1978. The same year Superman fought Muhammad Ali and Will Eisner's A Contract With God hit store shelves, DC suffered multiple waves of cancellations in the wake of a few intersecting "bad moves". An economic recession, a massive blizzard, and a shortsighted initiative to make DC the "premium" comic publisher through larger page counts, all conspired to bring the publisher's comic output to its knees.
The October cancellations featured more of what you'd call "foregone conclusions". Three more horror anthologies bit it that month: House of Secrets, Secrets of Haunted House, and The Witching Hour. Fans of DC's Vertigo line and Gaiman's Sandman series in particular would recognize the mascot characters from these series, and for the most part, it's only through the rose-tinted lenses of eighties writers and artists that these characters would ever live again.
House of Secrets and its remaining features would be folded into The Unexpected. Researching the Implosion, it seems The Unexpected would become something like a shelter from the storm, throwing a protective canvas over the very concept of horror one-shots by bringing the remaining strips and stories from several cancelled series under one banner. I suppose if the work was already paid for, then DC figured they might as well try to get a return on as many of these "drawer stories" as possible.
(Side note: A "drawer story" refers to fill-ins and other inventory issues commisioned in advance by various creative teams, designed to fit into a series' schedule when the regular team fell behind or a title found itself between regular creative teams.)
House of Secrets came to a close with issue #154, a be-careful-what-you-wish-for, Monkey's Paw style yarn by Paul Levitz and Mike Kaluta. One depressing thing about the cancellation of so many horror and suspense titles is that artists like Kaluta usually did their best (or at least, most inspired) work in the non-superhero genres. Similar to how the Silver Age great John Buscema felt more at home drawing high fantasy than caped crusaders back at Marvel, many bronze age artists felt they had more wiggle room when it came to short expressive stories like those found in House of Secrets. This is opposed to superhero serials, where characters had to stay "on model" and the DC "house style" was enforced a little more closely.
Secrets of Haunted House hardly counts as a "casualty" since it would be revived after about a year or so and continue to do its thing for about seven more years. The stories in this series were typically more bizzare and grotesque and today's readers will most likely remember this series as the place where Destiny of the Endless was created, although the scope of "the Endless" as a concept and the perception that these characters would be anything more than "hosts" in the vein of the Crypt Keeper was a Gaiman addition that wouldn't occur for about a decade. For whatever reason, this one anthology in particular got to shamble on, rising from the '78 shotgun blast like Michael Myers, but taking long enough to do so to make us think it might be dead. Spooky.
Firestorm, The Nuclear Man found itself in a similar bout with death and rebirth after its cancellation with October's issue five. Gerry Conway's series about young stud Ronnie Raymond and cranky Professor Stein's fusion-based adventures would have to wait until its second incarnation to become a smash hit. This one must've caused a stir when deciding which books would step up to the guillotine, since Conway's remaining issues were chopped into back-ups that ran in Flash (no pun intended) and the series itself would return to much fanfare inside of two years. Conway was never quite able to replicate the success and acclaim of his legendary Spider-Man run (he's the guy who killed Gwen Stacy, yo), but he would instead stumble onto a new flavor of youth angst and the character's nuclear fusion gimmick birthed a ton of new dramatic possibilities.
Another Conway superhero epic in the making met its end after only five issues as well. Steel, the Indestructible Man (not the one written by Christopher Priest, nor the version starring Shaq), a spinoff of Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron would never see issue six, but the completed story was reworked into an issue of All-Star. This one's a bit of heartbreaker: Conway's main artistic collaborator, Don Heck, is one of those unsung heroes of Marvel's Silver Age (co-creator of Hawkeye) and this marks some of the last regular work I can recall from the guy. Folding the series into All-Star Squadron makes enough sense, since the title character debuted there and the book was a home for "legacy" characters related to the forgotten capes-and-masks of the Golden Age. Recommended reading for fans of Geoff John's JSA run in the late 90's/early 2000's.
One last little curio from the time is Star Hunters, a haven for DC's space-based characters like Adam Strange that had launched just a year earlier. A certain space opera from a certain George Lucas hit theaters the previous year and was gaining steam as a visual masterpiece. With that in mind, it's a wonder that DC didn't indulge in more space-faring stories. Maybe the fabled Star Wars took a while to gain momentum? Anyhoo, Star Hunters fizzled out like a star-based metaphor I don't have at the ready and ended with issue #7. The aformentioned Adam Strange would have a brief run as a back-up in World's Finest, another title, much like The Unexpected, that would come to house many refugees from the three months of cancellations.
That just about covers the cancellations (phew!), but this exploration of the DC Implosion is just beginning. Next time 'round, I'll be looking at the heads of state, the mucky-mucks who had to make hard decisions like "to cancel 'Tec or not to cancel 'Tec". That's right, I'll be shifting away from the writers and artists next time to focus on DC editorial at the time.
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