Daily Planet House Ads
The Daily Planet house ads were a series of newsletters ran in DC Comics from 1976 to 1981. The ads were styled in the form of one-sheet newspaper pages with headlines, stories and features. Over the years, several popular features emerged including Bob Rozakis’s Answer Man column and Fred Hembeck’s gag strips.
The first Daily Planet appeared in “House of Secrets no. 141” and “Our Army at War no. 295” which were both published in May 1976. The series continued on a weekly basis and appeared in sporadic issues. Eventually a second ad called “The Feature Page” was added to the rotation and generally alternated within the Daily Planet.
In 1978, DC was set to launch a number of new titles and concepts under the banner of “The DC Explosion”. However, the plug was pulled on the project at the last minute, leading it to become known as “The DC Implosion”. Many titles were cancelled suddenly as a result of the Implosion. One largely forgotten casualty of this mass cancellation was the Daily Planet Vol. 78 No. 35. It was never published. It should have appeared in some titles published on August 28, 1978, the last week of the Explosion. Whatever title was supposed to carry the feature was cancelled. Many of the cancelled issues turned up in Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, but not the lost issue of the Daily Planet.
Following the Implosion, DC began bi-weekly shipping instead of weekly. Therefore the Planet often had two or three issues bearing the same release date beginning in September 1978. The feature continued to appear in most DC titles through May 1980. Then in June 1980 it moved exclusively to DC’s Dollar Comics. It initially expanded from a single page to three pages and was merged with its sister ad, the Feature Page. After three months, the size was cut back to two pages appearing on the back cover and inside back cover of Superman Family and World’s Finest Comics. Ultimately, with the issues published in December of 1981, the Daily Planet breathed its last. It was survived by Direct Currents which continued to appear sporadically on the letters pages.
