Remembering DC Explosion (And Implosion)

DC’s announcement of “The New 52” this fall has sent shockwaves through comics fandom; some trumpet it as a new age in comics, while others lament that it’s a reactionary stunt after DC’s drop in sales versus Marvel. In the crazy world that is comics, it’s too soon to speculate on what will happen come September 2011 and in the ensuing months – but it does remind me of another bold initiative taken by DC years ago.

In 1978, DC Comics launched a marketing campaign to herald a wave of new monthly titles and an increase in page count for its existing stories. This initiative, dubbed “The DC Explosion”, was done in an effort to gain ground against Marvel’s increases in market share as well as to justify the higher cover price DC was instituting on all titles. For the DC Explosion, the publisher relaunched a number of defunct titles and characters and not just in the realm of super-heroes; DC brought back western titles, war titles and oddities such as “The Adventures of Super-Baby” inside Superboy (look it up!).  In an editorial running in DC comics dated September 1978, then-publisher Jeanette Kahn summed it up by saying:
 

We’ve been calling all of this “The DC Explosion” and that’s what it truly is – an explosion of new ideas, new concepts, new characters, and new formats. We now have near-limitless opportunities to experiment, to do longer and indeed better stories, to be more flexible in the type of material we’re presenting. The best is getting better.”

But the “DC Explosion” was short lived, as just a few months later DC’s parent company Warner Bros. called for major cutbacks in what would come to be known as the “DC Implosion”. DC ended up canceling approximately 30 titles, including some that were advertised but never released. At one point, DC had made the decision to cancel its flagship title Detective Comics with issue #480, only to be saved by a last minute reprieve and merger with a then-better selling title, Batman Family.  The DC Implosion also led to the publisher scaling back it’s vaunted page count while keeping the recently-increased cover prices.

While it was a bad time for fans, retailers and those working on the actual comics, the events of the late 70s had a silver lining in that the Explosion and Implosion led to DC upper-management looking to strengthen its talent ranks by offering royalties (then unheard of in comics), and began concerted efforts to recruit talent both in America and in England. The cancellation of multiple ongoing series also led to DC to bring comic book miniseries into fashion, allowing for finite story-arcs with a more flexible publishing format.

It’s no question that DC’s “The New 52” in the fall of 2011 will bring about some major changes in the comics world, but only time will tell if it’ll be in DC’s favor.