More than a decade ago, I wrote an online column for
Silver Bullet Comic Books. In addition to trivia quizzes and answers to questions, I wrote on a variety of topics of interest to comics fans. Those columns were archived online for many years, but I recently learned that they are no longer available.
For your reading pleasure, I will re-present these musings with minimal editorial changes...
**
Spiraling
inflation spelled doom for the 35c price of comic books in early 1978. (Yes,
imagine that, a standard 32-page comic book for 35c!) Faced with having to
raise the price a nickel to 40c, publisher Jenette Kahn opted instead from
something much bolder: DC would add eight pages of new story material and raise the
price to half a buck. It was promoted as “The DC Explosion,” though no one at
the time realized just what kind of a big bang would result.
Team
books like Justice League would carry 25-page stories which “gives us
something we haven’t had for the better part of a decade: the chance to do
full-length stories with fully-developed sub-plots and characterization,” Kahn
explained in her Publishorial “Onward and Upward.”
Other
titles, rather than expanding a single story, would become the home for new
back-up features as well as old favorites. As Kahn put it, “some of your
favorite characters that haven’t been able to carry an entire 17-page title:
Enemy Ace, The Human Target, The Atom, and OMAC.” Well, that’s almost true.
After all, The Atom’s own magazine lasted six years in the previous decade…
certainly impressive considering the average lifespan of a comic book
today. Even OMAC, which ran for 8 issues over a little more than a year,
outshines much of the current output.
“We’re
not stopping here,” Kahn promised. “We’re continuing to grow and branch out, to
boldly go where no comics company has gone before.”
Actually,
she was following a path similar to one chosen by her predecessor, Carmine
Infantino, six years earlier. At that time, with comics set to raise prices
from 15c to 20c, Infantino added sixteen pages of reprints and pushed the price
to a quarter. The plan was apparently “unacceptable to retailers” and soon
after, DC was back to 32-page books for 20c, like the rest of the industry.
[One has to wonder why a retailer, who makes his money off a percentage of
cover price, would want cheaper magazines. The owner of the mom-and-pop store
where I bought my comics had been quite happy to have me handing over a few
extra quarters a week. When the prices dropped by a nickel, he grumbled about
“those %&#$ publishers” taking money out of his pocket.]
And
where Infantino’s plan was unacceptable to retailers, Kahn’s plan was shot down
by her bosses upstairs at Warner Publishing. Even as DC was launching the
Explosion, horrendous sales reports for the winter months were coming in.
Thanks to a series of blizzards and ice storms, hundreds of thousands of comic
books never even made it out of warehouses, reducing sell-through percentages
to their worst-ever levels. Taking this on a strictly dollars-and-cents level,
the Warner Publishing powers-that-be told Kahn and company President Sol
Harrison to cancel the plans for bigger books and cut the line to 20 32-page
titles at 40c each.
Faster
than The Flash could outrun a bullet, writers and artists were stopped in
mid-assignment. Books were canceled, new projects were axed. Twenty-five page
stories were chopped down to fit into the old 32-page format. Back-up features
were tossed into filing cabinet drawers. And more than a couple of people lost
their jobs. The publishing breakthrough that had been hailed as an Explosion
suddenly became known as “the DC Implosion.”
From
the rubble emerged Cancelled Comics
Cavalcade, two blank-covered volumes
of the material consigned to the filing cabinets. Ostensibly created to protect
the copyrights on all the material, CCC
was also a way for the fanboys on staff to create something of a collectible
for the people who worked on the axed features. Thirty-five copies were
produced in the Warner Duplicating department (and “Neil of the Magic Finger”
was thanked for his efforts); thirty-four went to the creative folks involved
and the copyright office. The last copy went to Price Guide publisher Bob Overstreet “to show the world it actually
happened.”
The
contents of CCC are not exactly a
tightly-guarded secret. Overstreet reports that in 1989 a set of the two
volumes was sold for $1200. Through the years, duplicates have been made and
circulated from either that set or one of the others. (Not surprisingly, no one
has ever come forward to claim credit for “leaking” the copies.) Just last
week, after I mentioned that CCC
would be the subject of my column, emails circulated about the availability of
“twelfth-generation copies.” With so much money to be made auctioning things
off on eBay and similar sites, I suppose it’s only a matter of time before an
original set turns up there.
One
little-known fact about CCC: At the
time we were about to hand out the 34 copies, I suggested to then-Editorial
Coordinator Paul Levitz that we should mark the originals, by having
some of us sign random pages in colored ink. That way, any pirated duplicates
could be recognized instantly. Though he agreed with the concept, it wasn’t
done, leaving the door open for someone with a bit of skill to make bogus
“genuine” copies.
**
Next time, a look at the contents of
Cancelled Comics Cavalcade.
