JENETTE KAHN - TwoMorrows Publishing Store

glad I hired her because it started us on that track.
GREENBERGER: Absolutely. Now, yes, you did the Super Friends comic
and Shazam! and all, but you also did Welcome Back, Kotter, which felt
like out of left field since it wasn’t based on any comic stuff. Was that
an attempt to try the old licensing gambit that used to work so well?
KAHN: Again, I don’t remember why we did that.
GREENBERGER: Fair enough. Meantime, there was the success of the
Wonder Woman live-action show with the wonderful Lynda Carter.
You know, apparently it was Marty Pasko who suggested taking the
book he was writing and turning it into a World War II book to
mirror the TV show. Were you at all involved in the TV show or the
comics adaptation?
KAHN: No, I wasn’t involved at all with the TV show because that
had been sold by another Warner Communications executive, Ed Blier,
quite independent of us.
GREENBERGER: But apparently, you did have input in the comics
because of the success of the TV show, you took a look at the comic
which at the time was being written by Marty and drawn by Jose
Delbo and said, “Jose isn’t a strong enough artist for this important a
property,” and you insisted he be replaced. Do you remember doing
those sorts of creative decisions?
KAHN: I don’t remember that particular one, but I often had creative
input into the comics in terms of talent and ideas. And ideas would
be pitched to me. I remember Len and Marv coming in, pitching
Teen Titans, and at first, I was thinking, “Teen Titans? What a lame
comic. Who cares about these teenage imitations?” But Len and
Marv had a terrific pitch that reflected the new sensibility we were
fostering and, I’m totally delighted to say, they convinced me.
[chuckles] But the specific decision to remove a Wonder Woman artist,
that I don’t remember.
TRYING OUT NEW FORMATS
GREENBERGER: The other thing is the comics at the time were cutting
back on page count because of the economics. DC was down to, like,
17 pages of story around the time you arrived and one of the things
you were definitely playing with in those first four or five years was
format. There were the original stories in the tabloids, better choices
of the reprint material, you took the Legion and you took the Justice
League and you bumped them up to 48 pages with twice the story
page count. Do you remember playing with all of this stuff and then
working with the editors to figure out what was going to work?
KAHN: What I remember was just trying to give more—give more
value to the readers and find a way to justify raising the price. Not to
raise the price without giving value, but to find a way to add value and
then raise the price so that the economics of comics would be better.
GREENBERGER: And then, of course, there were the Dollar Comics,
which really felt like you were getting your money’s worth.
KAHN: The ill-fated Dollar Comics. I think ultimately, you didn’t get your
money’s worth, even though, based strictly on the page counts, you did.
But because—I remember it only had one lead story of new material and
the rest was reprint. Is that correct, Bobby? You know better than I.
GREENBERGER: Well, no. No, those were the 50-cent, 100-page Super
Spectaculars that were there at the very beginning. But when you gave
us in ’77, ’78, the Dollar Comics. They were 80 pages of new material.
KAHN: Eighty pages of new material. I guess, then, it was in the quality.
Perhaps because we were trying to do so much material at once, it
wasn’t as strong as it might have been. Neal Adams did the covers…
GREENBERGER: He did a lot of the first covers, yeah.
KAHN: But then you had him on the cover, but you didn’t have him
on the inside. I think Dollar Comics were a good concept but they
weren’t executed as well as they might have been and they might
have been a little early.
[Editor’s note: For more on Dollar Comics, see the article beginning
on page 39.]
GREENBERGER: Speaking of the new material in the tabloids,
how involved were you in making the Superman/Muhammad Ali
book a reality?
KAHN: Strangely, even though Don King, who was a big boxing
promoter and still had a strong relationship with Muhammad Ali,
even though he came first to Sol’s office and that was the kind of
thing that Sol usually was excited about, he handed it off to me.
I was tremendously involved in the comic and it was an exciting
experience because I got to work with Ali’s team and with Ali himself,
and I wrote about it in the introduction to the recent reissue of
Superman/Muhammad Ali.
And, of course, I was also responsible for one of the colossal
challenges/catastrophes [chuckles] of the Superman/Muhammad Ali
book. I had what I thought was an inspired idea. I said, “We have a
huge double cover with no ad in the back and with Supes and Ali
in the ring together. And who comes to boxing matches? All the
glitterati. So let’s fill the entire audience with famous people,” and we
proceeded to do just that. And Neal drew all these famous people in
the stands. It was only after they were drawn that we learned that if
we were using their likenesses, their images were aiding in the sale
of the comic book, and we needed their permission to use them.
Needless to say, we didn’t have it.
I had to travel the country to try to convince the people who were
already on the cover to allow us to use their likenesses. And when
they wouldn’t give us permission, we had to draw somebody else
with a similar physiognomy in their place. So George C. Scott,
for instance, became Kurt Vonnegut. If I looked at the cover, I could
More for Your Money
JLA and Legion got page count boosts in a Kahn
decision. Cover to Superboy and the Legion of
Super-Heroes #231 (Sept. 1977) by Mike Grell.
TM & © DC Comics.
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