At the start of the year, DC had a line up of 47 ongoing series, a mixture of super hero titles, war comics, horror/mystery series, westerns, science fiction and fantasy.
It was a good time to be a DC fan!
By the time 1978 ended, DC's line up of ongoing series was down to 26 titles.
What the hell happened?
Welcome to what we now call... The DC Implosion.
Some background on the origin of the "DC Implosion" nomenclature. The first half of 1978 saw DC promoting the hell out of a new initiative called the DC Explosion launching the summer of 1978.
The basic comic book had a story and art page count of 17 pages with a price point of 35 cents. Starting June 1978, a story and art page count would increase to 25 pages with a price point of 50 cents. A whole bunch of titles would add 8 page back ups or have 25 page stories.
Come September 1978, the price was now 40 cents and the standard comic was back to a 17 page count for story and art. Some 25 page stories snuck in but with edits bringing the page count down to 22 or 23 pages.
With no forewarning and no knowledge of what the hell was going on, I found DC comics reduced in size, price and in number.
Yep, there were fewer DC comics than before.
The next issue of Firestorm? Vanished!
The next issue of Steel the Indestructible Man? Gone!
The next issue of Secret Society of Super-Villains? Missing!
Black Lightning? Kamandi? Star Hunters? All Star Comics? Aquaman? All gone!
Back in 1978, there was no internet and if there was any kind of fan press, I didn't have access to it. What the hell happened?
Eventually there was a message to DC readers from publisher Jeanette Kahn explaining what happened.
Apparently a really bad winter at the beginning of 1978 had pretty much decimated DC's sales. This was in the days for before comic book shops and sales relied on the spinner racks in convenience stores, drug stores and elsewhere.
In response to this belly drop in sales, DC's corporate owners demanded that DC reduce their comics in size, price and the number of titles published.
The fallout of this mandate was a reduction of DC's output by about 50 percent.
But even before September 1978, I suspected something was amiss at DC. A variety of artists were disappearing from the credits, particularly certain inkers. Modern inkers of the era such as Joe Rubinstein, Bob Layton, Bob McLeod, Terry Austin and Bob Wiacek began to vanish from DC's titles even before the boom dropped on the titles themselves. Instead, more books were inked by old school artists like Joe Giella, Jack Abel, Vince Colletta and Dave Hunt. Nothing against these particular artists per se but they represented a more retro look to DC art than the sleeker style employed by Rubinstein and his contemporaries.
I suspect the more modern inkers commanded a higher page rate than the old school guys. I didn't suss that out at the time. I was just pissed that the sleek, shiny style of Bob Layton on All Star Comics was replaced with the simpler style of 1960's stalwart inker Joe Giella.
Charles Nicholas who had drawn the original Blue Beetle in the 1940's was pressed into service to draw Robin's solo series in Detective Comics. Steve Ditko replaced Michael Golden on Len Wein's Etrigan the Demon series. Up and down DC's reduced line up, up and coming talents were replaced with older artists, exciting new artists replaced with competent, staid and older professionals.
Editors like Al Milgrom and Larry Hama were let go as part of cuts in DC management.
The upshot for me as a comics reader was I actually I had more money for comic books than I had actual DC comics to buy. So I began buying Marvel which is where I found out where Rubinstein, Layton, McLeod, Austin and Wiacek had disappeared to.
There were no new titles added starting from issue #1 until April 1979 with World of Krypton, DC's first limited series.
No new titles were added to DC's corporated mandated diminished line up until May 1979 and the revival of the horror/mystery title Secrets of Haunted House with issue #15.
The brakes came off a little bit in June 1979 with three #1 issues, a new war comic called All Out War and two digest series, The Best of DC and Jonah Hex and Other Western Tales. The month following saw the debut of Time Warp, a new science fiction anthology.
It was not until October 1979, over a year since the DC Implosion hit, that DC launched it's first new ongoing super hero series. When Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes changed it's title to just Legion of Super-Heroes, DC launched New Adventures of Superboy #1.
It was not until June 1980 that DC really began to regain it's mojo with another attempt to revive the line with story and art page count would increase to 25 pages with a price point of 50 cents. This time the experiment worked, propelled in part by the debut of New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman & George Perez.
There is a book called Comic Book Implosion which provides an oral history chronicling the strange year that was 1978 at DC Comics.
I far preferred the old-style inking of Giella, Colletta, et. al. to the slick look of Layton and Rubenstein. That's when comics were fun.
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