by having to redo the first issue from scratch, Conway assigned David Anthony Kraft to script the next three issues of Secret Society of Super Villains over his plots. After issue #4, both Conway and Kraft abruptly left DC, leading to a mad scramble to produce a fill-in issue. Jack C. Harris took over as editor, and Conway returned as writer only with issue #8, but artists on the series rotated nearly as often as the lineup of the titular supergroup, with Rich Buckler, Mike Vosburg, and Dick Ayers all contributing short stints as pencilers, while inkers changed from issue to issue. Harris felt that the series' mediocre sales might have been partly his fault: "The cover concepts were one of my editorial duties. Rich Buckler turned my ideas into the best he could do, but I never felt as if my ideas were good enough for his art. I think there was a ‘sameness’ to my ideas which might have hurt the title in that casual readers might have missed buying an issue because they thought they’d already seen it". Secret Society of Super Villains was cancelled with issue #15 as part of the DC Implosion. Issue #16 was already at the printer at the time of the cancellation and would have been the final issue, but writer Bob Rozakis appealed to DC to pull the issue since it was the beginning of a three-part story and he did not want to leave the readers hanging. Issue #17 was near completion at the time, and both it and issue #16 would see publication (of a sort) in the privately printed Cancelled Comics Cavalcade #2. Issue #18, which concluded the three-part story, was scripted but never drawn. Rozakis later revealed where the story would have gone had the series not been cancelled in a weekly column for Silver Bullet Comics. This series, along with the unpublished issues #16 and 17, were collected in a two-volume hardcover edition, with the volumes published in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Fictional history Darkseid's Society First organized by Darkseid, the Secret Society of Super Villains were based in the Sinister Citadel in San Francisco. From early on, the team was plagued with power struggles. Lex Luthor, the Wizard, Gorilla Grodd, and Funky Flashman all sought to control the powerful team; the Manhunter (the team's first leader) and Captain Comet, on the other hand, sought to