September, 1978. The cancellations hit twice as hard in the second month of DC's implosion, and the titles to receive the business end of the axe had many similarities to the ones that ended in August. Anthologies, particularly in the war and horror genres, were hit the hardest. Superheroes and more toyetic brands would be the wave of the future, and with Richard Donner's promising
Superman wowing audiences with its trailers depicting a flying Christopher Reeve, it was easy to see why other genres would be marginalized in the wake of the publisher's blunder the previous year.
That's not meant to imply that the cape books weren't effected as well. Take Paul Levitz and Joe Staton's
All Star Comics, ending in September with #74. The series featured the Justice Society and continued the adventures of the JLA's Earth-2 counterparts, incorporating the Golden Age stories of DC's "big three" and allowing their relative timeline to advance and those core characters to age. But alas, the home of salt-and-pepper Superman was no more, save for a brief run as a co-feature in Adventure Comics. All-Star was a legacy title for DC, like
Detective Comics, but unlike 'Tec, editors and creator rushing to keep All-Star alive couldn't bargain with the Reaper fast enough.
Black Lightning bit the big one with issue #11. B.L. had been Denny O'Neil's latest playground for experimentation and liberal polemics, but the most notable thing about the storyline here is that the remainder would appear in the near-mythic publication
Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, a wild experiment I'll dive into later. Rich Buckler's cover depicts the hero of Suicide Slum doing what he does best, electrifying the criminal element in his 'hood and lighting a brighter path for urban youth of the seventies, when gang culture and drug culture were becoming intertwined in American cities from coat to coast and pop culture was starting to take note. The cover also promises the beginning of a back-up feature starring The Ray, which would unfortunately be D.O.A. with the cancellation of this series.
The previous month saw
Mister Miracle end and this month sees another Kirby concept off to that big Fourth World in the sky.
Kamandi, the chronicle of a loin-clothed lad in a dystopia overrun by human-animal hybrids, ended its run with issue #59, while Jim Starlin's
OMAC back-up strip (another Kirby creation gifted to DC's next generation of creators) would live on for a few months in the back of Warlord.
Like All-Star, mentioned above,
Showcase was another DC title to meet its end in what I've mentally labeled "Black September".
Showcase #104 would be the last issue of the book, where the Barry Allen Flash had debuted a hundred issues earlier, kickstarting the Silver Age. It bears mentioning that most of these titles, especially the anthologies, were already on a bi-monthly schedule (6-7 issues a year) and were probably already teetering sales wise, primed for cancellation whether DC imploded or not. Two stories that were primed to appear in the following issues of Showcase, a Deadman story and a Creeper story, were almost lost to time. the Deadman short showed up later in
Adventure Comics while the Creeper story was M.I.A. until DC published a Steve Ditko Creeper collection in 2010.
Battle Classics,
Dynamic Classics, and
Our Fighting Forces also saw their last hurrah in Black September, fitting the pattern of both war comics and anthologies being tossed overboard to alleviate the sinking of DC's hole-pecked publishing vessel.
Our Fighting Forces was allegedly already set to end, but the other two were in fact, cut short. Reprint titles all, what had once been loss leaders for DC quickly shifted into loss makers after DC's "up the price, up the page count" initiative blew up in their face.
And I'd be cruel not to mention one of DC's less talked about horror/suspense anthologies,
Doorway Into Nightmare, ending after only a scant five issues. This marks the near-end of the genre being a presence at DC, and many of the characters here (like Madame Xanadu) would lie dormant for a spell.
Following Black September, DC would begin their other, more lateral, move to keep things afloat: reducing the number of story pages in their books to 17 (same length as Marvel's) and drawing the cover price line at 40 cents. This would excuse certain "prestige format" works like Neal Adams upcoming
Superman vs. Muhammad Ali one shot and those DC Special Edition books. These products were intended for a different audience than the monthly pamphlet format comics, and were probably approved and too far along to scrap, whereas a backup feature or an issue or two of a third-stringer's ongoing book probably weren't considered "big shakes".
There's more to come; the Implosion is far from over at this point. More books will end, and for next month in particular, under some pretty interesting circumstances . . .
