Hawkman was one of the coolest characters of the Silver Age. I still have vivid memories of picking up his first BRAVE AND BOLD appearance. O, the Joe Kubert art! And the first page scared the willies out of me!

Unfortunately, characters that cool tend to attract the wrong people, trying to hitch their wagons to that star.

•••

Just noticed this.

The “success” of SECRET WARS can be largely attributed to two factors:

First, the DSM, where the series was perceived as an “event”, and issues were ordered in greatly inflated numbers. (I wonder how many of them still languish in back issue boxes?) Keep in mind, since product shipped to the DSM was non-returnable, Publishers counted them as sales. This could not be done with newsstand sales, that had to wait for the returns to calculate final numbers.

Second, younger fans loved the wall-to-wall superheroes. They were able to get a much bigger bang for their (limited) bucks. (Mike Higgins, Carlin’s assistant editor, went so far as to cross-reference the sales on Marvel’s other books at the time, and discovered the main titles, those starring characters featured in SW, had lost sales that added up to the numbers on SW. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, in other words.)