Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle

Michael Kantor joined American Masters as the PBS series’ executive producer in 2014. An Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, Kantor’s own films include American Masters Quincy Jones: In the Pocket; the six-part series Make ‘Em Laugh, hosted by Billy Crystal; and Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle hosted by Liev Schreiber. Kantor’s landmark series, Broadway: The American Musical, was hosted by Julie Andrews and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Series in 2005. Over the past ten years, Kantor has premiered more than a dozen American Masters films at the Sundance Film Festival including Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore; Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am; Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir; Ailey; Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool and Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It, which he executive produced with Norman Lear and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at NYU’s Grad Acting Program. With Michael Kantor, he wrote the three-part documentary, Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle, as well as the companion volume, Superheroes! Capes, Cowls, and Comic Book Culture. His most recent book is Hitchcocktails: Lethal Libations Inspired by the Master of Suspense; a previous book, I’ll Drink to That!: Broadway Cocktails, was published by Insight Editions in 2023 (winner, Gold Medal, Independent Book Publishers, 2024). He is also the host and producer of the radio series, Broadway to Main Street on the NPR radio station WLIW-FM. The program is winner of the 2019 ASCAP Foundation/Deems Taylor Award for Radio Broadcast. Among the documentaries he has either cowritten or coproduced for PBS are: the Emmy-Award-winning Broadway: The American Musical; Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me; and Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest Sounds. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker and, recently, a history of the 1966 Broadway musical, “It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s SUPERMAN!” for RetroFan magazine. He also still thinks the 1980 film Superman II is hard to beat. 

Ivan Cohen has written comic book stories starring some of the best-loved and most-well known characters in fiction, ranging from Batman, Spider-Man, and the Teen Titans to Looney Tunes, Scooby-Doo, and even LeBron James (the Space Jam version). Among his notable titles are the Ringo Award-winning The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries; Multiversity: Teen Justice (starring his nonbinary breakthrough character Kid Quick); and the illustrated storybook Batman Returns: One Dark Christmas Eve. The Story Producer for the documentary series Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle, Cohen is also a culture writer whose essays and articles have appeared in Time Out New York, Esquire.com, Vulture.com, and the Library of America’s The Mad Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America’s Brain!