DC is dusting off a classic logo and giving it new life. The comic book publisher announced at Comic-Con in San Diego that the new-old logo will be used across the company, from comics to merchandise to its media arm, DC Studios.
Known as the “DC bullet,” the logo was designed by the late, famed “I Love NY” designer, Milton Glaser. It shows the publisher’s name—the initials for “Detective Comics”—tilted at an angle inside a circular shield with four stars.
Glaser’s original design was DC’s longest-running logo. According to the School of Visual Arts, then-publisher of DC, Jenette Kahn, commissioned the logo because she wanted to take the company in a “bold, new direction.” Glaser’s logo was used from 1976 to 2005, a nearly three-decade period that saw everything from the first Superman movie to Watchmen. It’s a period that DC president and publisher Jim Lee said during a Comic-Con panel “defined DC in its heyday” for him and other fans.
The DC Comics logo evolution
After DC retired Glaser’s logo, it adopted a handful of more corporate-leaning versions. Its most recent, a clean rebrand by Pentagram’s Emily Oberman, was used until the recent resurrection of the Glaser logo.
The new-old logo will be included in a motion graphic that will play before DC Studios films. The animation shows an old-school Superman who breaks free from chains inside a circle that turns around to reveal the DC logo. DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran compared the motion graphic to the simplicity of the iconic MGM lion. “It’s timeless, classic. And we thought, What are the elements that we have for something like that? And Superman felt like that for DC,” he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Reviving the classic logo for DC Studios suggests that the company is hoping to create a new heyday, but it comes at an interesting moment for superhero films. Despite a strong opening weekend for the new Marvel Studios film Deadpool & Wolverine, the category leader has found many of the new films in its sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe have failed to generate the kind of ticket sales they once did before the pandemic. A golden age of superhero films, it seems, has come to an end.
Still, DC Studios is hoping to create a new era of its own with an upcoming slate of projects including Joker: Folie à Deux this fall and a Superman reboot next summer starring David Corenswet as Clark Kent. Time will tell how successful DC Studios is, but at the very least, by opening each show with a nostalgic logo and animation, it’s tying its DCU, or “DC Universe,” together into a new era that references a fan-favorite period from the past.