[Superman Fan Club] Presents: THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS Week 16 B&W December 28th 2022

[Superman Fan Club] Presents: Challenge of the Secret Society of Super-Fans!

Welcome to Week 16 of a very special challenge / contest , reading one single issue a week (as they are digitally published that is) of THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS (1976) .

This time around: THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS #16, in black and white, with Bob Rozaskis, writer, Dick Ayers / Mike Vosburg, Artists.

Click below to go to Volume 2 of The Secret Society of Super-Villains, then go to pages 240-258 for this issue- if you have Ultra.

Q&A:

  1. Why do you think the Silver Ghost chose the second banana team he insisted on?

  2. Did the Ray show up in Black Lightning #11? How about any issue after that?

  3. Which of the three clashes was your favorite this time around and why?

  4. Why did DC stop publishing this comic?

  • Extra credit: Color in the cover for Issue 16 (there won’t be a cover for Issue 17). Here’s a form of the cover you can print out, color, and post below (or just grab the image of the cover above to print out)!
I read THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS #16
  • Yes, I did!

  • Oops, I did not

0 voters

Here are the latest exciting standings of this very special limited-edition of Secret Society of Super-Fans Please let me know if I missed you on a given week!

This issue was never published (same for the final issue #17), so no letter page or ads to share this time.

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From a Bob Rozakis site:

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I usually enjoy a comic in black and white, including this one!

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Ah, so it is in B&W because it never came out? I was thinking that maybe Eastman & Laird’s Turtles were guest starring or something. :stuck_out_tongue:

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They didn’t come out at the time. There was something called the Cancelled Comic Cavalcade. I have to see what that was all about in the early 80s.

Bob Rozakis, then DC Comics assistant editor, in a comment posted on his blog in 2012:

“From the rubble emerged Cancelled Comic 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.”

Paul Kupperberg, then DC Comics public relations assistant in an interview posted online in 2007:

"[Cancelled Comic Cavalcade was composed of] Xerox copies between heavy blue paper covers, glued square spine held together by a strip of black binding tape. We went crazy and commissioned covers from Alex Saviuk and Al Milgrom… everybody gets hit by a truck, but they probably worked for free to be in on the joke or to get a copy! Like I said, we did this cheap. This wasn’t made to last. It was made to be sent to the copyright office.

Milgrom on the right, Saviuk on the left

One [copy of CCC was reserved] for the [DC] library, two for the Library of Congress, Sol got a copy, Jenette Kahn, myself, a few other staffers, then we counted up the freelancers—I don’t remember exactly who it went out to, but people like Gerry Conway and Dick Ayers whose work was run in it surely got copies. You can probably figure out who got one from the table of contents. And, one copy went to Bob Overstreet, of the Overstreet Price Guide, just to prove to the world that it actually existed. We counted 35 copies.

However, we printed 40. Yep, don’t know how many bootlegs there are out there of CCC, but there are actually 40 legitimate copies. The other five made their way through channels that I’ve since forgotten to names that I no longer recall…but the real number is 40."

image

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It was interesting looking at the characters on black and white, and realizing what a difference color makes for some of them.

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I was going to make a joke about him looking to get a discount, but… he can transform anything into silver… so…? Maybe he actually believed their powers and abilities were well-suited to handle the members of the Freedom Fighters? To be fair, there weren’t a ton of actual supervillains on Earth-X (the old Quality Comics). Most of the Freedom Fighters were probably still getting used to fighting people with powers. Why not c-listers?

He did! He had his own back-up story! …But then Black Lightning was canceled before issue #12… Ray and the Freedom Fighters popped up in DC Comics Presents #62 where a text piece in the letter section finally resolved this Silver Ghost plotline. More recently, Happy made an appearance in Flash #770 albeit in the past…

I would say Ray vs. Quakemaster and Killer Moth. It was fun seeing the villains use their abilities to try and take down a being made of pure light. They really shouldn’t have won and it was actually pretty dangerous. I saw Happy kill a lot of Nazis during WWII…

I think it was the wrong era for it. Modern comics have published quite a few successful books starring villains or teams of villains. However, they’ve all had a sort of edge to them. The Bronze Age didn’t have that edge yet. It’s hard to do a book centered on villains without it. It also didn’t help that the constant changes to the creative teams really threw off the storylines and hurt the book’s consistency. And… there was the Implosion that axed so many of my favorite DC titles from that era…

I will try to do some coloring and will post my work later if I succeed!

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The last page of the forbidden Cancelled Comic Cavalcade that I plan to have us all read next week seems to point to what’s going on with the Silver Ghost although I can’t figure out the drawing because it’s so sketchy.

I may go deep underground to find that letters page of DC Comics Presents # 62. I have an older Android tablet I use just for this probably no more than once or twice a year that has the operating system Opera that does a real nice job of allowing me to go to some of these crazy sites without going blind from the ads.

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I’ve got my coloring pencils ready to go. I guess it was 3 or 4 years ago I got hooked in a really cold winter I believe with the craze for adult coloring books of DC covers etc.

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The internet is a strange and wondrous place.

Enter at your own risk:

Just do a search for “zipcomic cancelled comic cavalcade issue 1”

And issue two LOL

I absolutely loved the original Ragman of the seventies. I didn’t know issue 6 was in this cavalcade.

@MisfitCMJ

Oh false alarm, for Ragman it was just the cover oh well.

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Letters page from DC Comics Presents # 62

Contain spoilers for the current storyline perhaps.

I survived my trip to the underground.

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Thanks! The funny thing is, I’m pretty sure I used to own this issue, but had no memory of reading this text piece.

Looks like you got pretty good at it, too! My work will not come out like that, :laughing:

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My coloring:

It’s hard to see but I put Phantom Lady in her blue and red costume from Fox Feature Syndicate rather than her yellow and green one from Quality. I just Hypertimed the Fox PL in there. I also put myself in the corner so everyone knows I colored this. I chose to color Ray in the orange/yellow costume he wears in Black Lightning #11 because I thought it would pick up better. I do like the classic yellow/fainter yellow color scheme better, though…

All in all, it could’ve came out worse, but I don’t think DC will be hiring me as a colorist anytime soon.

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Thanks for sharing, I think it looks great!

I still have to sharpen my pencils over here.

Thankfully my job is giving Monday off for belated New Years.

I like the looks of that Ray backup feature 8n Black Lightning that’s in the final issue plus the Cancelled Comic Cavalcade.

I also very much enjoyed the new version of the Ray in the early 90s with Jack C. Harris and Joe Quesada (which includes a pretty heavy presence of the original Ray).

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Same. Along with Starman and Damage, that was a good era for passing on legacies.

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Yep I bought all the Starman and Damage at the time as well and thought they were really good… Then another implosion happened LOL.

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Oh no they don’t have any of the Freedom Fighters from the '70s on DC Universe Infinite. I hope I don’t have to go underground again for this!

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Yeah… I went looking, too… you might have to!

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I hope you don’t mind that we’re featuring your coloring to draw people into the thread.

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Nah. It’s all good! I shamelessly advertise my own bad artwork in my avatar, anyway…

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I found these in the underground if anybody like me needs them for color reference for the cover (from Freedom Fighters # 15… plus an interesting ad for some DC Explosion.

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