians and fans call the Silver Age of Comic Books.

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.

Instead, superficial reasons were put forward to account for the brand's popularity, like the presence of the color red or word balloons on the cover, or that the perceived crudeness of the interior art was somehow more appealing to readers.

When Lee learned about DC's subsequent experimental attempts to imitate these perceived details, he amused himself by arranging direct defiance of those assumptions in Marvel's publications as sales strengthened further to frustrate the competition.

[64] 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 (Filmation produced most of DC's initial cartoons) and other media.

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.

[73] The move was not successful, however, and corporate parent Warner dramatically cut back on these largely unsuccessful titles, firing many staffers in what industry watchers dubbed "the DC Implosion".

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.

As it happened, the implementation of these incentives proved opportune considering Marvel Comics' Editor-in-Chief, Jim Shooter, was alienating much of his company's creative staff with his authoritarian manner and major talents there went to DC like Roy Thomas, Gene Colan, Marv Wolfman, and George Pérez.

[77] 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.

[78] 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[79] in part due to the stability of the creative team, who both continued with the title for six full years.

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.

[82] 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.

DC's extended storylines in which Superman was killed, Batman was crippled, and Green Lantern turned into the supervillain Parallax, resulted in dramatically increased sales.

However, the increases were temporary, and sales dropped off as the industry went into a major slump, while manufactured "collectables" numbering in the millions replaced quality with quantity until fans and speculators alike deserted the medium in droves.

DC also increased publication of book-store friendly formats, including trade paperback collections of individual serial comics, as well as original graphic novels.

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 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.

[88] They appeared in the Red Circle line, based in the DC Universe, with a series of one-shots followed by a miniseries that led into two ongoing titles that each lasted for ten issues.

[101] The new line would launch with an 80-page one-shot titled DC Universe: Rebirth, written by Geoff Johns, with art from Gary Frank, Ethan Van Sciver, and more.

After the events of the Dark Nights: Death Metal storyline, the DC Multiverse was expanded into a larger "Omniverse" where everything is canon, effectively reversing the changes The New 52 introduced a decade prior.

... Of course, Goodman would want to be playing golf with this fellow and be in his good graces ... Sol worked closely with Independent News' top management over the decades and would have gotten this story straight from the horse's mouth.Goodman, a publishing trend-follower who was aware of DC's strong JLA sales, confirmably directed his comics editor, Stan Lee, to create a comic-book series about a team of superheroes.