Secret Society of Super-Villains: Part Two

Continuing from my previous post … Regrettably, along with the disappearance of Darkseid, the new creative team also ditched Funky’s PR plotline, which might have been interesting; Funky remained for a half-dozen issues, but mostly as the team’s ineffective would-be manager (like Maxwell Lord’s idiot brother).
The new format made Captain Comet one of the key players, dedicated to bringing the team down to make up for having encouraged them to work together against Darkseid. Happily, he never became the sole focus; the villains’ side of the story was at least as important.
First up, Comet works with Black Canary, then Hawkgirl to take down a couple of Society splinter groups on different missions. Then, with Gerry Conway back on writing, a new mystery employer hires the SSOV to recover four sorcerous treasures (dating back to an old Superman story). Then Grodd recruits his teammates in a couple of world-conquering plans. While I can’t say this broke any radical dramatic ground, I certainly had no idea where the book would go next, which is not a bad thing.
Finally, the mystery employer unmasks as the Wizard: His powers fading on Earth-1 (he’s a resident of DC’s parallel world, Earth-2, home of the Justice Society), he’d tricked the team into gathering the talismans to restore his power levels. Now he reveals the reason he’d originally come to Earth-1: He and the other Earth-2 villains are so psyched out by the Justice Society’s repeated triumphs, they’re basically beaten before they start (an idea I’ve seen played with a couple of other places). His goal is to recruit a team that doesn’t have that problem.
After getting rid of Funky Flashman, the Wizard leads the much altered Society membership (Star Sapphire, Blockbuster, Floronic Man and Reverse-Flash) to Earth-2 (though it turns out they make a side trip to Earth-3 first, which brings back the Crime Syndicate of America for the first time in 15 years).
Here, showing unusual intelligence for costumed criminals, they start taking out the minor players (Atom, Dr. Midnite) first, so that when they go up against the JSA big guns, the heroes won’t have any teammates left to back them up. We ended with Captain Comet following them to Earth-2; meanwhile, back on Earth-1, a villain called the Silver Ghost hires some of the other members to take out his adversaries, the Freedom Fighters.
At which point the book died, part of a wave of cancellations at DC in the late seventies. I suspect had it kept going, we might have seen Star Sapphire team up with Comet against the other hoods: She was dragged to Earth-2 by force; the two were dating in their secret identities; and Conway repeatedly hinted at a mystery in her origins and motives for joining the team (never explained, alas).
Instead, the SSOV shows up back on Earth-1 in a Justice League of America story and we get a brief flashback explaining that Comet managed to rally the JSA and put an end to the Wizard’s scheme.
Secret Society of Super-Villains wasn’t the only book affected by editorial and writer reshuffling during this period, but usually it made things worse (I must blog about the seventies Blackhawks revival sometime). Here it resulted in a surprisingly entertaining improvisational feel, though I’m not sure it was ever intentional.