Editing DC Comics (section)

===DC Animated Universe===
When it came to cartoons, DC hit the ground running; from 1966 to 1992, there were ''very'' few years in which there wasn't at least one DC cartoon on the airwaves! But they didn't make much of a hit, especially due to the tendency to focus on being "kid friendly" by being very dumbed down and aimed at really young kids.

Then came 1992's "Batman: The Animated Series", and that all changed. It was the first in a new cartoon universe, which expanded in 1996 with "Superman: The Animated Series", and was followed up with "Batman Beyond" and "Justice League" (as well as "The Zeta Project", a forgotten spin-off to Batman Beyond, and the initially-unconnected "Static Shock" mentioned above). Aided by a number of explicit tie-in animated films, which were widely regarded as better than their live action counterparts of the time, this was the DC Animated Universe.

What made it different? In a nutshell, more mature storytelling: the DCAU treated its audience as having the ability to handle things that were darker and heavier than the campy Silver Age fun of the 1960s, and wrote accordingly. Batman TAS featured lots of pathos, with dramatic, often tragic storylines and even adding a layer of sympathy to its villains. Before Batman TAS, Mr. Freeze was just a goofy villain of the week; a mad scientist who used a freeze ray to rob banks. Batman TAS reinvented him as a mutated cryogenic scientist who could never interact with the human world again due to needing super-low temperatures to survive and whose only motivation was to cure his wife's fatal illness so she could be removed from her cryogenic slumber. Even the lighter and softer Superman TAS often had dark themes to it, and once Justice League came out as the official sequel to both Batman TAS and Superman TAS, with Batman Beyond as a sequel to both Batman TAS and Justice League, whoa did things get grim and gritty!

The reason these five cartoons (seven, if you count "The New Batman Adventures" - the later seasons of Batman TAS with a new artstyle, and "Justice League Unlimited", the later seasons of Justice League, as being different cartoons) came to be known ''as'' the DCAU was simple: connectivity. Whereas Marvel's cartoons of the 90s would occasionally have characters from different franchises show up for interactions with the hero of their series (Spiderman TAS had appearances by the X-Men, Iron Man and Ben Grimm from the Fantastic Four, for example), the DCAU went out of its way to establish that their worlds would be connected. Plots and characters from one series would be directly referenced in a later series, with Justice League and Batman Beyond in particular frequently invoking storythreads left dangling by their precursor series.

After the DCAU ended in 2004, DC went on to create new cartoons, dropping the shared universe concept entirely. However, these cartoons of the mid 2000s did take some lessons from the DCAU, even the lighter and softer ones like "Batman: The Brave and the Bold" (which was essentially a cartoon equivalent to the Silver Age Batman of the 1960s serial), "Teen Titans" or "The Batman".