Bruce Timm will oversee the projects, and each will be faithful adaptations of the original stories, carrying over the stories as well as the art styles from the comics. As such, Darwyn Cooke, Marv Wolfman and George Perez were all announced as helping with the adaptations.

Shortly after the announcement, we sat down with Levitz to talk about the new deal, and learn a little more about the larger picture.

Newsarama: To being with, what brought this arrangement about? Was it something that you had been thinking of first, and took to them, or did the animation side of things come knocking?

Paul Levitz: We've been talking within the different divisions of Warner Bros. for maybe a little more than two years about the best ways to use the DC library and the DC brands in the direct to video market, which is an emerging and interesting business. We developed a bunch of plans, discussed a bunch of different ways to do it, and none of them seemed quite right for everybody's situation and needs. But in the last few months, it's begun to come together much more solidly and we came up with the parameters for the program, something that would put together: the strengths of Warner Bros. Animation with their incredible team of award-wining animations, guys like Bruce Timm, who have as much knowledge and love for the characters as anybody working in any part of comics; Warner Home Video with their market reach and power; and DC with the characters and our creators.

Ultimately, once we figured out what the box was that we wanted to work in creatively; we sat around and asked what's cool? We started playing with the ideas - if we were going to do the New Teen Titans, one of the best stories and one that everybody loved was The Judas Contract. Wouldn't it be incredible to get Marv involved in that? If we're going to do the Justice League characters, well, you could do Kingdom Come on one hand, but maybe do New Frontier, and we settled on that as a logical place to start.

NRAMA: This really sounds like, if not a fundamental change, a very unique way of how Warner Bros. looks at animation of the DC characters, in that you're not starting at the beginning and telling a story in serial fashion, but rather, you're taking a chunk of story…not to mention the shift in audience…

PL: That's true. Most of the direct to video that we've done so far have been aimed at the kid market. Some of them have been brilliant - I'm a big fan of The Last Son of Krytpon from the Superman animated series. I thought that was a neat way of weaving Brainiac into the destruction of Krypton in a way that worked.

And also, there are fundamentals about the home video business that are shifting, and the opportunity to capture the older, collector's market, and have it make an impact seemed to be one of the factors that made it easier to bring into the discussion what our fans would love to see us do. That helped to lead us in the direction we needed to go in.

NRAMA: Would it be an accurate comparison to say this model is perhaps borrowing a little from the relationship between manga and anime in Japan, that is, these are popular comics that are being adapted, in their own style, and rather directly, into direct to video releases, bypassing an animated series?

PL: I don't think so. We've been doing the trick of moving our popular characters into other media since almost a minute after DC began. When you take the long run of history, we're probably the most successful company in the world's history at doing that. This is a different approach to this particular market niche and product category, and that's very exciting, but the broad idea of taking our characters and using them in whatever medium is available - that's an old story.

NRAMA: How direct will these adaptations be? Will the comics be essentially the storyboards for the films, with dialogue making the leap directly?

PL: It's going to vary tremendously from case to case. First off, you want to tell the story in a fashion that's appropriate to the medium it's in. Animation has great strengths - sound, voice acting, visual movement that comics don't have. Comics have strengths that animation doesn't - the ability to jump time very seamlessly and painlessly and take the reader with you, the unlimited special effects and background budgets. You really want to look at each project with love, and ask: what's the essence of what people loved about this, and how much of that story can I tell here? One of the reasons that Superman/Doomsday is defined that way is that The Death of Superman, per se, couldn't really be done in an hour-long animated film. It's just way to big a story in and of itself, so this is a…generous adaptation of it to the new form.

New Frontier, we think may be able to be a little bit more literal of an adaptation, but yet, it will still lose some things, and hopefully gain some others.

NRAMA: And with Marv working on The Judas Contract, and being familiar with both mediums…

PL: You have someone who is able to give you the most loving translation you could possibly have.

An example of what I'm talking about with the translations that we'll see - removing myself from our material - I'm an enormous Lord of the Rings fan. I've probably read the books twenty times or more in the course of my life. When I went to see the films, I knew I was not going to get everything was in the books, so the question became, was I carried along enough that I didn't quite notice that Tom Bombadill wasn't there until after we were past the point where he should have showed up? If you do it right, you carry the reader that way, and he or she feels your sincerity, loves what's been done, and then makes a note hoping that it will show up as a DVD extra. You always have some of those things on the list, but, when it works, and Lord of the Rings is a case where, not only in my personal taste, but in the case of the world as an audience, it clearly did, you see that you can adapt from one medium to another, and make some substantial changes in the process, but you must preserve the things that people believe are the essences of the original experience.

NRAMA: In that vein, as you said at the panel, the different features will be similar in style to the art that's in the original comics?

PL: That's the goal, and it's certainly the reason to have George and Darwyn involved. With New Frontier, Darwyn's an animator by trade, so like Marv on Titans, he brings with him a very powerful knowledge of how to translate his own work. Animation's not the same thing as comics, so there are certain translations to be made, but I think you will feel the richness of Darwyn's work come through.

NRAMA: And what's Bruce Timm's role in all of this?

PL: I don't know the right technical term…guardian angel? Bruce is a wonderful treasure for is, because I can sit there and discuss issues of The Avengers with him, and early comics in any form and fashion, and he has as much or more knowledge about the topic. At the same time, he's had the gift of being able to look at the material, and you can almost see the lenses in his eyes click over - he can look at a panel or a sequence and immediately see how it needs to be adjusted to work in animation.

The goal of Bruce being here is not to do these in his style - we've been there, done that - it may be appropriate for some future project, but that's not the purpose here. No, Bruce is here to bring that quality of creative intelligence to the translation process.

NRAMA: Speaking personally, and putting aside the political umbrella for a moment - what would you like to see adapted?

PL: I'm an old fart - I want to see the '60s stuff. I'm not sure we'll ever get around to it though. The magic age of comics is the stuff where you remember where you were when you bought it, and where you were when you read it. I'm old enough so that the things that I remember are probably not what the bulk of the potential audience for these things remembers.

Give me Adventure Comics #346, #347, or #353, #353 - the death of Ferro Lad, and I'll remember when I opened the wrapper of the subscription mailer, and how I felt that day. I'd love to see something like that happen, but I don't think that's going to be on the top of the list. I think there's a somewhat more modern world to explore.

NRAMA: But still - if they come knocking, asking about adapting The Great Darkness Saga from your Legion run…?