Micah Olsen sent me the following…
I was interested to read about the cancelled DC comics you mentioned, and it brought to mind a long running question I've had about them. I read all of those short-lived 60's series you mentioned a couple of decades after they were published. I especially liked Bat Lash, but I agree with you that they were all pretty good and I was disappointed that they didn't have much longer runs.
My question is what was happening in the market in the late 60's that caused the sales to go down enough that new series were quickly cancelled? It seems like series started earlier in the 60's from DC (Atom, Aquaman, Hawkman, Metamorpho, etc.) lasted longer. Even a non-superhero series like Captain Storm got 18 issues. I've figured something was going on that made it tougher for new series to get a foothold — beyond panicked employees at DC. As a reader at the time and a professional soon thereafter, do you have any insights about what why new series had so much trouble catching on in the late 60's?
I've discussed this at length with a lot of folks who were around then, a few of whom are still around and we're still discussing it. My answer is that there were many problems but I would put "panicked employees" pretty high on the list. When a bi-monthly comic ran 5-7 issues, that generally means that they gave up on it after seeing the early sales figures on the second issue.
I also think that kids were increasingly non-captivated by bi-monthly books, which is the way DC tried launching almost everything that was new. Most of the Marvel books were monthly and interconnected so you could get a couple visits to that world every week, whereas you had to wait a long time between issues of Anthro. Kids raised on television didn't like to wait for their entertainment.
In the late sixties/early seventies, the system via which comic books were distributed was crumbling and Marvel was gaining a headlock on what was left of it. Fewer and fewer stores had comic book racks. In 1970 when my pal/partner Steve Sherman and I visited DC Comics for the first time, the guy in charge — Carmine Infantino — kept quizzing on where we bought our comics in Los Angeles. He was asking us if we had any ideas of how DC could get comics to more potential buyers in our town. He wouldn't have been asking us if Independent News — a division of the same company that was the major magazine distributor in the U.S. — had any ideas.
But they clearly didn't. And what we learned was that the folks over in Independent office had very little confidence that the problem could be solved…or was worth solving. It was rumored around the DC office that some were suggesting that DC just scale back to the few properties that had merchandising value — Superman, Batman, a few others — and just publish those books, maybe as reprints, to keep the properties "alive."
Infantino was a wonderful artist. If you only know his later work, seek out what he did before he was elevated into DC management. Brilliant designs, brilliant storytelling. And when he was moved from drawing comics into the editorial division, he greatly improved the look and feel of the DC line, especially the covers…but only for a while. Others may give you other views of this but mine is that Carmine's skills were largely creative and he was installed in a position that required more of a head for business and marketing than he possessed.
As I keep pointing out here, when a TV show is canceled, that doesn't always mean it was a show no one wanted to watch. It may have been a case of someone in management panicking or making a bad call and dropping a show that would have built up a solid following if it had been given more time. There are plenty of examples of programs that were almost canceled but were given enough time including M*A*S*H, Cheers and Seinfeld. I don't see why anyone would think that the decisions to cancel certain comics after a few issues couldn't have been bad decisions.
