Creativity Quote by Gil Kane

DC’s old habit of printing everything in-house sounds, on the surface, like a dry production detail. Coming from Gil Kane, it’s a loaded snapshot of how power actually moved through mid-century comics: not through lofty editorial manifestos, but through who owned the machinery.

The intent is partly documentary - Kane was a working artist with an eye for the unglamorous bottlenecks that shaped what readers ultimately saw. But it also carries an implicit critique. If DC “were the only company” controlling their own printing, they weren’t just a publisher; they were a vertically integrated gatekeeper. That kind of infrastructure advantage meant stability, predictable schedules, and leverage over distributors and rivals, especially in an era when comics were treated as disposable ephemera and printing slots were fought over like scarce airtime.

The subtext is about why DC could feel so immovable for so long. When creators talk about “the system,” they often mean editorial control or corporate conservatism. Kane is pointing at something more material: the literal ability to manufacture culture at scale. It’s a reminder that the look of classic DC - its color, paper quality, consistency, even the constraints artists learned to design around - wasn’t purely aesthetic. It was industrial.

Context matters: Kane lived through the churn of the Golden and Silver Ages, the rise of Marvel’s leaner, scrappier model, and the shifting economics that eventually made outsourcing normal. His line reads like a veteran clocking an old empire’s advantage - and hinting that the industry’s “creative” history can’t be separated from its supply chain.