DC Comics chief Jim Lee debuted a new logo for DC Studios on Friday at San Diego Comic-Con that returns to the design the company used from 1976 to 2005, replacing the logo first adopted in 2016.

Starting in 1976, the comics publisher’s logo — which appeared in the top left corner of virtually every issue — was a circular badge with its two letters surrounded by a thick black circle, inside of which contained four white, five-pointed stars. In 2005, DC updated the logo to a more modern looking design: a single star swirling around slanted DC letters. In 2012, the logo was changed again, turning the “D” into a page peeling back to reveal the “C” — a somewhat controversial design that was replaced in just four years to the most recent version, which simplified the logo to block DC letters surrounded by a simple circle. That logo was also put in front of DC’s feature film adaptations, which will reboot with James Gunn’s “Superman” in 2025.

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The update comes as DC is refashioning itself into a more holistic media company, with Gunn and Peter Safran taking the reins at DC Studios to oversee all scripted adaptations of DC comics across film, TV, animation and video games.

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In a video message played during the panel, Gunn joked about the decision to resurrect the old logo came to be.

“I can pretend we worked long and hard on what that was,” he said. “But the truth is we knew what we wanted the logo to be when we were put in charge of DC Studios.”

Lee hosted his third annual panel at San Diego Comic Con on Friday. He was joined by comic book writers Scott Snyder, Joshua Williamson and Tom King to first discuss upcoming DC comics storylines, including an all new Absolute Universe. The Absolute versions of classic DC characters, like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, will be slight reinventions of the iconic heroes and serve as jumping-on points for new readers. It will serve as an alternate universe to the main DC comics line, similar but different to the Elseworlds and DC Black Label worlds.

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